Yesterday something unusual happened. In the most closely watched electorate battle in the country TV3 hosted a debate amongst the candidates and the candidate from the currently largest polling party did not show up.
Unbelievable you may think but it is true. Even though he has been selected as the candidate National’s Paul Goldsmith did not show. His excuse was that he was out trying to gain party votes but you would think that taking a couple of hours out from door knocking for an opportunity to appear on national TV to persuade people to party vote National would have been leaped at by Goldsmith. In two hours you could probably talk to 20 people face to face or talk directly to 20,000 people through their television sets so you would think that the latter would be the preferred option. But no, he decided not to front up.
It is not as if there is a secret agenda at play here. Everyone knows that there is a nod nod wink wink process happening where National is telling Epsom voters to hold their nose and vote for ACT’s David Seymour. If only they would be honest and say what it is they are doing.
On yesterday’s performance electors will have to hold their noses really hard. Seymour was appalling. He kept overtalking the others with that born to rule tory arrogance that lefties have grown to know and hate. And he kept repeating ad nauseum a collection of CT designed talking lines designed to kill intelligent discussion of the issues and divert from the fact that what we are seeing is a colossal electoral rort.
Labour’s Michael Wood performed well. He is an outstanding candidate. In Puketapapa he has managed to change decades of Citizen and Ratepayer dominance so that there is now for the first time in a long time a progressive majority on the body representing local interests. He has been the Labour candidate in National strongholds for the past couple of elections. In the Botany by election he performed very well and cut the National majority by over half. I hope we see him in Parliament soon.
The Green candidate Julie Anne Genter is also an outstanding candidate. The campaign promises to be a very interesting one.
The test for these two is how to persuade the people of Epsom that the stench coming from ACT is too strong and they should vote for a bag of flour rather than the candidate from a party with a high incidence of criminal activity amongst its MPs, a preference for incest to be decriminalised and a wish to increase poverty so that the privileged few can have even more outlandish levels of wealth.
During the debate Michael produced a bag of wholemeal flour and promised to bring this particular bag to all public meetings and to put it in the place where Paul Goldsmith should be. I suspect we are going to see this bag of flour a lot.
lprent – Updated:
Twitter link:
https://twitter.com/EpsomFlour
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