So much for honest government

Was the government changed at all at the last election?

You wouldn’t think so.

• Nanny is still with us.
• Her anti-smacking law is still with us.
• Aside from making it easier for the govt to bulldoze houses and factories, the Resource Management Act is fundamentally unchanged.
• Council rate rises continue to rise, even as their borrowings to fund their spending increases accelerate.
• The global warming/emissions trading scam continues.
• Our substance is still eaten out by KiwiRail and KiwiBank, KiwiSaver and Welfare for Working Families, by bureaucrats and central bankers, by the IRD and ACC -- and by politicians whose snouts are in the trough with an arrogance and sense of “entitlement” that normally takes three terms to develop, not just one.
• And in the face of the biggest economic crisis in seventy years we have a Finance Minister who can talk only about “sharp edges” and “green shoots” “rebalancing,” and between times acts in a manner that makes a deer in the headlights look purposeful.

So it’s all not good. Not good at all. 

And then yesterday it was reconfirmed, as it was was in September last year, and then again back in April this year, that the Electoral Finance Abomination is on its way back again, with just a few tweaks from Simon Power-Lust to pretend that all the campaigning and protesting and marching in the streets to oust Helen’s Electoral Finance Act really  meant something.

But it didn’t.

We marched to tear down Helen’s anti-democratic attack on free speech, only for you lot to vote in this lot to do the same themselves. To replace her Electoral Finance Abomination with their Electoral Finance Abomination-Lite. It includes:

• a $300,000 spending limit on non-political parties running protest campaigns in the three “official” months of the election.
• These “third party” protestors must register with the grey ones if they want to spend anything more than buying a classified ad in the Herald;
• and include their names (and addreses?) on their ads and billboards.
• "Anti-collusion" measures to really crack down on these jumped-up ne’er-do-wells with the temerity to criticise their betters.
• More taxpayers’ money gifted to the big two parties to advertise themselves on television and radio to the effective exclusion of the smaller parties.

And of course Labour will support it all because it, too, wants to limit the political competition—any competition at all—from anyone outside the Tweedledum and Tweedledumber of The Big Two parties.

What a crock.

So much for all the pontificating blowhard National Socialist MPS who blew hard and long at rallies around the country about the iniquity of Helen’s Electoral Finance Abomination, only to introduce their own.

Just as they marched and blew hard and long at rallies around the country about the iniquity of Helen’s  ant-smacking law, only to support it themselves.

They are scum, scum, scum, from their back teeth to their bum.

Bernard Darnton said two-and-a-half years ago that he looked forward to seeing the back of Helen Clark, but did not look forward to seeing the front of John Key.

Two-and-a-half years on from exchanging one from another, the only visible difference is a smile and a wave and the endless repetition of the word “relaxed” while things fall to pieces around him.

But of any fundamental change, there is none. None at all.

Here’s a poster produced by Whale Oil based on those produced for the last free speech campaign. All it needs is some funding and a corner site somewhere.