Geoffrey Miller

New Zealand geopolitical analyst & Arabic/Russian learner

Tagged: The Standard

Cunliffe and Robertson

Politics

New Zealand’s increasingly dangerous level of political vitriol

A long thin country, marked by its diversity of landscapes. A small population, outflanked by bigger and more powerful neighbours. An increasingly multicultural society with a significant indigenous group. It could be New Zealand. But it’s Sweden. Like New Zealand, Sweden long had a tradition of personal, retail politics in which politicians rub shoulders with voters as apparent equals. That’s what one expects in a small country. But there is one big difference between Sweden and New Zealand. Sweden has suffered not one, but two political assassinations. The first, in 1986, was the murder of then Prime Minister Olof Palme. The...

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

Did Douglas give the speech?

It has a partisan interest in claiming this, but Labour-aligned blog The Standard says that Sir Roger Douglas didn’t deliver the speech that was put out in his name, because it had been released early by mistake. According to the post, the Herald report on which I also based my own write-up was written only from Douglas’s published remarks and a reporter did not attend the speech. In the scheme of things, the slip-up doesn’t really matter much. But if true, it does reflect somewhat poorly on the Herald as the report should have made this clear, especially since the...

Politics

Consumer Affairs for Heather Roy

Courtesy of the Dominion-Post, we learn that ACT’s deputy leader Heather Roy will be made Minister of Consumer Affairs. The paper asked Consumers’ Insitute head Sue Chetwin for comment and as she used to be a journalist and editor of both major Sunday papers, her insights are certainly worth noting: ACT itself is not strong on consumer issues in terms of country-of-origin labelling and some of the things we’re interested in. But regulations around financial advisers and a lot of that stuff that’s happening now, I think she’d be very good. Chetwin’s view is a balanced one. To a certain...

Politics

Hide answering “your questions”

ACT leader Rodney Hide has featured in the “Interview the Leaders” series on left-wing blog The Standard. It’s a fairly useless interview in terms of substance and is indeed so short that I strongly suspect Hide responded via his Blackberry. However, Hide did respond with some more detail on what exactly constitutes ACT’s “Smart Green” policy and we now know that it will include the end of the current Emissions Trading Scheme (i.e. the “cap and trade” model).

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