New Zealand shifts right as voters punish ruling party

New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has conceded his Labour party lost Saturday’s election, as voters punished the government and took the country rightwards nine months after his predecessor Jacinda Ardern suddenly resigned.

The rising cost of living dominated campaigning with voters New Zealanders ending six years of Labour Party rule, the latter half of which was dominated by the country’s strict response to the coronavirus pandemic that successfully kept infections low but battered the economy.

With 90% of votes counted on Saturday evening, the center-right National Party, led by former airline executive Christopher Luxon, had amassed around 40% of ballots, CNN affiliates RNZ and Newshub reported.

barryamelton,

Conservatism is dead. If we do nothing, climate change will profoundly alter the way of living. If we act, we prevent climate change, but we will profoundly alter the way of life. In both cases, there’s no place for conservatism. It’s just closing the eyes and covering the ears like a child.

Mago,

What they did during covid was disgusting

deadbeef79000,

You’ll need to be more specific: who “they” are.

The government at the time opted to prioritise people’s lives over corporate profits with lockdown and mask mandates etc.

The opposition at the time, now the likely government, were quite happy to sacrifice the vulnerable to prop up corporate profits.

A gross over simplification on my part, I admit.

Background for visitors from the rest of the world. Both our major parties are conservative, one is centre-left and slighly progressive and the other centre-right and quite regressive. The only real progress we make is driven by our minor parties.

Mago,

Uuh the largest corporations benefitted MASSIVELY from lockdowns, ordinary people who lost their jobs and basic freedoms suffered. Look at how Sweden handled it, very measured and successful.

funkless_eck,

voting for conservatives to lower the cost of living 🤔

deadbeef79000,

Voting conservative unless you’re the 1% …

gmtom,

A combination of 3 major events that were completely beyond the control of the government (pandemic, Christchurch, volcano) all of which were handled extreme well I should add. And then the nail in the coffin of the PM leaving her party during an election year.

Burn_The_Right,

This is a goddamned tragedy. Nothing good in history has ever come from conservatism. Nothing at all.

AnUnusualRelic,
@AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world avatar

It got Reagan to stop making movies.

Was it worth it? Probably not, but it’s still a small positive.

kboy101222,

Us leftists need to step tf up and hire some marketing people or something. People seem to be getting fed up with spineless liberals promising a lot and delivering nothing of substance. Conservatives keep promising them easy solutions, while leftists require you to read 10,000 pages of theory to understand the basics.

While you can’t bundle leftist ideology into the political equivalent of a get rich quick scheme like conservatives, there has to be a better way to market our concepts

Mossheart,

Marketing isn’t what the left needs. It’s actually doing what you say you’re gonna do, so that conservatives don’t get to run against our shitty records.

Pretzilla,

Conservatives are happy to spew disinformation to their advantage

kboy101222,

Exactly. And while we shouldn’t swoop to their level at all, we need some kind of marketing to counteract all their bullshit

Occamsrazer,

Conservatism is resisting change, so the whole purpose of a conservative party is to resist progressive forces, provide resistance to the rapid and sometimes over reactive changes that can result from unchecked progressivism. A good example of where it went off the rails is the Chinese cultural revolution. Conservative voices were silenced, even killed by the thousands. Years of history and artifacts were destroyed along with the economy itself. There needs to be someone to speak up when things are going crazy, and a shift to the right can be a sign that things went too far.

Burn_The_Right,

Sounds like we need an American Cultural Revolution.

Occamsrazer,

What part of the Chinese revolution do you feel was done right, what part of it makes you think it’s a good idea and that you want to try it in America?

Burn_The_Right,

For starters, the silencing of conservative voices sure sounds pretty appealing!

Nearly every act of racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia and antisemitism ever committed in the U.S. has been by conservatives. Nearly every act of domestic terrorism and every attempt to overthrow the government or subvert democracy has been by conservatives. Nearly every policy position held by conservatives today supports bigotry or public harm.

