[Lightspeed]

You're very generous with your view of politics, I'm more cynical.

Voters with understanding is the very opposite of what some political parties seek. Voters who vote for them is what they are after, and often given a party's fundamental political aims, informed voters will not achieve that.

This is the double-edged knife Labour and the Greens must live with. Their supporters favour being informed over being powerful. So if they get caught playing at cooking up bullshit, they get punished by their core supporters. Of course, presenting what's real and inevitably unflattering, they risk the support of the swing vote.

National's base is about power, they know what's right, they make the best decisions, they should be running the country. You just need to tell them what they want to hear, any problems can be foisted onto the vulnerable. The swing vote likes a good story too. Of course reality eventually bites which is National's challenge to staying in power. Fortunately they can't turn to authoritarianism, which is available in so many other countries.

Scarcity is one such story, despite living in an age of abundance. If scarcity appears real, it's because we've been pouring our greatest resource down the drain the last nine years: people.