Maybe house prices dropped but my rent keeps going up.

My rent went up under labour.

Neither of them has a credible plan to end the 10+ years of housing crisis that New Zealanders have suffered.

No, but so far it’s your sole redeeming characteristic.

At least I’m not sarcastically criticising people, while holding no position of my own.

So you need to get yourself into a party. But you can’t just rock up to your party of choices offices and have them put your name next to their logo in the next election.

Just wait another 10 years for Megan Woods to resign and they will open a new position lol

Because people wouldn’t vote for me.

Where are you based, and do you care about local council issues? You can at least start with community board.

Well, the company is dying apparently. Good luck to him, lol. NZ Herald seems to have some fairly interesting premium articles from time-to-time, but most of their articles are about finance, business and investment. Not very interesting for me. If they made a newspaper or digital subscription for poor people I’d be more interested, but not if they dumb down language and assume everyone is a dolt.

Who listens to Newstalk ZB and reads NZ Herald? Nobody my age.

At least you’re pro school lunches, I guess.

That itself isn’t the hill to die on though.

And the left aren’t the ones obsessed with abortions.

Well not most people, but a small subset of the left is obsessed with it. They were very upset about the protests in Christchurch. Now there’s a law to ban the pro-lifers in Christchurch. They used to protest all the time across from the hospital, at Hagley Park. There is a road between the park and the hospital, but the femmi-nazis weren’t happy and obviously they made this law change so that the protests can’t be within 300m of the hospital. It’s ridiculous. Why not just ban protests within 1km of parliament while we’re at it.

I agree but from Seymour’s perspective he views it as ideological. I listened to Rodney Hyde on Reality Check Radio a while ago. He had good intentions to just make it easier to do business, but now he’s embarrassed that he was in politics. He moved on and says it’s bad that people view politics as a legitimate career (lasting many decades for some MPs).

I understand that Act Party want to make it simpler to invest and stuff - after all I wouldn’t want it to become overly complicated to apply for a job, or government assistance. That said: I have come to realise that it’s one-sided.

Act will make it easier for billionaires to buy just about anything, while making it impossible for anyone to build apartments or decent houses. It’s out-of-touch. For a few years now, I consider Seymour’s intent to be harmful to the country. These people would cry and demand a law change if rich people had to piss in a cup to get a job or fly their own helicopter or private jet. But it’s fine if poor people have to piss in a cup every few weeks just to drive a class 1 or class 2 truck.

Rules for the workers but not for the elite class. It’s total B.S. and I’m glad I can see everything clearly now that I’m a bit older and wiser.

Fighting terrorism. What year were you born in son ;-D

School lunches are one of a few things that should be funded (and I’m saying that as someone who previously voted for Libertarianz and Act). We need to be proud of our services and our country. I don’t mean waving flags or saluting flags. Just basic stuff.

Do you want a country you can be proud of, where the schools are good quality, and the children have good quality food, or do you want a country that sucks, where it’s a case of “every man for himself”? Pretty basic.

I’m actually embarrassed that I voted for Act in 2014. David Seymour does too many stupid things for attention, and he is like Zuckerberg, I wonder if he is actually just an android because he is so fake.

That leads to the question…what makes a good politician?

Someone who can turn the country around 180 degrees and tie up all the loose ends. Changing heaps of things at once if they must. Like Vladimir Putin in the 2000s or Donald Trump in the past 5-6 weeks. Rightly or wrongly! History will be written. I’m one of those impatient people who despises the Barack Obamas and the Mitt Romneys. I’ve heard enough about abortion, healthcare and ram-raids and the same old talking points ad nauseum.

I’d register as a Christchurch council candidate but only if someone would pay the fee. I’m broke and in my thirties, I had more money when I was 19-23 lol. Good news though, my friend Vince McLeod became press secretary for NZ Loyal, and I’ll be voting for Kelvyn Alp. They got rid of Liz Gunn, and Kelvyn actually cares about housing. On rare occasions I’ll write to Kelvyn on Signal or Telegram. He doesn’t have millions of dollars, he’s just a political activist who knows a lot of people. Whereas most of Parliament are lawyers or from business.

