How many idiots can argue on a pinhead?

The really big issue, especially with the prioritisation of development on the outskirts of the current urban areas, is that councils cannot afford the infrastructure costs to serve these new homes.

I’ll refer to a live Auckland example that I know well. The Supporting Growth programme, led by NZTA and Auckland Transport, has been planning the necessary transport corridors for the next 30 odd years of housing development. The aim is to protect these corridors so that they don’t get built out thus reducing future construction costs, and to give developers clear signals about where the government agencies will invest and in what order.

They are currently submitting notices of requirement. This creates present day property liabilities. There is, however, not enough money to meet the required property purchases and this is completely undeveloped land that we are talking about. The remaining land will be even more expensive in the future. There absolutely will not be enough money in the future to actually build all of the transport infrastructure without some significant funding regime changes, and this is just one example, in Auckland, for transport. It is compounded across all of the high growth urban areas and other horizontal infrastructure like the 3 waters.

So far I’ve only talked about the pure financial cost, but there are other economics costs due to the increase in car travel that will occur. More deaths and serious injuries, higher levels of congestion, increased greenhouse gas and other pollution emissions, etc.

There is a reason that so many professions have been calling for greater intensification and the MDRS, while it wasn’t perfect, was a much better solution AND was originally bi-partisan.

Spoiler: It won’t be.

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

The premise of OP’s post is that it is not possible to win an election by changing the party’s candidate close to an election. I provided evidence that it is possible.

Whether the DNC has someone capable of doing so is another question.

Unfortunately we’re no socialist utopia and we recently swung to the right in the election last year. The deputy prime minister is a noted xenophobe, pay-to-play corruption is on the rise, and most of the social policies of the last 6 years are being rolled back and then some.

These changes aren’t necessarily popular, lots of people voted against the incumbents rather than for the new government, but the next election is 2 years away and the electorate has a short memory.

It’s also worth knowing that much of our international reputation is a smokescreen. We’re not clean and green despite what our tourism marketing says. Almost every party in our parliament subscribes to neoliberalism to varying degrees and thinks deregulation will solve our productivity problems. We have one of the worst housing markets on the planet which is more like a Ponzi scheme thanks to a lack of capital gains tax and incentives for speculators. Finally the cost of living is extreme due to a lack of competition in the food, banking, petrol, electricity and water markets.

We have been falling in the OECD rankings on most metrics since the late 80s when we embraced Thatcherism/Reaganomics.

That’s splitting hairs. Notice I said “vote” rather than “elect”. I’m well aware of how the electoral college functions and that you can lose the “popular vote” but still become president (e.g. Bush Jnr and Trump).

The fact remains that on ballot you directly cast a vote for the president.

We don’t have ranked choice voting either and don’t directly vote for prime minister. It’s a proportional system. If anything this should reduce the effect that a leader has on the popularity of the party compared with first past the post jurisdictions.

Given that the US does directly vote for President, personality and popularity have much more weight, and therefore a more popular candidate could turn it around. How likely that is I’m not sure, as I don’t know a huge amount about the alternatives other than AOC and Sanders, but Jacinda did show that it’s possible.

Not American, but am anti-fascist so anyone is better than Trump. However it’s wrong to say that there is no other option.

The New Zealand Labour Party (centrist-left) won the election in 2017 by switching leaders much closer to election day:

On 1 August 2017, just seven weeks before the 2017 general election, Ardern assumed the position of leader of the Labour Party, and consequently became leader of the Opposition, following the resignation of Andrew Little. Little stood down due to the party’s historically low polling.

Jacinda Ardern Wiki

It’s also gluten free!

I play D4, Last Epoch and PoE.

I enjoyed the D4 story for my first play through and the recent changes for season 4 have made levelling to endgame much more enjoyable. It is much simpler than PoE and I play it knowing that as something fun that I can pick up and put down at will.

Last Epoch I’m playing to try out each mastery. Even though it’s now a 1.0 release it’s still a bit barebones. Give it a couple of cycles and it’ll be more fleshed out especially in the endgame. I think of it as a middle ground between the simplicity of D4 and complexity of PoE. I like that I can easily try off meta builds through passive refunds and make my own builds.

PoE scratches the D2 itch for grinding. I’m an addict who like spreadsheets.