Posts by tony j ricketts
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Polity: A week on from the housing controversy, in reply to Ewan Morris,
My questions for Rob are: Isn't property speculation the issue, rather than where someone comes from? Is property speculation OK if done by New Zealand residents?
If it IS property speculation that's happening. As I understand it, people in China with significant cash have serious constraints on what they can do with it, including being told not to sell share they have bought, for example. So even if they don't sell their NZ property at a profit it can be helpful to have money/wealth away form their government's control.
The Auckland scene is one where prices are sky-high, and a canny speculator buys at another point in the market, doesn't he?
This is a complex issue, but an important one, and anyone seeming to try and corral it as a 'racism' issue is probably smokescreening.
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Polity: The overconfidence man, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Someone needs to think hard about the Maori seats - turnout is usually low in these seats, which means that the simple numbers of actual party votes cannot be large, and it is party votes that decide parliament.
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Polity: Government votes not to improve MMP, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Parliaments with five times as many members work fine (and there is a good argument that the less "efficent" parliament is, the better the laws that come out).
One reason for this may be that with a larger parliament there are more government-party backbenchers, some of whom will be competent, and they are able to exercise the parliamentary role in a usefully different way than the opposition MPs
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and to get back to Stuart Nash - one thing that troubled me was his use of the Napier/Hastings merger issue, where the more numerous and wealthier Napier doesn't want a bar of merging with the less numerous and poorer Hastings. Even then, it took the intervention of Garth McVicar splitting the tory vote (plus possibly 2000 Party-vote Green voters who didn't vote for their candidate) to give him a reasonable win. Labour has to win party votes!
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Polity: Unity, success: Chicken, egg?, in reply to Pharmachick,
more moderate Labour voters - who, IMHO have left in droves as the hard left has become a bit strong within the party.
Is it Labour voters who have left, or Labour Party members? If the 'hard left' have become strong within the party it's because the soft left have not the inclination to be involved. A party is by definition its members, and the surges in membership that have accompanied the leadership elections must impact on the balance of opinion in the party.
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Hard News: Mediaworks: The only horizon…, in reply to Sacha,
With Kathryn Ryan getting better and better at helping us forget how good Kim Hill was an Nine to Noon it seems really cruel to make the sad story of Campbell Live into an excuse to set the good people against each other.
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It's just happening again - I was searching for something a minute ago, and the Google item down below referred to Stuff, with a picture of Andrew Little and a headline about sex-change surgery funding being 'Nutty'. Except that it was the Minister of Health who said 'nutty'. People scanning past such headlines will always have the wrong end of the stick.
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There seem to me to be two hard questions:
If Australia has had compulsory voting for a century, why is their politics so dysfunctional and toxic?
More importantly, anyone who has read Dirty Politics will be aware that one aim of that system is to increase cynicism about politics, driving down turnout to the benefit of the right; so what chance the dominant right in NZ would ever countenance the idea? -
Matthew Hooton wants Labour to dump Cunliffe - isn't that enough reason to consider keeping him on for longer?
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Hard News: Steven Joyce: Prick or Treat, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Labour really needs to tell the seat-warmers within its caucus to know when to quit, but is the risk of a party split worth it?
The Labour Party is a big complex organism. From the leadership contest (itself a bit of a revolution) to the election was less than a year, and an attempt to eject the 'seat warmers' would have been all-but impossible, plus it would be a messy bad look. We were all aware there is an election looming.
If Cunliffe becomes PM, and leads a successful coalition, (both eminently possible), there will be plenty of time for the party as a whole to take a longer look at candidate selection. There is no need for a bloodbath.