Neither of them has a credible plan to end the 10+ years of housing crisis that New Zealanders have suffered.

The way I read long and complicated threads is by going down one conversation, then collapsing that last comment at the end of it, and making my way back up the chain, collapsing “parent” comments if they have no uncollapsed “children”, and reading “sibling” comments and replies to those as I go up to the original “root” comment.

That’s it, I didn’t even realise there’s a collapse button lol. Until now I just saw a lot of coloured lines that I thought I had to follow. I suppose it’s simple enough to follow things here if I collapse threads, or if I read threads before they get dozens of replies.

No, but so far it’s your sole redeeming characteristic.

At least I’m not sarcastically criticising people, while holding no position of my own.

So you need to get yourself into a party. But you can’t just rock up to your party of choices offices and have them put your name next to their logo in the next election.

Just wait another 10 years for Megan Woods to resign and they will open a new position lol

According to my friend Vince McLeod, smoking weed and eating mushrooms is a sacred religious rite that dates back thousands of years. The government is wrong to leave it up to pharmaceutical companies to regulate this issue.

Because people wouldn’t vote for me.

Where are you based, and do you care about local council issues? You can at least start with community board.

Well, the company is dying apparently. Good luck to him, lol. NZ Herald seems to have some fairly interesting premium articles from time-to-time, but most of their articles are about finance, business and investment. Not very interesting for me. If they made a newspaper or digital subscription for poor people I’d be more interested, but not if they dumb down language and assume everyone is a dolt.

Who listens to Newstalk ZB and reads NZ Herald? Nobody my age.

At least you’re pro school lunches, I guess.

That itself isn’t the hill to die on though.

And the left aren’t the ones obsessed with abortions.

Well not most people, but a small subset of the left is obsessed with it. They were very upset about the protests in Christchurch. Now there’s a law to ban the pro-lifers in Christchurch. They used to protest all the time across from the hospital, at Hagley Park. There is a road between the park and the hospital, but the femmi-nazis weren’t happy and obviously they made this law change so that the protests can’t be within 300m of the hospital. It’s ridiculous. Why not just ban protests within 1km of parliament while we’re at it.

I agree but from Seymour’s perspective he views it as ideological. I listened to Rodney Hyde on Reality Check Radio a while ago. He had good intentions to just make it easier to do business, but now he’s embarrassed that he was in politics. He moved on and says it’s bad that people view politics as a legitimate career (lasting many decades for some MPs).

I understand that Act Party want to make it simpler to invest and stuff - after all I wouldn’t want it to become overly complicated to apply for a job, or government assistance. That said: I have come to realise that it’s one-sided.

Act will make it easier for billionaires to buy just about anything, while making it impossible for anyone to build apartments or decent houses. It’s out-of-touch. For a few years now, I consider Seymour’s intent to be harmful to the country. These people would cry and demand a law change if rich people had to piss in a cup to get a job or fly their own helicopter or private jet. But it’s fine if poor people have to piss in a cup every few weeks just to drive a class 1 or class 2 truck.

Rules for the workers but not for the elite class. It’s total B.S. and I’m glad I can see everything clearly now that I’m a bit older and wiser.

It’s hard to say, but a guy on a bicycle said “slava ooocrane” and one guy in a car said f*** putin. That was in the course of 1 hour and 10 minutes. It’s hard to judge how many people recognise it, but dozens of people do, I’m sure. Some people older than me will know the modern RF flag from the end of the Soviet Union. I was too young to understand it at the time, but as a child I remember looking at a country on the map called USSR and thinking, wow, this country is pretty big lol.

Fighting terrorism. What year were you born in son ;-D

School lunches are one of a few things that should be funded (and I’m saying that as someone who previously voted for Libertarianz and Act). We need to be proud of our services and our country. I don’t mean waving flags or saluting flags. Just basic stuff.

Do you want a country you can be proud of, where the schools are good quality, and the children have good quality food, or do you want a country that sucks, where it’s a case of “every man for himself”? Pretty basic.

I’m actually embarrassed that I voted for Act in 2014. David Seymour does too many stupid things for attention, and he is like Zuckerberg, I wonder if he is actually just an android because he is so fake.

That leads to the question…what makes a good politician?

Someone who can turn the country around 180 degrees and tie up all the loose ends. Changing heaps of things at once if they must. Like Vladimir Putin in the 2000s or Donald Trump in the past 5-6 weeks. Rightly or wrongly! History will be written. I’m one of those impatient people who despises the Barack Obamas and the Mitt Romneys. I’ve heard enough about abortion, healthcare and ram-raids and the same old talking points ad nauseum.

