ACT and Local Body Elections
The Local Body Elections earlier this month provide a number of talking points relevant to ACT. Firstly, former ACT MPs Gerry Eckhoff (now a councillor on the Otago Regional Council) and Penny Webster (Mayor of Rodney District) successfully entered local politics. I’ll look at them in more detail later. The second link to ACT is more oblique, but no less interesting. Since 2006, Rodney Hide has concentrated on changing his aggressive image, as he emphasised to me when I interviewed him in August 2007: What I’ve found since 2005, and this was in a response to what members wanted, is...