This year's election campaign has got to be one of the most
disappointing in recent history.
It may be the uptake of early votes holds a surprise for us
yet but it is hard to escape the feeling that the country is sleepwalking its
way toward the future.
It doesn't help that so-called leaders' debates are
increasingly about the host rather than the combatants. Everything is so
sanitised.
Dirty politics came as no surprise. The opportunism
demonstrated by the participants merely confirmed a style of government foreign
to everything New Zealanders have come to accept.
A country that lent two generations of its young men to two
World Wars, which struck out with the people's support on a nuclear-free policy
that is still in place and which has carved its own place in the rough-tough
world out there, continues to find itself without a vision.
Neither of the leading parties have cared to demonstrate an
illuminated path to the future in their election talk.
And one of those parties is heading towards taking New
Zealand into a free-trade agreement, and probably the other party is in agreement, about which the voting public have no say
whatsoever.
Is this government by the people, for the people?
Perhaps the best analysis of where New Zealand is heading
was provided by Gordon Campbell in a piece that deserved far more coverage than
it appears to have received. I have no qualms in putting a link to it here.
Frankly, New Zealand deserves better than what has been
offered so far in the election campaign.
As Van Morrison so aptly put it, 'We've got to fight every
day to keep mediocrity at bay'.
