What a convoluted, messy, indecisive waste of time all that turned out to be.
By the time they work out who they are charging, and how they are charging them, they may as well have flagged it, the Greens win. This has been a scam, and it's an abdication of responsibility.
How the Labour Party told us they favoured having people and put this out is a joke. How New Zealand First told us they wanted people to pay and came out with this is a joke. The Greens, to their credit, have at least been consistent. Deluded but consistent that charging people somehow breaches their human rights.
Their human right is access to your home country, that has never been at stake or risk. Why did Labour and New Zealand First get rolled by the Greens only to have us pay out half a billion dollars we don’t have? And that's half a billion to the end of this year, what about next year? How long does this go? Until we get a vaccine? When are we getting a vaccine?
National could have given the government the numbers to pass the law they said they wanted passed. One can only conclude that Labour, in particular, never wanted to charge people. Or if they did, they freaked out and changed their mind when they worked out there might be a few offshore votes at stake.
New Zealand First should be embarrassed. For a party that’s made a lot of mileage out of distancing themselves from their own government, why no distancing now? Why get landed with a mess of a back-down like this?
If you're coming back for good for no charge, what if you come back for good then change your mind? How convoluted is it going to be to work out what to do when someone turns up and says they're broke? What if you structure a loan and they don't pay? This is the hallmark of this government, the ability to take an inordinately long period of time to essentially do nothing, or nothing close to what you said you were doing.
Once again, we were led to believe one thing, and something else turns out to be the result. We, yes, have been played like a fiddle. And this one was a half billion dollar fiddle that sucked us in.
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