"I didn't think the leopards would eat my face!"
-- voters for the face eating leopard party, probably
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"I didn't think the leopards would eat my face!"
-- voters for the face eating leopard party, probably
I don't get out much, but from what I have heard from repentant National voters of my acquaintance, the problem is they wanted the leopards to slowly and quietly eat other people's faces behind the scenes.
Instead the leopards are enthusiastically ripping off faces in public, and it's shaming them. Particularly the meals in schools for some reason.
Agree. Also in my experience with some of the right leaning olds I know, the smoking reversals in particular have come as a real shock. I think this is due to the fact that so many older people have had their parents and other family die from smoking related causes.
That on's probably also because Smokefree Aotearoa was introduced under John Key's National Government in the first place.
Tariana Turia spearheaded it when the Māori Party was in coalition with National, it came out of a Māori Affairs Select Committee process back in 2011 but John Key was totally on board with it and every iteration of the goverment has been.
It's not a National vs Labour issue and no one had any reason to think it was about to be derailed. We've collectively spent a fortune on it, and no one is particularly passionate about making young people start smoking (except tobacco companies).
The current efforts to repeal legislation relating to Oranga Tamariki is also going back to the future to a time before National introduced the legislation they're now ditching bc Seymour's tail is wagging their dog.
It really is weirdly regressive.
Killing as many people as possible before they're eligible for superannuation to eek out another decade before it collapses is just a bonus.
People who happen to already have the poorest health outcomes.
Chloe being ahead of both Peter's and Seymour as preferred PM must surely rankle.
Polls this far out are worse than useless.
They're not useful for predicting the next parliament - and even very close to elections aren't particularly good at that either. But can be used to compare periods in a parliamentary term to see how one government is performing compared to others etc.
Eg maybe the better thought from the journos isn't "labour could form govt" but after 6 months do most governments go up, or down in polling; and what does it say if this poll shows a divergence or continuation of that trend etc.
Why? It's called an opinion poll for a reason. This tells us nothing about the 2026 election, but it's helpful to get an idea what people think.
Labour and National wouldn't be paying to run them constantly if they were useless. They're not crystal balling the next election but they have value as a snapshot of public sentiment