Geoffrey Miller

New Zealand geopolitical analyst & Arabic/Russian learner

Author: Geoffrey Miller

Politics

Attack – and be attacked

Recently ACT has launched some scathing attacks on both Labour and National, in the hope of tarring both with the same brush and showing ACT out to be the only option for something different. To take just one example, from last week: It’s clear to us that the problem for New Zealand is economic as well as financial. It’s also clear that the political response from John Key and Michael Cullen has been both woeful and irresponsible. Their policy promises will make tough times worse. ACT can keep chipping away on these attacks, but its capacity to be heard is...

Politics

Hide the stuntman

A supporter of most ACT policies was kind enough to send me some photos of the party’s weekend campaign event. Some refreshing honesty here: even the supporter described it as a “stunt”. As the photo shows, it involved putting up 77 cardboard coffins to represent victims of violent crime who would have been “saved” had ACT’s crime policy been in place. Visual representations like this are designed for television and are not a stupid idea by any means. There was talk at ACT’s conference in March of carrying out similar exercises for economic matters. The obvious one would be to...

Politics

How accurate are ACT’s poll ratings? Part 2

ACT is polling at 2% or less in opinion polls – 1% according to Saturday’s Fairfax poll. Three weeks out from election day, this must be discouraging for ACT supporters. Is this picture an accurate reflection of what the party will gain on election day? Or is it underestimating support for ACT? In part 2 of my report, I examine whether a reverse “Bradley effect” could be underestimating support for ACT in opinion polls. Because I’m interested in historical comparisons, the best resource would be a database averaging the various polls taken in election years. Lacking this, I decided to...

Politics

How accurate are ACT’s poll ratings? Part 1

On Saturday, I had the opportunity to listen to a talk by Christopher von Marschall, author of Barack Obama – der schwarze Kennedy (“Barack Obama – the black Kennedy”), which by all accounts is a well-researched and well-written analysis of Obama’s career to date. For his research, von Marschall began attending Obama campaign events in 2006, so the book isn’t the sort of dashed-off, quick-money affair I thought it might be.Discussion at the talk inevitably turned to current opinion polls and whether they were accurate enough. As would be expected, von Marschall pointed out the possibility of the “Bradley effect”,...

Politics

ACT campaign launch

I’m sure most readers will be aware that ACT launched its election campaign with an event at Alexandra Park in Auckland on Sunday. Political party election launches in New Zealand do not give off “bounces”, as is always hoped for after the Democratic and Republican conventions in the United States. Indeed, while the US conventions are technically necessary, in order to nominate the candidate, the NZ affairs are pure show. Perhaps the best that a small party like ACT can hope for from its launch is to rally its supporters into working extra hard for the next four weeks. With...

Politics

Hide left to pick up the Peters

I recall once reading an article on ACT which compared Rodney Hide’s perkbusting campaigns with rubbish collecting: it’s something that has to be done, but you don’t have to be enamoured with the rubbish collector. In other words, don’t expect a boost in support for pursuing scandals. Perhaps that’s what happened with Rodney Hide and the Winston Peters saga. Despite Peters’s claims to the contrary, it’s clear that Peters was involved in something shady. No, the Serious Fraud Office did not find enough evidence to proceed further, but that doesn’t mean that Hide was wrong to pursue the complaint. But...

Politics

Roy Morgan poll

ACT supporters were no doubt buoyed by the Roy Morgan poll out on Friday which put ACT on a 3.5% share of the party vote. For a reality check, I looked at my own commentary from back in August 2008: A little hope…came in the latest Roy Morgan poll, out on Friday. ACT – which these days normally doesn’t even make it into polling commentary, leaving one to hunt for the light blue line just above the 0% mark in the accompanying graphic – has perhaps gained a little of what Duncan Garner et al. would call “traction”. The party...

Politics

The results are in…

Well with a quite respectable total 51 votes, readers have voted on what they think will realistically be ACT’s share of the party vote this year. The outright winner was the 4-4.9% segment, with 11 votes (22%), with 2-2.9% and 3-3.9% tied on 10 votes each. Going to show this blog is non-partisan, the very unlikely 7% or more band was favoured only by 9 voters and the doomsday scenario (for ACT supporters) of less than 1% had no support at all. With some luck, I think it’s plausible that ACT will get over the 4% mark on election day....

Politics

Hide on Radio Live

Rodney Hide is on Radio Live with host James Coleman taking talkback calls until midday today. So far there’s been a lot of talk on crime policy but in the second hour we’re getting more on to the economy. It took almost an hour for the first female caller – 9.57am!

Politics

Herald’s “street poll” in Botany

In 2005, ACT felt aggrieved by a One News poll which appeared to give Richard Worth a substantial lead over Rodney Hide. ACT’s claim was that respondents were confused by the wording of the question on the electorate vote, which asked for the preferred party of the candidate, rather than the candidate’s name. This gave the misleading impression that Worth was well in the lead. Today the New Zealand Herald has published a street poll in Botany which seems questionable to me. For those of you who don’t know, ACT is standing its candidate Kenneth Wang in the new electorate....

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