Having "saved'' New Zealand from the worst of Covid-19, Jacinda Ardern, Ashley Bloomfield, Siouxsie Wiles and company are beginning to find the country less compliant.
Having "saved'' New Zealand from the worst of Covid-19, Jacinda Ardern, Ashley Bloomfield, Siouxsie Wiles and company are beginning to find the country less compliant.
"I totally reject that,'' I said.
"Sorry?,'' came the reply from the maskless young woman at the checkout.
Turns out I don't have quite the same powers of persuasion as the prime minister, sadly.
But you would have tried to reject a bill for $152 too, had you had asimilarly pitiful amount in your supermarket basket.
It only occurred to me later that the woman hadn't been wearing a mask. I'm sure there was a good reason. Frankly, with the way community transmission is going, I don't even care what it was.
Never mind the idea that Covid might come to Hawke's Bay one day, it's beginning to run rampant.
But I digress.
Prior to Monday, the prime minister had "totally rejected'' that the cost of living was rising faster than infection rates, but you and I couldn't. Hell, I paid a fortune to fill the car up last week.
It's an inconvenient truth of pandemic life, but one the government had preferred not to acknowledge let alone remedy.
"I'll eat my hat if there's anyone in the country who's actually warmed to Luxon. And I'll eat your hat too if anyone can prove that National has been an effective opposition,'' says Hamish Bidwell
These will be disconcerting times for some of the sainted ones among us.
Having "saved'' New Zealand from the worst of Covid-19, Jacinda Ardern, Ashley Bloomfield, Siouxsie Wiles and company are beginning to find the country less compliant.
One day people are weeping with gratitude, the next they're giving Christopher Luxon the thumbs-up to be the next prime minister.
Don't know about you, but I am immensely fallible. I'm inconsistent, weak, lazy, selfish.
And that's on a good day.
I'm also not big on political polls, as I've mentioned before. It's election results that matter and nothing else.
Nevertheless, there was a poll last week and its results were better news for National than Labour.
Now I'll eat my hat if there's anyone in the country who's actually warmed to Luxon. And I'll eat your hat too if anyone can prove that National has been an effective opposition.
But they don't have to be.
People are tired of being patronised and they're tired of the great and the good dismissing their concerns.
And, most of all, they're tired of the pretence that our leaders are infallible.
The thing that interested me about that poll wasn't the numbers, it was something I read afterwards. It was the suggestion that the poll proved just how thick most of us are.
Too dumb to know what's good for us, in fact.
After all, how else could you explain so many people turning their backs on the government?
We'll see how all that turns out. I'm not one for believing political parties have the answers to many of life's questions.
But when you continually reject people's points of view, then you drive them towards someone else who might listen.
Times are comparatively tough here and getting tougher. People are sick, people are short of dough and people are squabbling over RAT tests the way they used to do toilet paper.
Hey, but don't complain, you could be living in Ukraine. How many times have you read or heard that lately?
No, this isn't Ukraine, it's New Zealand.
The land where you can put food on the table or gas in the tank, but increasingly not both.
