election 2008

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Batman Politics

Written By: - Date published: 5:57 pm, May 14th, 2008 - 14 comments

Who would have thought? Murray McCully as The Penguin. Hat tip: onegoodmove

New Zealand, a great place to be a mum

Written By: - Date published: 4:02 pm, May 12th, 2008 - 48 comments

We hear an awful lot from the Right about how much New Zealand sucks: ‘crime is up’ they cry (when it’s down), ‘taxes are too high’ (when they’re down), ‘too many dole bludgers’ (when benefit numbers are way, way down), ‘everyone’s leaving for Australia’ (when fewer than 0.7% of people went last year), ‘labour costs […]

Mythbusting: Winning a fourth term is impossible

Written By: - Date published: 4:24 pm, May 11th, 2008 - 50 comments

It has become a media mantra that winning a fourth term of government is nigh on impossible, but is that claim actually based on the record of past governments or just a political myth?  The first government formed along party lines in New Zealand was the First Liberal Government, which took office in 1891. Since […]

Clarkson not standing in Tauranga

Written By: - Date published: 9:37 am, May 9th, 2008 - 59 comments

Clarkson has jumped before he was pushed – he won’t be standing in Tauranga. Peter’s hasn’t confirmed yet whether he will stand or not. It’s always slightly irritated me that the media seem intent on refering to Clarkson as “colourful”. It kind of sounds like it might be a complement until you realise that the […]

How Boris won London by not being Boris

Written By: - Date published: 9:44 am, May 6th, 2008 - 13 comments

Tory candidate Boris Johnson has triumphed in the mayoral race for London in a campaign masterminded by the Australian political tactician Lynton Crosby. The Sydney Morning Herald has the story: Brought in at the end of last year, the mysterious Crosby – “you know I don’t do interviews”, he responded to an email from the […]

Would Key scrap GST on food?

Written By: - Date published: 3:12 pm, May 5th, 2008 - 5 comments

With hints that regional fuel tax could be put on the “go slow” list, along with parts of the emissions trading scheme, it seems like we shouldn’t take any policy on taxes for granted. For example, there’s a belief that National and Labour have consensus on not removing GST on food. A couple of comments […]

For whom the Toll bells

Written By: - Date published: 10:26 am, May 5th, 2008 - 62 comments

The Government has bought back the rail stock and ferries from Toll for $655 million. The privatisation of these vital assets, which are also natural monopolies, by National was a disaster from Day 1. National flogged the railways and the ferries off dirt cheap to their mates who asset-stripped them by slashing maintenance and taking […]

CTU Secretary selected for Maungakiekie

Written By: - Date published: 9:09 am, May 3rd, 2008 - 49 comments

CTU Secretary Carol Beaumont is set for a change of career later this year. She’s been selected as the Labour candidate for the safe Auckland seat of Maungakiekie currently held by Mark Gosche. As we know, Mark is standing for the list only this year, in order to spend more time with his family and […]

Talking down the economy

Written By: - Date published: 11:19 am, May 2nd, 2008 - 57 comments

National is a party weak on policy. It has had to drop nearly every one of its principled but unpopular policies to get itself in a position to win an election. This raises the question of why someone would vote for National, rather than keep the current lot. One of National’s answers is to claim […]

Electoral donations reported

Written By: - Date published: 9:50 am, May 1st, 2008 - 52 comments

The Electoral Commission has published the parties’ donation returns for 2007. It is worth noting from the outset that under the electoral law then in force only donations over $10,000 had to be declared and anonymous donations, including the use of anonymising trusts, were legal. Labour has the largest return, at $1,030,446.39. But $700,000 was […]

Who do you want answering the phone?

Written By: - Date published: 3:41 pm, April 30th, 2008 - 71 comments

Just received this parody of Hillary Clinton’s 3am ad, but with a New Zealand twist. Very funny.

Child beating petition falls short

Written By: - Date published: 12:45 pm, April 29th, 2008 - 95 comments

Family First’s petition for a referendum on reversing the amendment to s59 of the Crimes Act that removed the defence of reasonable force for assault on a child (try saying that three times fast) has failed to get enough signatures. It needed 280,275 signatures and seemed to have enough but the Office of the Clerk […]

Put it on the kids’ tab

Written By: - Date published: 12:00 pm, April 29th, 2008 - 6 comments

Some may have noted an odd series of questions in Parliament and press releases from Bill English around government borrowing over the last month. The questions purposely conflated the idea of maintaining current debt levels with increasing debt. We noted this at the time and Tane correctly picked the strategy: First, sow confusion about debt […]

Mistakes, I’ve made a few

Written By: - Date published: 2:22 pm, April 26th, 2008 - 91 comments

David Farrar’s three more prominent weaknesses came together in a speculator PR disaster yesterday. The weaknesses are his ego, his trick of using pictures of naked women to boost hits on his site, and his reverse midas touch, whereby every he touches turns to, well, it doesn’t turn out well. See, Farrar led the campaign […]

If I were National’s campaign strategist

Written By: - Date published: 11:05 am, April 24th, 2008 - 61 comments

National will not win by running on its rightwing principles and policy. For 20 years, New Zealanders have consistently said they do not want to sell public assets, they do not want weaker employment law, they do not want tax cuts at the cost of public service cuts, and they like government assistance like Kiwisaver […]

What would National do?: Emigration

Written By: - Date published: 11:58 am, April 22nd, 2008 - 18 comments

Simon Power has hit on the fact that Stats New Zealand produces migration figures every month, and that means every month he gets to report the number of New Zealanders heading for Australia as if a) the number is unprecedented, which it is not b) it’s all the Government’s fault, which it’s not. Not that […]

