Has taken Napoleon’s Advice: Do not Interrupt your enemies while they are making a mistake
New Zealand First Party leader WInston Peters MP has re-drawn the map of the pending general election so that all roads lead to his own central issue which is immigration
Like the maestro his adherents believe him to be WInston Peters MP has choreographed the pending general election around this single issue.
No matter which route his competitors in campaigning actually wish to take, he has wired the general election so that they must converge on and arrive at immigration
All the other issues converge on the single theme of immigration and do so regardless of any face value variant. Here are the usual main ones that now end up at the immigration destination:-
- Housing and infrastructure
- Employment
- Health education and welfare
- The environment
This quartet of traditional issues has been boiled down to immigration.
- Demand exceeding supply of the infrastructure to accommodate them reflected in the bidding up of scarce housing.
- Employment figures are no longer greeted with the same unquestioning belief that they have been in the past due to the absence of supporting statistics on pay received i.e. part time, full time. So are immigrants depriving locals of the worthwhile jobs?
- In health education and welfare there is a strong belief that immigrants are competing with residents for stretched services that the residents have paid for via their taxes.
- The liberal parties have bundled immigration with clean-green. Mr Peters now in effect claims that New Zealand is no different from a farm in that it is being dangerously stocked well beyond its balanced carrying capacity.
Mr Peters’ focus on immigration now puts pressure on the area most affected by the influx which is the Auckland isthmus which the Labour Party regards as its electoral territory.
Having set the order of the election battle to chime with his own agenda Mr Peters gives the impression of heeding the advice of Napoleon who recommended that enemies should never be interrupted while they are making a mistake.
He has boxed in the Labour Party to the extent that it can only tinker with policy surrounding the language schools and their uncertain backdoor contribution to the inflow.
The Greens meanwhile are doctrinally obliged to call for the accommodation of more and still more refugees.
Then there is the National Party.
It has long seen a direct parallel with an immigration influx and industrial growth.
The extent to which it has been check-mated was revealed when New Zealand Business, nowadays the main industrial lobby, tried to refocus the issue on seasonal migrants on farms which has nothing to do with the type of immigration that Mr Peters is talking about.
Then there is Britain now so vividly portrayed in terms of the grotesque high rise, intensive, and now demonstrably unsafe accommodation required to house the recent arrivals.
Neither is this flood of experience in Europe likely to abate before the general election.
Mr Peters’ skill as a politician has been to define issues worrying to the electorate at large. He strips away the confusing ideological or doctrinal or simply fashionable camouflage that disguises them.
As the conductor now of his own electoral orchestra he is there on the rostrum in a position to direct his general election symphony without any distracting variants.
| From the This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. || Wednesday 21 June 2017 |||
