Phil Goff's Election Time Suicide Gaffe.

What the hell does Phil Goff think he's doing being drawn into engagement with National on the raising of the pension age a month before the election? This is a mid-term issue for an incumbent government- why should anyone vote for a labour party whose policy gurus are so intellectually retarded they invite the electorate to kick them in the teeth on election day by raising it now? John Key knows this is a vote loser and will be totally irrelevent before the timescale the changes are proposed over has even begun. Key knows that in the radically polarised world he anticipates forty years hence, the common herd are unlikely to even have a life-expectancy of sixty-seven years so he can play this issue as as pure piece of electioneering politik. My heart is filled with despair at the ineptitude of the parties of the opposition in the face of this cynical, sinister man and the fawning cronies that surround him.

There was a little gem that came out at the time that Standard and Poor's downgraded New Zealands credit rating that, had National continued with the taxation policies pursued by the previous Labour government, then the credit rating would not have been lowered. Labour could have jumped on this and ridden it all the way to the election. Allied to this is the fact that, by failing to raise enough tax revenue, they have deliberately taken the country into deep sovereign debt in order to create the pre-conditions, as provided in the European economies by bank bale-outs, for future cuts in public services and the sell-off of publicly owned assets. Where did you hear the opposition parties raise this? Nowhere. Instead, Labour are effectively buying-into Nationals vision of the future world by addressing the "affordability" of future pensions in this way.