A blue-green brand of blandness leading the blind and mostly clueless [updated]

In nine years of John-Key government it was impossible to discern a direction beyond "steady as she goes" coupled with lots of blatant backtracking. Blind to the damage it was doing (middle-class welfare explosion, a stuffed second city, rocketing housing prices) it was a government simply maintaining reforms it had previously disparaged (RMA, Working for Families, Interest-Free Student Loans) while offering none of its own in response.

Status-quo merchants in blue, presiding over nine years of steadily increasing taxation, regulation and control.

The bland blundering looks to continue with the caucus's choice of the oleaginous Simon Bridges to be their great next-generational hope.

One listened in vain to discern any direction at all in the bland swill the new hope poured out around the media this morning in his first few interviews -- any hint at all of either a backbone, or a principle around which to grow one: but bereft of backbone he blathered instead about "holding the government to account, "presenting an "ambitious and strong alternative government," one with "a clear and positive plan for the 2020s." Oh, and something about "modernising" the Blue Team he now leads. (Which, as one wag swiftly observed, is pretty bleak considering his his positions on same-sex marriage, euthanasia and marijuana.)

Interviewers (mostly) failed to suppress a yawn.

The only hint of what any of that might mean -- from a man who only last week described himself as one of Nick Smith's “blue-greens”-- was his suggestion "National will have a strong focus on environmental policies." Sufficiently "strong," apparently, to countenance coalition with the Greens.

So if there is any direction in which this party is to "modernise" it appears to be the same old direction ambled towards by the dripping wet and (hopefully) soon-to-be-retiring Nick Smith.

The oleaginous in thrall to the odious; espoused by a bland man leading a bunch of blind blue know-nothings.

So not a sound basis on which we could expect any surprises, or for his "team" to hold anything to account at all, really, let alone a leader in whom the media continue to be enraptured.

It looks like a tedious few years ahead in NZ politics.
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