Look, I’m not gonna tell you who to vote for. If I did, I would rather I would get paid for it and currently I’m not, so free advertising is off the table. There’s a growing discourse around political parties in both New Zealand and the world, with people choosing to opt out of voting. Of course, no political party is perfect—not in my opinion anyway. National are too focused on growing private aspects of the economy and overseas investors that they have forgotten about the citizens on the ground level that keep it running. NZ First is full of old men complaining about ‘kids these days’ and thinking racism will fix their receding hairlines, and ACT somehow managed to copy and paste David Seymour’s personality far too many times. Even Labour, who has typically been slightly more left leaning, is centre left, and mostly passive. In my opinion (again, not telling you who to vote for unless the Greens hit me up with a paycheck), the Greens currently have the best interest in Aotearoa as a whole but unfortunately still don’t hold as many seats in parliament and require a coalition to be on the governing side. If you are in fact, a person who has similar opinions or simply doesn’t like a single of New Zealand’s main parties you are most certainly not alone, and it is easy to see how people become disillusioned with the voting system as a whole. However, the principles of democracy solely rely on the idea that everyone participates. It can be tempting to ignore the whole debacle of enrolling in the electoral roll and then filling out voting papers, but every voice matters. There’s a very good allegory going around at the moment: say we are all on a bus and have to decide where to drive to, three people on the bus vote to go get ice cream, while four people vote to drive off a cliff. Two people didn’t vote and therefore we are now plunging off a cliff. Moral of the story, enrolling to vote, and let’s look after each other to make sure we all get ice cream and don’t end up and the bottom of a ditch somewhere.
