In a little over six weeks New Zealand goes to the polls. Man these three year terms really seem to fly by as one gets older. You can read the lasttwo election threads here. And as always wikipedia has a great page up.
What looked to be a rather dreary and predictable campaign has really heated up in the last couple of weeks, with the Labour leader resigning and then one of the Green’s co-leaders doing the same this week. So there’s a whole bunch of new faces at the top, although thankfully Winston remains a pillar of stability at the head of New Zealand First. The polls are all over the place, but it currently looks like National will remain the biggest single party, however they may face difficulties forming a coalition.
There’s also a brand new party with some interesting ideas. I guess I’d describe The Opportunities Party as rationalist free-thinkers who try to adopt policies supported by empirical evidence. Crazy huh? (as you might guess I’m a bit biased towards them and actually subscribed to their email list so I could vote as to which charity they’re going to donate their electoral ad money to).
So have at it all you New Zealand-politics junkies! What are you thoughts and predictions?
[QUOTE=NZ Electoral Commission]
You are qualified to enrol and vote if:
you are 18 years or older AND
you are a New Zealand citizen or permanent resident AND
you have lived in New Zealand for one year or more continuously at some point.
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On the bright side any Australian(along with other neighbouring islanders) who feels like voting in an MMP election can just live here for a year and then vote:
Might be a thread you could convene in a phone booth but bugger the merkins … we copped TRUMP v HILLARY seeming without end or remorse …
If the Nats need to form a coalition, are there enough like or near enough like minded parties to get a stable, workable coalition or are going to need votes from a neophyte single issue or protest parties to govern?
Really hard to answer those questions Labour’s had a massive bounce in the polls as Green support has collapsed if the most recent polls are to be believed. National’s current coalition partners are languishing in the sub 5% zone, with Peter Dunne looking vulnerable, and ACT dependent on one electorate seat. Maori party should be good for 3-4 seats though. It’s looking like it’s all up to Winston and New Zealand First to be honest.
We may have no Airforce, but we could always call this guyback from retirement if need be. He must be worth a few per cent on the infantry scale at least.
Essentially she revealed she had lied about her living situation when a young solo Mum to qualify for a higher benefit. But media digging revealed she had lied about much more than that, including some bizarre and pointless electoral fraud about the same time. The Greens tore themselves apart about it, and now the voters are leaving them in droves as a result.
Seems to be a bigger trend that the Greens function best as a splinter party of dissent.
Once they get to the verge of political power, get taken seriously and come under genuine scrutiny they fail at about the same rate of the majors.
But tearing themselves apart is something the Greens do very well.
Witness the “Who is Holier than Thou” bub fight which is going on now with the Aussie Greens.
“I have no intention of returning back to Parliament and it’s highly unlikely I would.”
Ain’t that a doozie!
I dunno, a month ago I’d have said the NZ Greens had really done well in presenting themselves as a stable political party and had built up a firm support base of 10-15% of the electorate to become the third party in our system. Then that happened.
How wrong I would have been.
Oh and as for Ardern - watch this from about 4:00 onwards to see how she puts rogue men in their place. She’s got some serious leadership potential I reckon.
The big story of the last couple years (at least in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the US) is the rise of ethnic identity politics & resistance to migration / multiethnicity, so I guess New Zealand First is the New Zealand incarnation of that trned?
I’m on an extended visit to NZ right now and this seems to be quite a widespread attitude about Adern. A lot of progressive voters, from what I gather as a clueless foreigner, seem to be suddenly taking Labour a lot more seriously in their voting plans.
Clueless foreigner here, but AFAICT there’s a bit of a difference in that the long-time NZ First leader, Winston Peters, is of mixed Maori/British descent, and apparently quite popular with Maori voters. So the party seems to be not so much about the racism/white supremacy part as espousing a sort of generic cultural/political populist nationalism, with some isolationism and xenophobia thrown in.
IOW, descendants of native peoples and Empire colonizers good, “Asian flood” bad. Doesn’t look like they’re going to be riding any wave of populist sentiment to any spectacular triumphs any time soon, though.
If Winston ended up holding the balance of power what would he do with it?
Are there any hot button issues he’d want on the agenda as quid pro quo or he a steady as she goes operator?
The news stories I’ve been reading suggest Labour is going restrictionist on immigration in hopes of making a coalition with NZ First. Wouldn’t be the first country where that happens (looks like the same thing might be happening in Denmark).
To be clear, I don’t think the reaction against immigration and multiethnicity outside New Zealand is reducible to “white suprmecy / racism” either. Especially when you take into account that the countries where public opinion is most hostile to immigration today are mostly not the ones that were colonial powers, and largely don’t have the same history of thinking about race and ethnicity that the colonial powers did (Germany, UK, France and the US are actually more favorable to immigration than places like eastern Europe, Austria, Denmark, etc). In the US, sure, debates about immigration have a large component of white supremacy; it would be hard to argue that Trump isn’t a racist or that key figures in his administration aren’t. I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to impose US political categories or US modes of thinking about race on other countries, though. A Polish-American in metro Detroit who objects to mass immigration is in a very different position than his distant relative in Cracow who objects to mass immigration, and they’re doing so in very different historical contexts.
I did know about Peters being half-Maori and I was not saying what I said as a means of criticizing him, nor was I particularly trying to compare him to Donald Trump. I was simply observing that ethnic tribalism (which I’m in many situations quite sympathetic to) is an international phenomenon right now, at least as far as Europe and European settler societies go, and Peters looks to be riding that phenomenon same as politicians in many other contexts.
