Bluntj:

 

@evilengineer What has the UK got to do with it?

 

It's entirely relevant as an example of the kind of damage that right-of-centre thinking can do.

Bluntj:

 

No NZ party is even close to UK parties. I was looking at what NZ Labour party has done for NZ over the last 6 years (yes and not all bad), and what are our alternatives. As for me, I will be mixing my vote between two parties is candidate and party as I too dont want National to govern on their own and I dont want Winston in any coalition.

 

And given that the other party in this collation will be ACT, who push the same Thatcherite Neo-Liberalism so beloved of the Conservative party, the example of the UK as a cautionary tale is only more relevant.

I find the assertion that "no NZ party is even close to UK parties" to very odd. David Cameron's Conservative party was very much National (cludged together with ACT as a minority on their right flank to form a single party) until the folly of the Brexit referendum. Since then they've become a grotesque parody of ACT combined with NZ First (or maybe Australia's Liberal Party given the outsized influence of Lynton Crosby's acolytes).

Meanwhile, NZ Labour are very much the pink tinged centrists along the lines of Tony Blair's New Labour and the current version under Keir Starmer. Generally accepting of prevailing free market orthodoxy, unwilling to make real and lasting change but prepared to tinker a bit around the edges.

And in all honesty, the Greens aren't that much further to the left than Labour.

Turns out that pre-2010 Britain under New Labour really was the sunlit uplands and it's all turned to custard under the right-of-centre Tories since.

The idea that something similar might happen here is not in anyway fanciful.

So be careful what you wish for and Caveat Emptor etc.