There is simply no place in a modern culture for conservatism. It is a plague of oppression and death that is long overdue for a cure.

Occamsrazer,

There will always be conservatives since it’s a relative term. But I’m guessing that you are referring to the Republican party, of which roughly half of the country belongs to, comprising everything from moderates to extremists, just like the Democrat party has. How can you preach about subverting democracy in the same breath as advocating to silence half of the country? People who cannot coexist with different opinions or world views, who lack empathy and cannot understand nuance, cannot function and don’t belong in democracy. Why don’t you drop the mask and admit to being an extremist authoritarian? and in that case don’t even bother talking about democracy.

Burn_The_Right, (edited )

Half the country are Republicans? Source, please.

You can call me names all day as your “position”, but it doesn’t help your fake argument. There is still no place in modern society for bigots and fascists, despite your weird objections.

Your feckless, angry meandering is illustration that conservatives are incapable of entering a conversation in good faith. Every conservative thought is a Fox News talking point. Every word uttered by a conservative is deception or manipulation. There is simply no such thing as an honest conservative. So, there is no reason to engage with a conservative… other than for my own entertainment, I guess.

Occamsrazer,

Ok you’ve got to be trolling me. Goodbye.

SoleInvictus,
@SoleInvictus@lemmy.world avatar

It is pretty funny watching them try to form a cogent argument

Conservative parties in general are for the fraction of the population that never grew up and live in constant fear of change and “the other”. They’re a short-sighted, ill-informed plague on society. Some conservative political groups are worse (Likud party) than others (US Republican party), but they’re just varying grades of garbage people.

Burn_The_Right,

I couldn’t agree more. Here in the U.S., conservatives were seen by normal people in the pre-Trump era as just comical, creepy and unintelligent. But, now… Now they are a deadly threat.

Chetzemoka,

Ah yes, those famously conservative Communist Party academics who were targeted during the Cultural Revolution.

I have no idea what you’ve been reading. Mao was unhappy that the existing Communist Party was doing things differently from the way he thought they should be done. He was a pure authoritarian dictator, not a social progressive, no matter what propaganda he used as an excuse for his egotism.

“The Cultural Revolution began as a struggle between Mao Zedong and other top party leaders for dominance of the Chinese Communist Party.”

…stanford.edu/…/introduction_to_the_cultural_revo…

Occamsrazer,

Eradication of the “4 olds” was a deliberate effort by the communist party to destroy old culture, in order to replace it with something new. Since when do conservatives strive to destroy and overturn existing, established culture? That literally the opposite of conservative. Or is your argument that it isn’t necessarily conservatives, but it’s not progressives either?

Chetzemoka,

Authoritarians exist without respect to any political beliefs. They exist to aggrandize themselves.

Occamsrazer,

Mao may not have been progressive, I don’t need to argue that point. But he definitely tapped into a progressive spirit driven by progressive youths and the result was a tragedy.

Chetzemoka,

He definitely did not. He tapped into populist grievance from rural farmers and used them to violently target academics and authorities in cities. Funny how that sounds real familiar, doesn’t it?

Occamsrazer,

So let me get this straight, communism failed in China because it was like Trump?

Chetzemoka,

Are you saying you think a populist authoritarian movement was really communism?

Occamsrazer,

My whole point was that the cultural revolution was a disaster because of unchecked progressivism, and that more conservative voices could have averted the disaster. This was in response to an unhinged rant about conservatives being good for nothing and how they should be silenced. Not sure why I engaged in that insane premise to begin with, but anyway that’s how we got here.

Chetzemoka,

And my whole point was that you’re wrong in your assessment of why the cultural revolution was a disaster. It was a disaster because it was a populist authoritarian movement. Had nothing to do with progressive or conservative no matter what propaganda they used to dress it up.

Occamsrazer,

I guess maybe we are using the terms differently.

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