Shipley: visionless ideologue
Jenny Shipley's list of four
fundamentals for growth shows that she is captured by
residual loony right ideology, says Labour's industry
development spokesperson Pete Hodgson.
"This woman is so out of touch with the worries of ordinary people that she thinks a four-point agenda for a Treasury briefing is an election campaign platform.
"How could Mrs Shipley possibly still believe that inflation and interest rate control by themselves will create growth? Or that tax cuts and screwing employees will work? How could she possibly have forgotten her own words about the knowledge economy so soon? Was it a mere oversight that education and research and development are not fundamentals for growth any more?
"Her message is more of the same dismal fringe group pap that every other western economy abandoned years ago.
"Mrs Shipley has the vision of a mollusc. New Zealanders are vibrant lateral thinkers. If our present Prime Minister is one of those passionless people who thinks growth depends on reducing costs alone, then more and more vibrant lateral thinking New Zealanders will clear out of here.
"Mrs Shipley's miserable agenda betrays a Government with no positive track record and no new ideas.
"Ordinary families have seen their tax cuts disappear into higher charges for education, health and other public services. Only the wealthy are better off under National and Mrs Shipley's tunnel vision is fixed on widening the gap between the rich and the rest of New Zealand.
"Labour would be delighted if National campaigned on its real record, which is a catalogue of failure with a lot more than four items.
"Jenny Shipley's real fundamentals for New Zealand
are handouts for the rich, contempt for the poor, debt for
the middle class and jobs for
nobody."