Time to Make Your Mind Up, Swinging Voters!

Well, I have made my mind up....I did have some money in Hanover Finance, which, while it has not officially gone, has disappeared in a moratorium on repayments. This has been a major part of swinging my vote: The purpose of a government (at least from a constituent's point of view), is to LOOK AFTER it's citizens. They have not done.

As far as preventing finance companies from falling over, the present Labour government has done spectacularly badly in my view.

That said, I would imagine National would have done just as badly.

In the last few weeks, I have witnessed an apparent desire on the part of National NOT to be the government---well at least they should have locked one of their members in a chicken coop for the duration of the election!

It is all a bit deja vu, Helen promised 9 years ago to cut government spending, now John Key looks like coming in saying the same thing.

I've now taken up gardening-seems like a skill that may be in demand in the coming year.

The general election is soon

Being a not too busy Saturday, I thought I would have a bash at checking the policies of the major parties.  Yawn....  Does everyone else have this problem?  You go to the party's site, pick on just two areas of policy and fall asleep almost instantly.

What should I expect?  Life must be tough for the spin doctors who put all this stuff up for the us to read:  How to make what they have done sound like a lot.

It would be nice to be able to check out a site that puts it all into 2 x A4 pages....Is life this simple? No.

So I will probably be like the rest of the swinging voters and vote for John Key because a) he's someone different, and b) he must know a thing or two about money, and that might be extremely relevant right about now.  All this is embarassing to admit.

Someone has lent me Ian Wishart's book "Absolute Power", which is about Helen Clark, the prime minister.  In it, he makes the point that Labour came to power on a platform of cutting Governmental spending:In fact, they appear to have increased it.  

Listening to the radio on Thursday, I heard a man (not a politician) who seemed to tell it like it is: We are a tiny nation, and our standard of living is going backwards compared to Australia.

Governments, Labour and National have both had a turn, so I don't think things will change much, no matter who gets in. (In economic terms-antismacking, that's another bundle!).

Nothing will change, unless someone in the National Party wakes up one morning and has a rush of blood to the head as follows: What we need is a plan, a ten year plan that copes with all sorts of variables-chief among these would be: how to escape economic harm from events overseas, and how to cope with the worlds expectations on climate change- assuming that there is such a thing.

I remember years ago suggesting to my father that we should be economically independent from the rest of the world.  He countered that "trade was the life blood of any country", and that we would all be extremely poor should this happen.   If you think about it, we are very dependent on second hand cars from Japan, medicines from USA,  machinery from Germany and so on.

Imagining a country of 4 million coping with car production, medicines and so on seems far-fetched.   Having said that, I hope we are not about to pay the price for dependance on the outside world.