ACT can be well satisfied with itself this Easter, having caused not one but two attacks on it before the break. To me it sounds like a return to the old days, when ACT caused loathing from both the left and the so-called centre right. During the 1999 election campaign, Bill English called ACT’s policies “unrealistic”. On Thursday he was forced to do much the same, while John Key was scrambling to find a coherent answer to the idea of Douglas becoming a Cabinet minister. The kerfuffle started when Douglas outlined policies he wants to implement should he get the...
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...
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....
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...
It’s interesting that ACT and Rodney Hide were overshadowed in the New Zealand Herald‘s coverage of the opposition to the Electoral Finance Bill by other small parties, most notably the Maori Party. In the report space was given only for a comment by Hide in a collection of quotes from MPs opposing the bill. It wasn’t a particularly exciting comment – perhaps that’s why it came last, even after the Progressives (the 1 MP party). Indeed, it was Hone Harawira who was allocated much attention by the Herald and it’s not hard to see why – he gave an impressive...
This week I’ve been in Australia and I can’t get over how much stuff in the papers there is on ACT. Much more than the Herald. The “Roger Douglas Fan Club” (as a journalist described ACT in 1996) must have definitely found a home across the Tasman, right? Well, although ACT likes to highlight its “global heritage”, I’m afraid this is not the case. For those who did not see through my feeble attempt at humour, I’m referring to the Australian Capital Territory. But on a more serious note, former ACT (New Zealand!) MP Derek Quigley moved to the Australian...
A major resource for anyone writing about a New Zealand political topic is the Newztext database. This is a online subscriber-only database but is commonly accessible through institutions. When I was writing my dissertation, I had access to the database through the University of Otago. If you don’t belong to such an institution, however, don’t despair. Newztext is also freely available through many public libraries and is quite likely accessible simply by going to your local library’s website (click here for a list of every library in the country) and entering your library card number and PIN. What’s so great...