Posts by tony j ricketts
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Actually there is a very important implied message for us here this year: in our quasi-presidential local elections the most attention by far is paid to the mayoral contest, yet the make-up of the council is really important. Don't know what to do about this, local news is owned by the realityTV businesses and nationwide media have neither resources nor space to much more than glance at Auckland most of the time.
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Up Front: The Up Front Guide to Plebs, in reply to B Jones,
There's nothing like Australian politics to make our own look less awful.
Thirty years ago we didn't have a plebiscite or referendum, but the meeting I went to at Henderson would have been sickening, with Key Hay and his preacher mate, except that the crowd was not with them, and Fran Wilde was awesome.
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Hard News: The flagging referendum, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Shouldn’t we have elections and referenda to do that?
No Rich, we have elections to choose parliaments, and if we are collectively daft enough to choose the National Party then we must exert all our efforts to reduce the consequent damage.
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IF WE CHANGE THE FLAG NOW WE WILL NOT LIVE TO SEE A BETTER ONE
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Hard News: Mt Eden: Not a closing but an…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
"My disappointment is that when we got overseas visitors (think middle-aged less than fit scientists) we would routinely take them from the airport straight to the top of Mt Eden. It instantly gave them a sense of the Auckland landscape"
I used to do that too when I lived in Auckland, until I discovered the Savage Memorial – such a beautiful place, and with so much to say about NZ,s noble past. good views as well.
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Welcome to PA, Rob as Polity, it's a pretty civil place, a bit like much of Wellington (I've lived here just over 3 years), but also pretty perceptive.
I'm Labour too, these last 3 years, mostly with pride, and sometimes embarrassment. And also have aspects of my life outside politics, though some of my friends find that hard to credit.
Kia kaha -
Hard News: A cog in the Mediaworks machine, in reply to Russell Brown,
Francis Cook
I think you'll find it's Frances Cook, who was female last time I talked with her.
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Polity: Meet the middle, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Island Bay isn’t an electorate?
A lot of that is because Green (and maybe NZF) voters support the Labour candidate rather than their party candidate (NZF didn’t contest Mt Albert). The rest I guess is voters hedging their bets: who either support National and don’t care about the electorate vote, or support Labour and wrongly don’t care about the party vote, or support National but want David Shearer to do well in the Labour party.
Sorry, yes, Rongotai, not Island Bay. By the way, I canvassed several National voters who intended voting for Annette as a great electorate MP.
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I've just read 4 pages of comment on Rob's piece, and posted one testy comment myself (sorry), but there are a couple of fundamentals that we ignore at our peril:
Firstly, the NZ Parliament is defined by the Party Vote, and we STILL haven't confronted the disparity of 'safe' Labour seats like Mt Albert or Island Bay where Labour lost the party vote. Up and down the country there are electorates without even a prominent Labour MP or candidate to lead the fight for Party Vote Labour. Each party vote there is just as important. And pushing the old 'Two Ticks for Labour' line merely makes us look out of touch when so many voters split their votes.
Secondly, in 1969 Stokes and Butler published 'Political Change in Britain', a book whose big revelation was how complex are the changes in voting behaviour. Even in the two-party, FPP system of the day it appears that actual voters switch from Lab to Con, Lib to either, voting to not-voting, and the opposites, so the often small net swing is the result of many, many changes.
So even if we accept the idea of targeting the centre we must be aware that winning an election will result from voters arriving from everywhere on the spectrum outnumbering those leaving for everywhere on the spectrum. Over-simplified thinking is not likely to lead to success.
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Polity: Meet the middle, in reply to Nick Russell,
If your attitude is that these voters are intellectually lazy and zombie mall shufflers just because they disagree with you, you may not be terribly successful in achieving that.
But if your attitude is that concerned leftists are 'the kamikazi wing of the Labour party', you may end up with the English parliamentary party, with fewer than 10% of a mind to resist Blairism. And what really is the point of winning an election for that?