Election 2023: Barry Soper - As the week has progressed so have Labour’s false claims

OPINION:

They’ve been out on the hustings for a week now and there are a couple of things that have stuck in my craw.

As the week’s progressed so have the porkies, coming from the self-proclaimed most kind, transparent Government we have ever experienced. Labour cares about wellbeing and it’s become apparent that applies only to themselves in their desperation to retain the baubles of office.

It seems they’re willing to say anything that will keep the centre right wolves from their door, like Willie Jackson screaming in a debate that National’s planning to get rid of the minimum wage, which was clearly wrong and dismissed by his political betters.

And then we had Andrew Little, the leader who handed the reins over to Jacinda Ardern, telling anyone who was silly enough to listen, that National and Act were going to sack all the teachers and close the schools - preposterous.

If that wasn’t bad enough, we had Labour’s Shanan Halbert telling his Facebook followers that National planned to reduce sick days to five a year which was again simply untrue.

Is there any wonder then why Labour’s now languishing in the psychological opinion poll vortex?

The media have reason to be reflecting on the high dungeon expressed in some quarters about the email correspondence between National’s health spokesman, Shane Reti, and the Vice-Chancellor of Waikato University, Neil Quigley, over a third medical school.

We were told Quigley went to considerable lengths to help National develop its policy to establish the school. He even made the observation to Reti that the new school, scheduled to take its first students in 2027, could be a present for National to begin its second term in Government.

Now that was seen by some quarters in the media as some sort of clandestine, sinister cuddle-up between professors and power.

What it was in fact was the chief executive of an academic institution, rightly lobbying a politician to extend the university’s offering.

And why not? National had been in talks with Waikato University a year before Ardern limped to power only to see the idea canned by her government the year after she had settled into the Prime Minister’s chair.

With the idea being resurrected, why wouldn’t the university boss embrace it? There were suggestions our universities should be politically impartial which defies any sort of logic.

All of them have political studies professors who are always expressing their views, without fear or favour, and no one has a problem with that.