I’d register as a Christchurch council candidate but only if someone would pay the fee. I’m broke and in my thirties, I had more money when I was 19-23 lol. Good news though, my friend Vince McLeod became press secretary for NZ Loyal, and I’ll be voting for Kelvyn Alp. They got rid of Liz Gunn, and Kelvyn actually cares about housing. On rare occasions I’ll write to Kelvyn on Signal or Telegram. He doesn’t have millions of dollars, he’s just a political activist who knows a lot of people. Whereas most of Parliament are lawyers or from business.

Politics is largely a waste of time, but if you’re outside politics you can still meet like-minded people and at least keep ideas flowing. Perhaps change public opinion slowly over time. I’d love to see these middle age and elderly councillors get voted out, but I don’t know who’s going to run - probably a university student in their early 20s who thinks that they know everything? I’m not going to vote for a university student or university graduate who’s into climate change and lgbt as their main ideologies. Parliament is already full of these people. Even Christopher Luxon, a supposed right-winger, says that climate change is real and that he enjoys the Big Gay Out. You kind of have to say these things to get on television and radio, but we all know it’s insincere marketing, and for some reason we go along with it.

I’m so far to the right that I view Christopher Luxon as a progressive, but for me it isn’t about political spectrums or ideology, it’s about energy. I’m in favour of expanding the school lunch programme to the point of having on-site catering, with actual chefs, not just sandwich makers on a temporary contract. Is that right wing? I want a country I can be proud of, and I think that we need something like “patriotism” or “national pride”. Those words mean different things to different people. Anyway, it’s an untapped resource - national pride. Labour may have built the school lunch programme but I still resent that they don’t make food on site at the schools. Other countries do it, and by not having this programme on site, we are behind other countries. I’m not proud of what NZ has become.

Millions of dollars wasted in Afghanistan, and we can’t even have a good school lunch programme. My opinion: if you don’t have any passion or energy then don’t get into politics, do something boring instead. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Politics is so dogmatic and plain here in New Zealand. I’d be happy to run as a candidate but I won’t do media interviews or any of the other stuff that I described above. People are tired of the B.S. and we need to get to the point. Instead of asking “what are your policies” I’d ask people “what do you want” or “what would make you proud to be a New Zealander”.

Do you really think this is not your business? People are dying because a fascist leader of a super power country is invading the small neighbor? And the other fascist leader of the other super power country is helping destroying the small country and Europe, Africa and Asia and the world economy? Are you also a fascist?

@onirakkiss@ioc.exchange Calling Russia a fascist country is wrong. It’s not a case of being inaccurate, it’s completely wrong.

Yeah, that sounds about right. I guess you also think the Chinese would do a better job of running NZ? Or that we should fight alone if they try and invade?

@Ilovethebomb@lemmy.nz Nah I don’t think China is interested in absorbing New Zealand into its global empire. Would they want to pay everyone’s pension or unemployment benefits? It’d be a disaster. China doesn’t have the skill or knowledge on how NZ society works.

How many people in Christchurch even know what a Russian flag looks like?

@BalpeenHammer@lemmy.nz Quite a lot of people, in fact. How many tricolour flags are there with white-blue-red? Maybe the flag of the Netherlands, which goes red-white-blue? The only other similarity is the Serbian flag, which is the Russian flag but upside-down. Other flags such as the French flag are vertical bars of colour, which is obviously quite different. Don’t ask me how so many people young and old know the Russian flag, but they know it from somewhere. Maybe they read books or played Call Of Duty or War Thunder.

Your kids get marmite on toast, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumann, Lockheed Martin get fifty billion dollars.

This! But I go much further.

The New Zealand government isn’t acting in good faith, they spread false information about the war in Ukraine, they will spread false information about China too if we let them. They will create a narrative that China is bad and China is bombing the children’s hospitals in Taiwan, or that China is using chemical weapons 1,000,000 times against Taiwanese soldiers. The government and media will tell lies to get New Zealanders emotionally worked up, in favour of a war against China.

I won’t rule out everything that ilovethebomb says. The Chinese government could get angry with another country and invade them - just think about what could happen in 30 years or 50 years from now. There will be more wars and somehow people in the future will be surprised. Some people are apparently surprised that Russia and Ukraine are at war. I was watching RT today and they said that the Americans have built up their air base at Tinian. The same island where the bomber “Enola Gay” flew after nuking Japan.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Enola-Gay

https://www.rt.com/news/589851-china-us-base-expansion/

The Chinese Defense Ministry has called on Asia-Pacific nations to be on the lookout for US military deployments in the region, citing the Pentagon’s plan to rebuild a World War II-era airfield on a small island north of Guam.

We could end up fighting a war, even if it’s decades from now. The government argues that we should fund the military a lot more, and presumably put our military on some Pacific Islands to deter China. It could work for a while, but if China ever gets into a dispute with us and we don’t back down, NZ or another country could be invaded. In this scenario, the government would control all media and start drafting men for a war that can’t be won. Just because we can vote in elections it doesn’t mean that the government can’t manipulate the public with propaganda and make poor decisions.