In my opinion, Chris Hipkins and Winston Peters are as bad as each other.
Look up Kirsten Murfitt, who will stand for New Zealand First in the Bay of Plenty, and have a read of the commentary around her online activity.
Once you have read about her online activity,look up the New Zealand First website and see if any of that activity is mentioned (small clue, it isn’t).
What it shows is that Peters is seizing the opportunity to dip into the extreme end of the political debate in order to garner votes - in other words, he will hang with anyone in the pursuit of power.
Then we come to Hipkins, who it seems to me will say anything to get your vote.
The GST on fruit and vegetables announcement is denounced by every tax expert going, it has been rejected by the tax working group and it has been rubbished over and over again by his own Finance Minister and, yet, in a last-ditch attempt to promise anything, he has.
We get to choose the nutters and the inexperienced and the delusional, the ill-prepared, the lazy and the just plain incompetent.
The hope, of course, is enough of us care about our country and want the best.
At the moment my hope is we want better, a lot better than we have had foisted upon us these past six years.
As I have said for months now, my sense of the pending election is that it is a foregone conclusion, such is the damage done to so many aspects of this once-brilliant country.
The polls are showing this to be true.
But what the polls also show is that they are capable of producing “talking points”.
This is why Peters is back making headlines.
A couple of polls have him at 5 per cent, and with it, the implications that he may be back to cause more carnage.
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins. Photo / Mark Mitchell
The polls, or at least Labour’s pollsters, claim that the GST decision is popular and that it is attractive to swing voters.
A lot of things are attractive to swing voters, a lot of things are attractive to most of us.
Free stuff generally is popular: doesn’t mean you act on it.
Winning Lotto is popular, that’s why so many buy tickets: doesn’t mean they get rich.
Election campaigns are also filled with mad claims and desperate pitches.
One of the weaknesses of MMP is that too many voters don’t appear to have worked out that minor parties especially can say literally anything, because they know full well it will never have to be delivered on.
A lot needs to happen for a minor party to actually pony up with a promise.
1) They need to get 5 per cent or win a seat; 2) They need to be part of a coalition; 3) They need to have a bottom line or two around policy; 4) Those bottom lines have to be adopted.
The Greens, for example, have no bottom lines, so you have no idea what, if anything, will ever see the light of day, even if they end up in a position to be part of a government.
New Zealand First leader Winston Peters. Photo / Michael Cunningham
Peters gets around specific promises by telling voters we can’t know until the votes are counted, as though that makes any sense at all.
I get a bit of correspondence at the moment from NZ First voters saying they are voting for Peters because he will get rid of “Māori signs”.
He can promise no such thing, and your vote can deliver no such outcome... if it eventually comes to pass, your individual vote will not determine it.
The fact people can’t work that out worries me.
At a time when this country is in desperate need of genuine leadership, of thought-provoking transformative redirection, of experience, of maturity, of a fairly major reset, we have the vacuous thought bubbles of attention seekers and desperados.
One of them - in my view - is a gnarled old hack who has ravaged the political landscape for far too long, and the other is the Prime Minister.
Ah, democracy. They say every election is the most important ever, I have never personally said that or indeed believed it, until this one.
Mike Hosking hosts Newstalk ZB’s breakfast programme and is New Zealand’s number-one talk host.
