Beware of political promises!

I want to take the opportunity to thank them for raising their voices and fighting for farming in this great country of ours. Well done Groundswell Team!

We are officially in our winter months now, as from the first of June. The shortest day of the year is just up ahead of us, which means our daylight minutes will slowly start to ramp-up again. As usual, winter will clip on by as things start to brighten up.

Soon enough, up and down our country, people will be saying "spring is in the air". Having lived through many seasons, picking up on the changes that come with that is not so difficult. The wild daffodils at our place are always a bit of a giveaway.

I think spring is my favourite season. Even the birds seem much happier and filled with new 'get-up-and-go'.

Well, it’s now very obvious we are in another ‘election season’. Like I just referred to above, if you have lived through a few, it really is not hard to recognise!

The major parties, in conjunction with their ever compliant ‘leaders’, will all be trying to outpromise each other. Who can come up with the most attractive promises?

It does kind of remind me of Santa Claus, with his bottomless bag of lollies. Now if you stop for a moment and think about it, that really is a fitting comparison. While Santa may provide a lot of fun, and momentary distractions for many, the facts are he just isn’t real! He and his reindeer simply cannot get right around the world in one night! He may well promise to, but it’s just not going to happen.

It is all a con that most of us, especially those from the business world, happily ride along with. But nobody ever seems to stop and ask who actually pays for all his lollies? Of course, as always in the Government’s case – like it or not – it’s ‘we the people’ who pay for all the freebies.

Yes, election year promises abound; they go hand-in-hand with the season we are in. With political promises, they are simply vote-catchers. There never seems to be any sort of accountability for the keeping of those promises. The puzzling thing is that people even take them seriously.

Broken election promises… let’s not even attempt to make a list – I’d need many more pages than my word space allows!

This is where government spin doctors come in to play. These wellpaid bureaucrats have all the ‘answers’ for what didn’t happen and why they’re not spreading disinformation.

To acknowledge you made a mistake, you got it wrong… I would very happily accept that, and respect you for it. I’m sure many Kiwi’s would do the same. Humans are humans after all. But to hand it over to these masters of spin to cleverly cover your tracks? I have totally zero respect for that! How about you?

Later this year, all of us will have the opportunity to cast our vote. In my formative years I heard the words think before you speak many times over! Good advice of course. Well how about, think before you vote? Again, that’s top advice.

Like many others, I regularly read a book full of promises. Real ones, I mean! In all my years, I have drawn wonderful inner-strength from these promises so many times. Both in the worst of times, and in the very best of times, the book has always been my first go-to.

God Bless.

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