I watched last week’s TVNZ’s small party leaders’ debate and a Rodney Hide interview with John Campbell and came away with some developed thoughts on ACT’s hardline stance on crime. I had planned to do a blog post on it last week but it slipped my mind until I heard an account of a Dunedin North local candidates meeting. Let me elaborate: In his interview with Campbell, Hide admitted that ACT had had problems with the economy in election campaigns in the past, with people “jogging past” economy-related billboards. Hide said that this had changed this election, but I doubt...
A supporter of most ACT policies was kind enough to send me some photos of the party’s weekend campaign event. Some refreshing honesty here: even the supporter described it as a “stunt”. As the photo shows, it involved putting up 77 cardboard coffins to represent victims of violent crime who would have been “saved” had ACT’s crime policy been in place. Visual representations like this are designed for television and are not a stupid idea by any means. There was talk at ACT’s conference in March of carrying out similar exercises for economic matters. The obvious one would be to...
I’m sure most readers will be aware that ACT launched its election campaign with an event at Alexandra Park in Auckland on Sunday. Political party election launches in New Zealand do not give off “bounces”, as is always hoped for after the Democratic and Republican conventions in the United States. Indeed, while the US conventions are technically necessary, in order to nominate the candidate, the NZ affairs are pure show. Perhaps the best that a small party like ACT can hope for from its launch is to rally its supporters into working extra hard for the next four weeks. With...
I didn’t see a single Maori or Polynesian face at the conference. A few Asian supporters of former Chinese ACT MP Kenneth Wang sat near me, but even they were thin on the ground. If any proof was needed that ACT is a party of white men, a glance at the conference room today would suffice. Are they rich white men? ACT would beg to differ – indeed today again we were told that “ACT isn’t the party of the rich like the media portray us”. Yet there can be no doubt that many of the attendees were high net-worth...