Ryan Bridge: Labour's getting protest votes

People aren't telling pollsters they'd vote for Labour because they'd actually vote for Labour. Labour hasn't got any policies - they're an empty vessel.  It's captain is still, according to most recent polling, less popular than the current Prime Minister.  It's a protest vote. They're telling the PM to hurry up and do something else to rescue the economy the last lot, and a trade war, have suppressed.  You don't throw the baby out with the bath water and back a team that has no plan.  That clown that's running in the Wellington Mayoral race has more policies than Hipkins. He wants to turn the Basin Reserve into a swamp.  Sure, it's mad, but at least it's something.  Late last year and early this year, the recovery was on-track.  We then got hit by Trump's Liberation Day. Confidence and investment took a massive hit, the markets were in freefall, remember? That's thrown everything off course.  Now, you can argue that National went too hard and fast on cutting spending and stopping infrastructure.  But at the same time, they were voted in to stop wasteful spending on dumb projects. That's what we asked them to do - many think that hasn't gone far enough.  Just yesterday we learned of 100 jobs to go at the Reserve Bank, which under Adrian Orr, wanted a budget of a more than billion bucks and twice the staff they started the pandemic with.  Does that sound reasonable?  This comes down to a question of who is best placed to invest in this country. The private sector or the state? The answer is, of course, a bit of both. But's chicken or the egg stuff right now. One thing's for sure, if the only thing capable of keeping this country afloat is government borrowing, then we'll only ever end up back in this same position. Over and over again.  The medicine needed to dig us out of this whole is nasty. Completely unpalatable. But the disease its treating is worse. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.