Geoffrey Miller

New Zealand geopolitical analyst & Arabic/Russian learner

Category: Politics

Politics

Strategic voting and ACT

[text-blocks id=”act-party”] It’s the final week of a fairly lacklustre election campaign by all parties concerned. But if ACT does manage to gain an extra MP or two, it may well be due to “strategic voting” taking place. I take strategic voting to mean voting for a party for a reason other than, or in healthy addition to, agreement with its policy. I’ve previously argued that ACT should give up trying to convince voters to become neo-liberals and gain supporters for pure tactical reasons. Earlier in the campaign, we saw ACT reintroduce the tired, but sometimes profitable tough-on-crime stance. Perhaps...

Politics

ACT media site

[text-blocks id=”act-party”] Party enthusiasts have launched a new website for the presentation of ACT videos from the campaign trail. It has a refreshing home-crafted look! ACT has never been short of text policy and PDFs online, but a central repository for video clips (some have been drifting on YouTube and the main ACT website for a couple of years already) are a welcome addition. I hope the future will see videos, rather than just transcripts, of all party speeches being placed online. Well done to the site creators.

Politics

Ansell’s new ad

[text-blocks id=”act-party”] I’ve been alerted to the return of John Ansell to ACT’s campaign, with a new ad promoting strategic voting and favouring ACT over National. To be honest I’m a little surprised that Ansell is behind the advertisement, which is classic ACT: far too many words per square centimetre. However, the overall thrust of the advertisement is sound and the slogan “Strengthen the Nats. Party vote ACT” is something the party has long needed. The only question is why ACT did not switch to strategic campaigning months ago, when it found its efforts to convince voters to vote ACT...

Politics

Emissions Trading Scheme

[text-blocks id=”act-party”] One of ACT’s centrepiece policies of this election pledges to repeal the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). As I understand it, the ETS will require businesses to purchase “credits” for carbon they wish to emit from other companies which have a surplus (e.g. foresters). There is an official diagram which explains this further. The ETS enjoys support from both Labour and National. But ACT opposes it. My concern here is not so much the workings of the ETS, but the way ACT has promoted its opposition to it. There is no question that the party sees it as a...

Politics

Attack – and be attacked

[text-blocks id=”act-party”] 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...

Politics

Hide the stuntman

[text-blocks id=”act-party”] 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...

Politics

How accurate are ACT’s poll ratings? Part 2

[text-blocks id=”act-party”] 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...

Politics

How accurate are ACT’s poll ratings? Part 1

[text-blocks id=”act-party”] 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...

Politics

ACT campaign launch

[text-blocks id=”act-party”] 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...

Politics

Hide left to pick up the Peters

[text-blocks id=”act-party”] 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...

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