RIGGED!

The only people concerned about the general election are the politicians and the chattering class. Maybe that's because the rest of us know that whoever wins this election, nothing will change. 

IN HER commentary on the 1News Verian Poll released on Monday night, TVNZ'S Jessica Mutch-McKay suggested that the results reflected an 'uncertainty' abroad in the electorate. She was specifically referring to the 12 percent of respondents who said that they did not know who they would be voting for or declined to say. But she also pointed to the small cache of respondents who indicated that they would be voting for a party that is currently not in Parliament: The Opportunities party (two percent), Democracy NZ (one percent), Freedom NZ (one percent) and the One party (one percent). And the ever-circling NZ First scored 3.1 percent.

Mutch McKay probably thinks the support for these parties represents an increasing fragmentation of the popular vote. But it does not represent a significant shift away from the parties presently ensconced in Parliament. It certainly does not suggest that these fringe parties have sparked widespread enthusiasm among potential voters.

What is more significant, and what Mutch-McKay didn't seem was important enough to comment on, is that the two major parties seem marooned in the mid-thirties: 36 percent of the poll's respondents said they would be voting National while 33 percent said their vote would go to Labour.

It's been like this for months. If the opinion polls are right, both major parties are struggling to hold onto little more than a third of the vote available to it. This is a far cry from 2020 when, on the back of the coronavirus pandemic, Labour won 50.1 percent of the vote. 

What the latest opinion tells us is that the electorate is not uncertain about who it wants to be government, rather it is certain that none of the parties are much cop and it doesn't like the so-called choices it is being presented with. It is very certain about this. 

One of TVNZ's better interviewers, Anna Burns-Francis, referred to this on Breakfast this week. In an interview with National leader Christopher Luxon, she suggested that people were having difficulty discerning any real differences between Labour and National. Luxon's reply was to reel off some of his usual complaints about Labour but he made no attempt to explain how National, if it won, would be any different from Labour.

The electorate is obviously fed up with the free market policies that have dominated New Zealand's economic and political affairs for over three decades, especially since they have led to greater economic inequality and greater social devastation. You might have forgotten by now, but at the tail end of the pandemic Finance Minister Grant Robertson talked grandly of 'building back better'. Instead, as a country, we have plunged deeper into the mire.

Two weeks ago, Prime Minister Chris Hipkins snuffed out any liberal optimism that real change was on its way. Like his predecessor Jacinda Ardern, he ruled both a capital gains tax and a wealth tax. It was enough for economist Susan St John to write: 'The termination of the neoliberal experiment is delayed yet again, possibly by a decade.'

But we cannot hang on for perhaps another ten years and hope against hope, yet again, the next Labour Government will save us. What over three decades of neoliberal rule has told us - emphatically - is that the system doesn't seem rigged against ordinary people, it is rigged. In this respect the Labour-aligned left has reached the end of the road. Its continued defence of the Labour Party only underlines that it is as much a part of the political establishment that it claims to oppose.