Geoffrey Miller

New Zealand geopolitical analyst & Arabic/Russian learner

Tagged: Garry Mallett

Politics

Strategic voting and ACT

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 precisely because...

Politics

Conference 2008: initial impressions

Welcome to Douglas to Dancing‘s extended Conference 2008 coverage. I aim to provide a series of posts over the remainder of the weekend examining the outcomes of the election year conference, held at the Waipuna Lodge in Auckland. Attendance was modest to begin with but steadily built during the morning. Held in a banquet room, probably only around 80-90 were there to hear party president Garry Mallett open the conference at 9am. This figure built throughout the morning, however, and by the time Sir Roger Douglas gave his speech shortly after midday, I estimated closer to 200 people were there....

Politics

Tim Shadbolt – a stellar ACT candidate?

I’ve talked before how ACT could do with a star candidate to help it build a bigger profile, especially in the 2008 election campaign. It was the personality of Rodney Hide who really saved ACT at the 2005 election from complete annihilation. If another MP had been elected ACT leader in 2004 to replace Richard Prebble, I have doubts that the party would have been returned to Parliament (even though this would not have necessarily prevented Hide from standing in Epsom, first passing him over for leader would not have been a good look, at the very least). In November,...

Politics

ACT’s Christmas mailout – part 2

In a pre-Christmas posting, I looked at what ACT president Garry Mallett had to say to members in a December 2007 letter. Today I examine what leader Rodney Hide had to say for himself. Hide’s letter is an important document, as it is the closest guide we currently have as to how ACT is planning to campaign in this year’s election. First, Hide talks about a “Taxpayer Rights Campaign”. According to Hide, this “campaign will demonstrate what makes ACT fundamentally different…[the] party will advocate for a constitutional limit on the size of the tax take and tax cuts”. I’m not...

Politics

ACT’s Christmas letter – part 1

I joined ACT for research purposes in February 2007, at the outset of my research, but on Thursday this week finally received my first piece of conventional mail from the party. Of course, like most parties these days, ACT prefers to save money and use e-mail. Accordingly, it sends out the weekly ACTion! e-mail newsletter to members every Friday. The problem with ACTion! is that there’s not a lot in it and most of it is the same each week, having been copied and pasted from the previous edition. It’s also not very personalised and I’m sure for many people...

Politics

It’s a Right Roy-al con!

The candidate ACT will be standing in Wellington Central, mysteriously foreshadowed last week and reported at this blog, is none other than….Heather Roy! Readers who take only a passing interest in ACT may be forgiven for not knowing who Roy is, but she is currently ACT’s sole list MP. Douglas to Dancing will analyse the pros and cons of standing Roy in Wellington Central in greater detail later, but for now some raw data from this evening’s events: – Roy has launched a personal website, http://www.roy.org.nz. The 1990s-style website design must be a deliberate ploy to subtly remind visitors of...

geopolitics.nz - Understand the world through New Zealand eyeswww.geopolitics.nz
+