Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: National needs to stop this ACC business before it loses votes

Now, listen, I hope that this ACC business is a Scott Simpson problem and not a National problem, but I'm starting to get a little worried about it - because this is at least the 3rd case of race-based stuff still happening under National when we thought National was going to put a stop to it.

I mean, with the free GP visits in Hawke's Bay for Māori and Pasifika kids and no one else - at least that stuff could be blamed on rogue public health staff, and it was killed as soon as we discovered it was happening.

And at least with the co-governance stuff that's going on in the Waitakere Ranges - at a stretch, we may believe that the Government didn't know about it. Maybe.

But this ACC stuff, the minister knows about. And even though he was told about it, he's not gonna stop it because as I told you in the Newsroom article, he stands by ACC - and he thinks it's okay.

Now, I reckon this is gonna be just a little disappointing to a whole bunch of voters who put this Government in power to stop this race-based stuff that Willie Jackson and the Labour Party were pushing.

And who would have thought that that directive to the public service that went out last year telling the public servants to stop the race-based stuff was actually going to stop the race-based stuff?

National needs to cut the stuff out. They need to stop this.

They either need to stop it themselves or they need to go along to to Scott Simpson and tell him to stop it, because otherwise, a lot of voters are gonna wise up to exactly what ACT was warning us at the election - which is that National is not actually going to change anything.

National is just Labour in blue clothes. And if you think I'm going too far saying that, just take a look at what is going on. I'll remind you, Nicola Willis has spent more in her last budget than Grant Robertson ever spent. Scott Simpson clearly loves himself a little race-based target.

Now, what did we complain about ad nauseam with Labour? We complained about too much spending, but we've still got that going on. We complained about too much racial division - we've still got that going on. So how is this any different currently?

As I say, National needs to cut this out, or it needs to risk losing voters to its coalition partners, because the coalition partners at this stage are actually taking a tougher line on this stuff.

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