Weather reprieve and politicking

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

Opinion

In what is becoming something of a cliche, the battered Tairawhiti district seems to have dodged a bullet from yet another heavy rain event over the past 48 hours.

The latest storm was centred more on the long-suffering East Coast, although there were some heavy falls in Gisborne itself.

There were conflicting views, from residents who found themselves worrying that they had lost their access, to some farmers who described it as a perfect light rain coming in the face of a predicted long, hot summer.

However, the prospect of no serious weather events in the coming few days at least will have turned people’s attention to other things.

In Gisborne, one that is holding the attention of a lot of people is the mistaken euthanasia of a beloved family dog. Errors will always happen but this is a bad one and there is widespread sympathy for the family.

On the national scene, with early voting starting next Monday the latest poll this week has NZ First on 5.2 percent and looking increasingly likely to return to Parliament.

It is looking more and more like the decision of National leader Christopher Luxton to say he would pick up the phone to call Winston Peters was a shrewd one, even though he would obviously prefer to join in government with ACT alone.

There were suggestions after the 2020 election  that ACT had taken votes from National, and the percentage supporting the party is historically low by its standards.

Some pessimists are even fearing an Italian-type situation where governments regularly dissolved because one of the parties defected.

Hopefully that is not likely here, but it does make problems for the majority party in a coalition.

This week started with a series of new promises from party leaders with National saying it would introduce a traffic light system for beneficiaries who breached ready-to-work obligations.

Meanwhile in Wellington, police are preparing for disruptions reportedly planned for the area around Parliament tomorrow.

Several groups are believed to be converging on the city including Brian Tamaki’s Freedoms and Rights Coalition which has been accused of disrupting political meetings and photo ops.

It has forced a national conference looking at New Zealand’s progress on the UN’s sustainable development goals to go online. Former Director General of Health Sir Ashley Bloomfield is a keynote speaker.

Police have warned commuters and the public to expect disruptions. What nobody wants is the violent scenes that marked the end of the 24 day protest at Parliament in March 2022.