Some great points there. But just to be clear, I haven't really been "revealing" anything or complaining about any Herald decisions. My Twitter comments last night were in response to Danyl Mclauchlan asking me: 'Will you be doing an NZ politics column in the Herald for the campaign?' I said, 'No invites this time round. Pagani & Odgers are the outside columnists for the next 4 weeks'. And then I linked to the Audrey Young article/announcement from a couple of weeks ago that specified who the guest columnists would be: Audrey Young: Policies and people all part of campaign - http://bit.ly/HeraldColumnists And as of a few minutes ago, the Herald's Shayne Currie has announced: 'Cathy Odgers has withdrawn'.

Thanks Russell. I've just corrected that guest blog post by Simon Wilson. I've corrected the stuff about the election of Ross Clow and non-election of Noelene Raffills! This was my mistake - I had uploaded the wrong version of the guest blog post that Simon wrote yesterday!

Turnout was about 68.8% - based on the estimated total number of votes cast (2,254,581) as a proportion of those eligible to vote (3,276,000).

This formula is the more commonly/modern/comparative used way of measuring voter turnout (as opposed to just votes as a proportion of those *enrolled*).

Bryce

Russell says that my liberation blog post about Don Brash invokes ‘the word “principles” to characterise the former National Party leader’s motivations’. This is an accurate reading of my post, but of course some caveats or further unpacking of this idea of “Brash as a principled politician” are probably necessary. What I was trying to convey was this idea that many on the right of politics feel that National’s current economic orientation is driven by pragmatism and moderation. It’s harder to characterize the Don Brash’s campaign critique of National’s orientation to the foreshore and seabed issue, and my feeling is that Brash’s Orewa speech was much more focused on economic issues, with just a few nodes to the foreshore and seabed debate thrown in, rather than an in depth critique of it (even though some news media hyped up this aspect up).

Also, the use of terms like principled and populist probably need quite a bit of unpacking to understand New Zealand politics. In my view Don Brash the politician is actually a very interesting mix of radicalism, populism, and principled and opportunistic politics. This to me is one of the key themes of his time as National Party leader, and is particularly clear from reading Nicky Hager’s Hollow Men expose. The whole Hager story is essentially how “Brash the Principled” became “Brash the Populist Opportunist”. What is now frequently forgotten is that throughout Brash’s time as leader he actually oversaw the ditching and de-emphasizing of virtually all of the National Party’s more neoliberal and rightwing policy, and instead (despite traditionally being rather socially liberal) Brash started to emphasize and strengthen National’s more socially conservative policies. Essentially he ditched his principled politics in favour of more populist vote-winning stuff around ethnicity. Now in 2010 he’s more interested in returning to the principled neoliberalism (with a dash of populism thrown in around issues of ethnicity).

It's pretty hard to see any how anyone can call themselves a democrat and defend the 5% threshold.

So, yes, let's abolish it, and keep MMP. Then the problematic "one-seat rule" is automatically dealt with.

On the day that Matt McCarten announced his entry to the Mana by-election campaign, I blogged some analysis of whether this meant the ‘The launch of a New Left Party?’. See here: http://liberation.typepad.com/liberation/2010/10/matt-mccarten-for-mana-the-return-of-the-left.html

Here’s an excerpt:

“This has been his plan ever since the Alliance disintegrated. Building the Unite union has always been the first step in this larger project of resuscitating progressive politics in this country. McCarten has never wanted to just be a unionist for the sake of it, but has instead seen that building of the unite union as part of a larger vision for changing society. He knows very well that you can’t do this without an actual organized force at the political level. And for McCarten, neither the Labour and Green parties are capable of this; when push comes to shove, despite their posturing, both parties are not really particularly leftwing at all.”

I’m currently writing an extensive blog post looking at the pros and cons of launching the New Left Party. I’d be interested in other people’s ideas (in the comments below or via email).

I certainly agree with Russell’s analysis that there are some major contradictions in trying to involve socialists and Hone Harawira in the same political project. Of course this was one of the major problems in McCarten’s Alliance: trying to fold into one party some quite disparate ideologies and political interests.

Yes - the various Glenngate and NZ First political finance scandals show how inadequate the Electoral Act 1993 was in achieving the putative transparancy expected by politicians. But it's far from clear that the Electoral Finance Act 2007 does this either. There are incredibly loopholes in the EFA. And these aren't easy ones to fix up. As for increased state funding - there's no evidence that such a 'solution' would fix the problems we're looking at here. The lessons from other countries with generous direct state funding is that it either fixes nothing or exacerbates the political finance scandals. By giving politicians even more money doesn't do anything to make them less corrupt.

Bryce
www.liberation.org.nz

It was interesting to read that Mark Jennings has claimed their was no tipoff to TV3 about the morning Wellington raid.

My fairly reliable sources say that a TV3 Executive received a direct tipoff from the Police. Supposedly TV3 had to invent a convincing story so as to avoid it looking like a tipoff. Obviously there is no certainly about this one way or another, but I hope some further questions are asked about all of this. If TV3 did indeed have a Police tipoff then it would raise significant questions about the motivations of the Police in carrying out the raids.

Bryce
www.liberation.org.nz