Geoffrey Miller

New Zealand geopolitical analyst & Arabic/Russian learner

Tagged: Muriel Newman

Parliament buildings, Wellington.

Politics

New Zealand politicians on social media (including Wayne Mapp at The Standard)

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...

Politics

Conference 2009: David Garrett

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...

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

Dual citizenship restrictions on MPs

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...

Politics

Gerry Eckhoff and the “Country Party”

Until today, I thought Gerrard (Gerry) Eckhoff was a loyal ACT trooper, even though he lost his seat at the 2005 election. At the 2007 annual ACT conference in March, which I attended as part of my research, Eckhoff loomed large and gave a rather entertaining, if at times confusing speech on “environmental morality”. But it seems that we now have to add Eckhoff to the growing list of former MPs who have expressed misgivings about the new direction of ACT. In today’s Otago Daily Times an “op-ed” piece written by Eckhoff appeared, headlined “Time to take a Country Party...

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