3-time election loser Don Brash spoke at the ACT conference on the weekend. It was an attempt to revive the Owera days with an anti-Maori speech. When he made a ‘they don’t know how lucky they are’ reference to how Australians used to “shoot the natives”, a ACT member yelled “bring that back” and the audience laughed.
You can hear the audio here at about 2.25. here
No wonder Roger Douglas is keen to get away from this bunch. There’s a lot to say that’s bad about the man but we can give him this: he is a principled liberal through and through, both socially and economically. The party that he created, however, was taken over by reactionaries, starting with ‘tough on crime’ Richard Prebble and sinking to ever lower depths under scumbag Rodney Hide.
John Key, however, wants to work with this bunch of racist bigots so badly that he has told National’s Epsom branch “his need for coalition partners overrides any local desires for Epsom to return a National MP to Parliament”. But even such political trickery might not be enough – “National’s soundings in the electorate are understood to show Hide is running well behind an as yet unselected National candidate, in part because he’s extremely unpopular with female voters” according to John Armstrong.
I suspect that Douglas, like the rest of us, won’t be too sad to see ACT die at this election. But he might shed a tear for what it could have been.
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