A gaggle of grumps

Insights Newsletter
29 January, 2016

There is nothing wrong with being an old grump. With a lifetime of disappointments to reflect on, old grumps have earned the right to grouse about how things used to be back in their day.

It is far sadder to be a young(ish) grump. And yet this is the situation I find myself in, two years shy of my 40th birthday.  Still, as a former journalist, I feel justified in saying “in my day, the media were required to be objective”.

The piece that raised my ire was not the standard Kardashian clickbait fare, but the Dominion Post’s editorial on Tuesday, titled “Little sign of a mood for change” (pun not intended, I’m sure). In it, editorial writer Anthony Hubbard bemoaned the fact that 47% of people surveyed in the most recent Roy Morgan poll supported National despite seven years under John Key and his “lethal blandness”.

Hubbard suggests this is ludicrous given the government’s slew of mortal blunders. These include signing the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, sitting idle as China’s growth wanes, and failing to resolve the Auckland housing crisis.

You do not have to be a National voter to splutter over the logic.

Surely a more level-headed reading of the numbers would be that just under half of New Zealanders support the government’s bid to open international trade links. Furthermore, it is reasonable to deduce that a vast chunk of the voting public trust National to handle the effects of China’s economic slowdown and the housing crisis more than Labour, which scored 27.5% in the poll.

This is not an endorsement of the National Party. Far from it. The Initiative recently praised Labour’s housing policy. It is just a straightforward reading of the poll numbers.

Hubbard seems to suggest that most voters are too dim to see beneath Key’s game of banal smoke and mirrors to get what is really going on. Instead, Hubbard is hoping a massive personal scandal befalls the Prime Minister so that voters will decamp to the enlightened opposition. By this thinking, voters are dumb when they vote right, and smart when they vote left. That is 18-carat objective right there.

Then again, perhaps I’m being too harsh. If I’m allowed to moan about declining editorial standards, Hubbard, as a newsprint veteran, should be allowed to grizzle over the dominance of the centre-right in Parliament. The other factor in his favour is that he is not a young(ish) grump.

Harrumph!

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