Conference 2008: Still more coverage on Douglas

Note: this post originally appeared on ‘Douglas to Dancing’, a blog I maintained from 2007-9 on the ACT New Zealand political party. The blog was an extension of the thesis I wrote about the Act Party in 2007, From Douglas to Dancing: explaining the lack of success of ACT New Zealand and evaluating its future prospects (PDF).

I’ve just caught up with another couple of recent stories on ACT. Former ACT MP Deborah Coddington used her column in this week’s Herald on Sunday to discuss Douglas’s return to ACT. There’s too much worth reading in there for me to extract bits here, so do take a look. Also this week, the Dominion-Post carried a report by its political editor Tracy Watkins on the Douglas-Hide reconciliation and whether Douglas would stand for the party. NZPA also summarised and expanded on this report later. So we still don’t know whether Douglas will be on the list, but it sounds like it will be just a symbolic placing. But could he also symbolically contest an electorate seat – perhaps in the new Auckland constituency of Botany?

While there’s not a lot new in the second two articles (and the first is an opinion piece), please note that my own opinion piece in the New Zealand Herald was written before any of these reports appeared and therefore could not take into account any new information presented in the above stories.