National makes work rights the defining issue

Written By: - Date published: 1:41 pm, April 21st, 2008 - 32 comments

National’s strategy, the strategy of a weak party, is to present a ‘small target’ by promising to change virtually nothing if they were in government. Problem is, their small target has a great big bull’s-eye on it called work rights. With flip-flops on health, education, welfare, annual leave, parental leave, assets, Working for Families, Kiwisaver, […]

Note to John: get a new lawyer

Written By: - Date published: 10:59 am, April 21st, 2008 - 18 comments

John Key: ‘ my lawyer actually does those things clearly [he] had the wrong information.’ That’s how Slippery John explained why legal documents showed him living at different addresses at the same time. For election purposes he had claimed to be living at his $1.1 million home in Waimauku in his electorate, but on documents […]

Ralston sez: leave poor Johnny alone

Written By: - Date published: 5:45 pm, April 20th, 2008 - 61 comments

In the Herald today, Bill Ralston sticks up for poor John Key who has been the subject of personal political attacks recently. Like Key, Ralston wonders what is “the cost of the Government using countless bureaucrats to endlessly scour records in an attempt to discover inconsistencies in any utterance [Key has] made”. Ralston needs to […]

Business to Key: ‘You’re ruining everything’

Written By: - Date published: 11:50 am, April 18th, 2008 - 54 comments

Business is starting to get worried. This was meant to, finally, be the year that they got the Left out of government and started making New Zealand work for the business elite again. But there’s a problem: the man they chose for the job. Sure, Key’s got a cheeky grin but on real ‘prime minister […]

Cost of benefit system plummeting

Written By: - Date published: 1:40 pm, April 17th, 2008 - 26 comments

Continuing our benefits theme, here’s a look at how much the benefit system costs you. The figures are the combined expenditure by the Government on the Unemployment, Sickness, Invalids’, and Domestic Purposes benefits per day per working age New Zealander, in 2007 dollars. Sources: MSD (1,2,3), StatsNZ (4,5) The portion of the working age population […]

If I were the Maori Party’s campaign strategist

Written By: - Date published: 12:02 pm, April 17th, 2008 - 27 comments

The Maori Party is in an enviable position going into this year’s election. It is likely Kingmaker, and the more seats it gets the more likely it will occupy that ground. Polls project the Maori Party to possibly win all seven Maori roll seats while obtaining around 2% of the party vote. That will create […]

Peters doesn’t trust National

Written By: - Date published: 12:33 pm, April 16th, 2008 - 10 comments

Yesterday, Winston Peters said that in any deal with National he would require all National MPs to personally sign the agreement and that he wouldn’t require the same conditions of Labour. That is an unprecedented demand and one that no leader could agree to without losing face. The deeper message here from Peters is ‘look […]

Police confirm Brash email leak an inside job

Written By: - Date published: 10:42 am, April 16th, 2008 - 19 comments

Police have closed their investigation into the theft of e-mails from former National Party leader Dr Don Brash and have announced that they have been unsuccessful in identifying those responsible for the thefts. Despite Brash’s ongoing insistence to the contrary, the police have said that they’ve been able to rule out the possibility than an […]

Nothing personal, John

Written By: - Date published: 10:18 am, April 16th, 2008 - 74 comments

John Key’s latest line is to whine that Labour and others (including this blog) are launching personal attacks on him, and would we please stop. Our attacks are not personal, they are political. National wants to be in control of the Government, control an operation with a budget of near $60 billion and quarter of […]

Key’s record on Te Wānanga o Aotearoa

Written By: - Date published: 1:45 pm, April 15th, 2008 - 7 comments

The Herald is really doing its best to help out National. Today it proclaims ‘Key’s wananga visit undoes Brash legacy‘. That nice Mr Key has undone all the harm caused by that nasty old Dr Brash, we’re meant to believe. But check the record. It wasn’t Brash who led the attack on Te Wānanga o […]

NZ Growing Faster Than Aussie, US, Japan, and UK

Written By: - Date published: 11:16 am, April 10th, 2008 - 42 comments

The Reserve Bank produces a series of helpful tables of economic data. One table compares our growth to that of Australia, the US, Japan, and the UK. Here’s a graph comparing growth across the countries between National and Labour’s periods in government. National has a pathetic track record on growth. Under them, our economy grew 1% […]

Fair and balanced

Written By: - Date published: 11:17 am, April 8th, 2008 - 16 comments

The Herald could barely contain its self-satisfaction when National’s David Farrar complained to the Electoral Commission that the country’s largest private sector union, the EPMU, which comprises 50,000 working New Zealanders, should not be allowed to register as a third party under the Electoral Finance ACT. ‘ Law gags friend as well as foe‘ proclaimed […]

Davey gets it wrong again

Written By: - Date published: 3:57 pm, April 4th, 2008 - 79 comments

David Farrar’s latest political campaign on behalf of the National Party has, like so many of them before, foundered on the sharp rocks of reality. In an attempt reminiscent of the ramshackle PR fiasco that was the Free Speech Coalition, DPF tried to get the Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union’s application for third party status […]

If I were Labour’s campaign strategist

Written By: - Date published: 2:49 pm, April 4th, 2008 - 18 comments

Part three of the ‘If I were [Party X]’s campaign strategist’ series brings us to Labour. The strategy for a major party is very different from that of a smaller party. Rather than trying to grab attention public attention and target niche concerns, a major party needs a broad-based platform that will appeal to most […]

April 1 changes boost wages and cut taxes

Written By: - Date published: 10:02 am, April 1st, 2008 - 15 comments

Today is a big day for government policy affecting Kiwis’ incomes: The minimum wage is now $12 an hour, up from $7 when Labour gained power. Youth rates have been effectively abolished, meaning young people will get the same pay for the same work. From today, employers must contribute to employees’ Kiwisaver accounts equivalent to 1% […]