Politics is largely a waste of time, but if you’re outside politics you can still meet like-minded people and at least keep ideas flowing. Perhaps change public opinion slowly over time. I’d love to see these middle age and elderly councillors get voted out, but I don’t know who’s going to run - probably a university student in their early 20s who thinks that they know everything? I’m not going to vote for a university student or university graduate who’s into climate change and lgbt as their main ideologies. Parliament is already full of these people. Even Christopher Luxon, a supposed right-winger, says that climate change is real and that he enjoys the Big Gay Out. You kind of have to say these things to get on television and radio, but we all know it’s insincere marketing, and for some reason we go along with it.

I’m so far to the right that I view Christopher Luxon as a progressive, but for me it isn’t about political spectrums or ideology, it’s about energy. I’m in favour of expanding the school lunch programme to the point of having on-site catering, with actual chefs, not just sandwich makers on a temporary contract. Is that right wing? I want a country I can be proud of, and I think that we need something like “patriotism” or “national pride”. Those words mean different things to different people. Anyway, it’s an untapped resource - national pride. Labour may have built the school lunch programme but I still resent that they don’t make food on site at the schools. Other countries do it, and by not having this programme on site, we are behind other countries. I’m not proud of what NZ has become.

Millions of dollars wasted in Afghanistan, and we can’t even have a good school lunch programme. My opinion: if you don’t have any passion or energy then don’t get into politics, do something boring instead. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Politics is so dogmatic and plain here in New Zealand. I’d be happy to run as a candidate but I won’t do media interviews or any of the other stuff that I described above. People are tired of the B.S. and we need to get to the point. Instead of asking “what are your policies” I’d ask people “what do you want” or “what would make you proud to be a New Zealander”.

You are looking at the issue from a moral perspective rather than a logical perspective. Russia has a lot of power here - they have hundreds of thousands of troops in Ukraine, they have Oreshnik missiles which could destroy Kyiv’s government and economy district. The only thing which could save Ukraine now, is for Russia’s economy to collapse. Don’t count on that happening - if there was a way to force it to happen, then it would have happened in 2022.

When I said “trick” I meant that Ukraine wants to invite foreign armies to the border, and then deceive the world with something, a provocation, that would “justify” foreign armies to invade Donbass and Crimea. We already see these provocations in the media. Last July, Ukraine claimed that Russia used a KH-101 missile to deliberately strike the children’s section of a hospital in Kyiv. This was false and designed to provoke outrage in the West.

If a KH-101 had hit a building, there would be no survivors. Yet only 2 people were killed, leading me to believe that the missile was not a KH-101, but rather an air defence missile launched by Ukraine, which missed its target and ran out of fuel and crashed into the hospital, killing 2 adults and injuring 35. If Russia was deliberately trying to kill as many civilians as possible, why would they waste a missile worth millions of dollars, just for the sake of killing 2 random people?

The Ukrainian government is counting on a deception to provoke a full-scale war between European nations and Russia.

The most interesting part is whether Trump will support Ukraine, or whether Trump will see Ukraine as a liability and give up on the situation. So far we already know that one of Russia’s negotiators has ruled out any concessions. When asked if Russia would give back land to Ukraine, he said to the BBC “why should we? we have liberated lands where russian people are living for centuries”. We are now back at 2014, wondering whether to give-in to Russia’s 2014 demands, or continue the war for another 2 years or longer in the hope that Russia’s economy collapses, causing their army to disintegrate.

@[email protected] Russia has said that they won’t allow foreign armies in Ukraine. It’s just a trick by Ukraine to bring NATO into the war and Russia will reject the proposal:

20 Feb, 2025 https://www.rt.com/russia/613064-peskov-responds-report-uk-troops-ukraine/

This isn’t Afghanistan, we should be very careful. It’s speculation at this point whether foreign armies will deploy to Ukraine or not. More likely there will be a ceasefire to restore US-Russia relations, and then Russia will eventually break the ceasefire to fight in Kursk (at a time when they can get away with it).

America doesn’t want to deploy their troops, but we’re dumb enough to send ours. This is hilarious. Christopher Luxon should forget about our historical peacekeeping operations and look at Ukraine as an individual case. We can’t just say yes to every crisis because of our past decisions.

I met Sam Land right after he did it. I was 17 at the time. I actually went more toward the right as I aged. But I still follow some left wing newsletters.

No doubt it will be abused, but I will find ways around it. Receiving news from state-sponsored media isn’t interference - I actively subscribe to it. A lot of Chinese people watch satellite channels, and I don’t think the government is going to start jamming them any time soon. State media gives people the knowledge of what those governments think, and people can act on that information independently.