Paula Bennett: Weighed in the balance and found wanting.
As a proudly patriotic American, I stand with people of goodwill everywhere to condemn President Donald Trump for his making a moral equivalence of neo-Nazi demonstrators in Charlottesville and those who protested their racist and anti-semitic message.
In New Zealand's politics, the idea of moral equivalence has its own resonance.
In the balance is the admission of Metiria Turei that she cheated on her single parent domestic benefit by taking in room-mates to defray rent and feed her daughter.
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The National Party of the 1990s had cut that benefit by 8 per cent and explained that it sought to encourage employment. Ms Turei also received a training incentive allowance, which allowed her to complete her education and seek employment.
The other balance pan bears the full weight of National's Deputy Prime Minister, Paula Bennett.
Ms Bennett, herself a former beneficiary, pulled herself up from poverty by virtue of that same training incentive allowance. The difference is that Bennett helped to eliminate that allowance, an act of pulling up the ladder that saved her.
To weigh the balance between Turei and Bennett properly, we need look at motive.
Turei lied 20 years ago to feed her daughter. She admitted the fact this year out of deep concern for the plight of the poor and the failings of a welfare system that actually keeps people in poverty.
Bennett is the person whose solution to the Auckland housing crisis is to pay poor people to move elsewhere. It's difficult to find an instance in which Paula Bennett's actions seemed motivated by anything beyond self-interest.
I continue to be mystified by the continuing support for the party in power for the past nine years when it has so obviously mismanaged things but managed instead -- together with a compliant media -- to avoid being held to account.
I'll cite just a few of the many instances overseen by this confederacy of dunces.
There's Gerry Brownlee and the Christchurch rebuild that still has residents left houseless. Brownlee was in too much of a hurry and too important in his own mind to go through ordinary airport security, and he's the same fellow whose gratuitous insult of Finland made him a laughing stock on the internet.
In quick succession came then Prime Minister John Key, whose tea-towel exercise made him a target for New York's John Oliver and cost taxpayers $30 million (plus free adverts worth another $20 million).
The field of failure is crowded by the likes of Hekia Parata whose superintendence of the $20 million Novopay disaster before she handed over to Steven Joyce (renowned fixer who didn't) proves that Maori and pakeha can be equally incompetent.
None of this would count against National if they have their way. They've successfully staved off every inquiry, including those to PM English's self-dealing, his double-dealing with Pike River mine families and the honour of our troops in Afghanistan.
Experts at hiding the casualties include Jonathan Coleman, the "I see nothing; I know nothing" man, and Nick Smith, superintendent of the health of our rivers, who alters the standards of tolerance of pollution. We need to accept conditions of more shit because brown is the new green.
Elections are about the future. All politics is local and, in that view, we need to choose those whose parliamentary tenure will bring the needed economic benefit to our city -- not vague policies but actual plans with time and date stamps.
Hope is primary as motivator but let's respect fear as well.
As a country, the greatest challenges we face are not Isis or terrorism or even North Korea. They are global warming and the conditions, economic and social, that can give rise to an opioid epidemic.
If you think the problem of the homeless, or the fact 400,000 kids living in poverty is someone else's problem, think again. Social disaster breeds anti-democratic processes. Inequality of means and increasing inequality of opportunity is incompatible with the democratic experiment. That's what gave rise in the US to Trump.
Jay Kuten is an American-trained forensic psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand for the fly fishing. He spent 40 years comforting the afflicted and intends to spend the rest afflicting the comfortable.