Geoffrey Miller

New Zealand geopolitical analyst & Arabic/Russian learner

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Politics

Conference 2008: Still more coverage on Douglas

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...

Politics

Conference 2008: ACT gets high-tech

The front page of the ACT website has recently been updated for the conference this weekend, with two videos on display. Both are slickly produced (mostly) and are welcome additions to the site – let’s hope we see plenty more multimedia during the year. The right-hand video is an invitation from Hide to attend the conference, short but to the point. On the left, the first video features a conversation between Sir Roger Douglas and Rodney Hide about why he’s coming back to the party. Douglas believes that ACT can get 6-8% of the party vote this election. Obviously we’ve...

Politics

Conference 2008: The end of “The Liberal Party”?

Conference information posted to members in February featured what appears to be a new, slimline ACT logo. While it is true that little has actually changed, but what has gone is the bottom strip featuring the appendage “The Liberal Party”. This moniker was introduced by ACT party president Catherine Judd in 2003 as part of the “Liberal Project”, the aim of which was to rebrand ACT and tackle the party’s ongoing image problem. However, this was an alteration of the logo only and not a full name change, which would have required the approval of members. In ACT’s first two...

Politics

Kenneth Wang – a dream candidate?

The results of the Douglas to Dancing online poll are in. Of course, I don’t claim that the poll results are in any way scientific. The fact is that 13 people responded. While this is by no means a high number, this is a niche blog! So let’s look at the results as an indication of the people most interested in ACT – they might not be ACT voters (although I’m sure many will have been), but they’re keen enough to vote in an online poll. It seems that Kenneth Wang is the preferred dream candidate of respondents. Wang is...

Politics

Conference 2008: Opinion piece in the Herald

I have an opinion piece (“Act’s dilemma – what’s in a name?”) in today’s New Zealand Herald, on the return of Sir Roger Douglas to the ACT fold. In the print edition it’s on page A19. Understandably, the piece in the Herald was edited for length and other reasons (and for some reason “perkbuster” was changed to “perkmaster”), so for reference the full piece as I submitted it appears below: It came as a surprise to those who follow the fortunes of ACT New Zealand to hear recently that Sir Roger Douglas has apparently made his peace with the party....

Politics

ACT’s new Wellington office

This is intended as a news rather than commentary post. I recently checked with ACT on what the story is with Heather Roy’s Wellington Office which was opened in October 2007. The main function of the office is obviously to give Heather Roy a more visible presence in her Wellington Central electorate campaign. The party tells me that Roy is using her entitlement to open an Out of Parliament office with a support staffer funded by Parliamentary Services. At the moment the office shares a staffer with Heather Roy’s Parliamentary office. From ACT: The office is located on the corner...

Politics

Conference 2008: More coverage on Douglas and can Hide turn into a “fire-breathing dragon”?!

Just proving that Douglas brings headlines, I’ve found two other stories discussing his return to ACT. An NZPA report out on Sunday handily re-wrote ACT’s press release for it (as is typical with NZPA), while a more interesting opinion piece by libertarian Lindsay Perigo (whose views always makes ACT look mild) offered some typically blunt advice for the party: It’s fine for Rodney [Hide] to be fashionably gaunt and try to impersonate models, but it’s hard to resist the conclusion that his last-remaining convictions melted away with his adipose. In any event, fashion and fitness shouldn’t be his focus. He...

Politics

Muriel Newman in New York

Former ACT MP Muriel Newman, who now runs her New Zealand Centre for Political Research, was on the Leighton Smith show on Newstalk ZB last Thursday talking about her impending trip to a climate change denial conference run by right-wing thinktank the Heartland Institute. In her chat with Smith, Newman advocated the usual anti-climate change argument that the world is actually cooling. Then she name-dropped, noting that people such as David Bellamy do not agree with the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) consensus that global warming is happening. Finally, she added that a cold winter in the Northern Hemisphere...

Politics

Probably not welcomed with open arms

One person ACT probably doesn’t want to see return to the party in a Roger Douglas-style rise from the ashes is Donna Awatere-Huata, disgraced in a fraud scandal which cost ACT valuable time, energy and money from 2002 to 2005. From December 2002, ACT became embroiled in a drawn-out process to remove Awatere-Huata from Parliament, after fraud allegations against her surfaced. Finding that Awatere-Huata had deceived it, the caucus expelled Awatere-Huata in early 2003 and initiated a process to expel her from parliament altogether. Not only did Awatere-Huata’s fraud (she was convicted in August 2005) represent a severe breach of...

Politics

Roger returns (part II): From Dancing to Douglas – circuit-breaker or poisoned chalice?

What are the implications of Sir Roger Douglas’s return to ACT? Today, I look at the pros and cons of him returning to the party he co-founded in 1993/4. While I’m sure many ACT supporters were pleased to hear that he’s coming back to the fold, the strategy is certainly not without risk. The main advantage of Douglas coming back is his galvanising effect with core ACT supporters. In my dissertation, I examined how Douglas possessed an extraordinary capability to unify supporters of the neo-liberal economic reforms he introduced, but did not complete, during the Fourth Labour Government of 1984-1990....

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