Like Brownlee, but without the aggression and with an overhang and a sense of disappointment from leftie voters in Ilam we'd abandoned them to two rich tory boys. I also think there's a long term disadvantage to giving right candidates the veneer of ...
This is a terrible, terrible idea. Raf Manji is a centre-right councillor who governs from that perspective: centre-right, pro-asset-sales, anti-Living Wage, anti-social housing etc. His major solution to the Council's financial difficulty was a fire-sale ...
This is just wrong. Lianne Dalziel pushed the asset sales agenda against stiff opposition from Labour backed People's Choice councillors and the trades unions in Canterbury. Her vote was the decisive vote which made sure they would go ahead as far as they ...
And, erm, there plenty of Asian people willing to do the hard yards as candidates! The National Party certainly manages, and even Winston does it.
Are you saying that the Labour Party's practice is to disproportionately protect white men when the party performs poorly?
Key was ahead in the preferred PM poll from May 07, and Clark was level pegging or ahead in the run-up to '99. But yes, there's a tendency to prefer incumbents, but on the other hand NZ voters do tend to re-elect incumbent PMs.
Young Labour's statement just reiterated what those well known "young punk" groups who don't know anything about industrial relations the SFWU, the PSA, PSA Youth, and Stand Up said. So yeah, I'm not entirely sure what you are on about here.
But Smith was a "reformer" and had already appointed Blair as Shadow Home Secretary and Brown as Shadow Chancellor. He'd stood as a reformer and moderniser on the right of the party to succeed Kinnock, and in fact thumped left-wing candidate Bryan Gould to...
If you want to know what I thought about that, it's hardly a secret! https://twitter.com/KeirLeslie/status/600474204857741312. Nash wasn't the only one to come out of that looking like a tosser - I also think that Andrew Little really screwed up on that ...
Yeah, that remit was a really good remit, and Young Labour works hard to put together remits and organise on a nation-wide level like that. Young Labour has a strong internal democracy with robust internal debate on political matters and in particular ...
Nash did receive a briefing on the proposal - he was at the regional conference it was discussed at. He chose to grandstand out of self-interest.
And I remember making the case, with other members of Young Labour, for universality at the Christchurch Conference before the last election. I don't particularly remember getting a huge amount of support from the rest of the party, who tended to prefer ...
Yeah. OK, that's great, and I fully support that - although, it should be said that in the NZ public system, access to surgery is already generally free and needs based. It's mostly the primary care sector that suffers from cost-based barriers to accessing...
Isn't this one of those solid foundational issues? Every one has the right to the healthcare they need, whether or not they're wealthy enough to get it down privately, whether or not the judgemental bigots of the world approve? That's a sentiment straight ...
Firstly, over the past three years, Young Labour has campaigned internally on action on climate change. Young Labour was one of major drivers of the Healthy Homes Guarantee within the Party. Young Labour has pushed for action on child poverty, including ...
This is bizarre. This wouldn't be a story if Nash and Shearer had held their tongues and referred requests for comment to Annette King, who actually knows something about this issue and could have given a measured, reality-based response. If you want to ...
Firstly, so you do concede that the SVR money goes to the Scottish Consolidated Fund, right? And the SVR was allowed to lapse by First Minister Alex Salmond and Finance Secretary John Swinney, both of the SNP! You can hardly say they are in a tough place ...
No, that's not right. The SNP even ran an election campaign (Penny for Scotland) back in 1999 premised on the use of the SVR to fund services in Scotland. They than backed away from it, and the Scottish Greens used to attack them from the left as being ...
Actually that's not simply true - the Scottish Parliament has had the power to vary income tax by 3p in the pound since it was created, but Alex Salmond didn't want to raise taxes so he let that power lapse.
That is more expansive than I would assume from reading the Act, and I would be interested to see what a court would say if it were challenged. But I'm not sure why an organisation would expect to be able to keep a document made available to the public ...
Is a newsletter supplied to members of a club supplied to the public under the terms of the Act? Doubt it, but maybe there's contradictory authority.
I think Phil Twyford as Transport, Housing, and Associate Auckland issues will tend to take a lead on Auckland transport / housing issues. Goff might be lining up a mayoral run, who knows.
Patti, it's true that Andrew Little is against all those things - or he's against the Labour party doing anything about those things, I don't really care which, not having a wish to make a window into his soul. I mean, he really did attack women's only ...
No offence, Weka, but when a politician says "this particular policy is under review" that's code for "I'm almost certainly going to ditch but I'm not quite ready to make that announcement yet". Similarly, "personally I agree with you but let's leave it ...
See here: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11339957. "Too much policy" is a direct quote; "too radical" is a mild paraphrase of his stance - apparently our policy was "scary" - although quite how voters were scared by NZ Power ...
Interesting to read about Kris' father. Always nice to hear about how people acquired their values.
I don't object to leadership contenders talking about left wing policy within the framework of the Platform - both Cunliffe and Robertson were pretty good about that, and it was good to see. I do object to leadership contenders who see their role as ...
You may not see him pulling the party to the centre, but he very clearly is. That's what "too much policy, too much of it too radical" means. He has even come out saying that NZPower needs to be reconsidered - that's blatantly attacking one of Labour's ...
But the problem with "policy should come from the party not the leader" is that Little has clearly signalled that he sees his role as leader as dragging Labour back to the centre, with fewer scary policies, even if that means picking a fight with the party...
Erm, Roger Douglas was talking about a UBI back in the bad old days. It would be interesting to see if Little can get further with it than Mr Flat Tax did :)
Weka - well, by doing it "through the usual channels" as it were. The leader has lots of places where they can make their case - there's five caucus reps on the policy council, including the leader themselves, and the council generally gives quite a bit of...
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