This post was originally published at Liberation. MPs past and present in the blogosphere A number of past and present MPs are engaging in social media – blogs, and Twitter in particular. In this blog post,I outline what politicians are communicating online and where. I evaluate their efforts, and report on the latest rightwing ex-politician to enter the comments section of a leftwing blog. #106540172 / gettyimages.com This post was inspired by an innocuous-looking reader comment by “Wayne” at leftwing blog The Standard on the blogpost, Cunliffe declares war on National and the TPPA. Here are the comments: Wayne 8.1.1.3 17 September 2013...
#56052984 / gettyimages.com This post was originally published at Liberation. In the last post, I looked at the background to the Act Party’s 2004 leadership primary, which saw Rodney Hide win election over three other contenders. In this post, I consider some new information passed from a former Act insider, who wishes to remain anonymous. The comments are a cautionary tale as to what can go wrong with a primary contest. Based on this information and analysis, I ask whether Labour will end up going the same way that Act did following its destructive primary. An Act Party insider writes: I’m bemused by...
#55789878 / gettyimages.com This post was originally published at Liberation. The current New Zealand Labour Party leadership primary contest presents a more democratic way to elect a party leader. Traditionally, the party leader has been seen as a matter for the parliamentary wing, with the much less visible role of party president being elected by the party as a whole. In this blog post – the first of two posts on the subject – I argue that the new primary system, while far from perfect, can only be seen as a long-overdue reform which should strengthen the Labour Party as...
It’s safe to say that Deborah Coddington hasn’t been ACT’s greatest cheerleader in recent years. Even when she was an MP, she wasn’t one to mince words, calling Richard Prebble’s stunt-like suggestion in 2004 that ACT merge with National in the wake of Don Brash’s Orewa speech “disastrous”. In 2007, Coddington criticised Hide for being “rapt in his own dancing, flash suits, swimming and catwalk modelling”, instead of promoting policies such as “radical personal tax cuts”. If the criticism from Coddington has in the past been blunt, it is now razor-sharp. In her Sunday newspaper column published during ACT’s conference...
Since the election, one of the more talked-about ACT MPs has been its lowest ranked one: David Garrett, formerly a lawyer for the right-wing lobby group the Sentencing Sensible Trust. In the lead-up to ACT’s annual conference this weekend, I look at the debate over ACT and its views on crime. Much of this has its roots in the age-old debate over ACT and the concept of “liberal”. Firstly, thank you to Not PC for the linking through to this blog on this liberal debate. I examine the differing meanings of liberal most fully in my dissertation, but for a...
I neglected to place a comment at the time on ACT’s announcement that David Garrett, legal counsel for the right-wing lobby group called the Sensible Sentencing Trust, is on place number 5 in the party list. Place 5 was left open at the time of ACT’s main list announcement in August. It’s not surprising that ACT has, as Steve Braunias puts it today, “sidled up” to the Sensible Sentencing Trust. An anti-crime message has been a key part of the party’s election platform since 1999. In 2002, the “Zero Tolerance for Crime” was accompanied by billboards showing handcuffs on a...
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...
This week in Melbourne I attended a lecture at which I learnt that here one is barred from standing for parliament if he or she is a dual citizenship holder. This means that every MP in the Australian House or Senate in Canberra is an Australian citizen only. As far as I know, no such rule applies in New Zealand, although the Harry Duynhoven case in 2003, in which a special law was passed to allow Duynhoven to continue as an MP despite breaking the Electoral Act by reapplying for his Dutch citizenship, while still an MP. The Christchurch Press...
I keep meaning to write a fuller post on Craig Heatley, seeing he generated some discussion in the comments in a post a few days ago. Until I get around to that, here are some reviews and links of We’re Here to Help. I still haven’t seen the film yet, but hope to do so soon. The reviews I have found are universally positive and usually take the view that the film is non-partisan and is a classic example of the proverbial “little guy” taking on the big guns and winning. For example, back in October, David Farrar of Kiwiblog...
An opinion piece by Finlay Macdonald in today’s Sunday Star-Times discusses a survey of New Zealand journalists which apparently found they lean more to the left than right. Are journalists biased? It’s a bit like asking how long a piece of string is you need more information. Nevertheless, the authors of a recent survey of New Zealand newsrooms bravely posed the question of political “orientation” to a self-selected sample of hacks who were asked to rate themselves on a scale from hard left to hard right. The fact that most considered themselves very mildly left or just “neutral” possibly also...
