John Key set us a challenge on the referendum: get more an a million ‘no’ votes. That would mean more votes against asset sales than National won in 2011. So far, so good. The Electoral Commission has processed 805,204 votes. Doubling that would be an outstanding result that would almost certainly mean a million ‘no’ votes. Get your vote in now.
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Cameron Slater has been ordered in the District Court to advise on who an otherwise confidential source for a story is. While at one level many would agree entirely with this decision there may be general considerations for the blogosphere which make this less than ideal.
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On Thursday Vernon Small wrote on the Chch East by-election: “Anything above 53 per cent will look like a fine result for Labour, anything under 50 per cent a relative failure. If Doocey can attract 40 per cent of the vote National can be well-pleased. Less than 33 per cent and the warning bells will be ringing for 2014.” And we know what happened next.
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Updates to follow. Williams leads by 1978 3,124 votes, on 30% 83% of the votes counted. Poto looking good! 96% of the vote. I’m calling it! Williams by 4000+ votes! Congratulations Poto! 100% votes counted now: Williams by 4,613 votes.
Some things don’t require much in the way of brains. Shame then that we tend to let no brain people determine shit so often.
NZ Herald editor/s selectively reports, omitting the full facts, in favour of the National government. It misrepresents the referendum on asset sales, ignoring significant facts – thereby also seeming to discredit the Green Party, the referendum, & democracy.
John Key is increasingly displaying that Rob Muldoon characteristic of denigrating anyone who has the temerity to oppose him. Key’s latest claim that people who opposed off shore drilling are just “rent a crowd” sorts is a classic Muldoonism.
Today is the day for the Christchurch East by election. No discussion or comments on the subject will be allowed until after voting closes at 7:00 PM. Then knock yourselves out …
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The Electoral Commission has reported receiving and processing nearly quarter of a million referendum votes per day on Wednesday and Thursday this week. All up, 530,000 votes are in so far – an impressive 17.50% turn out already. That’s far better than you would expect from a council postal ballot at this stage. Now, let’s get the rest in.
In the Budget, the Government said asset sales would increase the net worth of the Crown by half a billion dollars because eager mums and dads were going to snap the shares up for more than they were worth on the government books. As we know, it didn’t quite work out that way. The Greens have updated the Budget and found the impact is $1.5 billion worse than expected.
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Every other political party has said an emphatic no to National’s proposal to override the Commerce Commission’s reduction in broadband charges. I suspect that Cabinet and Chorus’s board are not having a very good day …
The National government is destroying NZ’s state housing system. Right of tenure removed, a shift towards private provision of “social housing”, housing campaigners marginalised, & Tracy Watkins crowing about the shift from the “welfare state”. Greens & Mana are for more state houses. And Labour? [Update] Picket of (Nat) Party for the Rich Dec 8 Akl. NZH article.
The Christchurch East by election is getting really weird. We have a National candidate who does not turn up to possibly the most important public meeting of the campaign, a spot of petty vandalism committed using a National MP’s van, a conservative party candidate who implies that legs on a billboard are his when they are not, a conservative party leader who does not rule out the possibility of chemtrails existing despite there being no supporting evidence while denying anthropogenic climate change when there is an abundance of evidence in support and Labour and the Greens contesting kindred votes when strategic voting could produce a positive result.
Confused?
Everybody is talking up the Conservatives as a partner for National after 2014 to save Key from being the least successful National PM ever. But there’s one problem: they don’t agree on anything. The Conservatives are reactionaries, the Nats are neo-libs. Here’s a list of things that Colin ‘Crazy’ Craig believes in and his policies compared to the Nats’.
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The latest Roy Morgan poll is out and things are neck and neck.
The Conservatives have a significant constituency and pose an interesting dynamic for the future of NZ politics. Their constituency will possibly letting the left in or sharing power on the right. The Conservatives are fond of saying how close they got in the previous election given how little time they had worked on it. Colin comes out on top against Paula then be prepared for a real change in the political landscape. They are already having an impact without being in parliament.
From the Chorus report: “Chorus now employs 763 permanent and fixed term employees directly, along with a further 4,434 people who are either employed directly by our service company partners or are sub-contracted by the service companies”. Insecure work is a BIG problem, even in our tech industries.
On the site we now have a a simple little graphic that shows how much heat has accumulated on our planet. It is expressed as multiples of of the heat energy of Hiroshima sized A-bombs. I’ve picked 1979 as being the start year because that was the year that I became aware of the effects of changing climate. I was a 19 year old student in my second year of a BSc in Earth Sciences, and the topic under discussion was the WMO’s recent World Climate Conference.
I heard Duncan Garner on the radio the other day mocking Napierites’ opposition to being forced into a Hawke’s Bay-wide super-council. ‘Why should there be 2 mayors within 21km of each other?’ he asked. Nah. The question is: ‘why not?’ If they want to keep own having their own council, that they pay for, why should someone else get to take it away? It didn’t used to be possible. National made it possible.
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From the you have to be out of your freaking mind file comes this gem from England. Boris Johnson thinks that the ultra wealthy are a put upon bullied minority just like the homeless and Irish travellers and ex-gang members and deserve our thanks and gratitude.
The Police investigations into both the teapot tapes and the GCSB’s unlawful spying on Kim Dotcom came down to the same section of the Crimes Act, 216B. That makes it a crime to intentional intercept a private communication without lawful excuse. In both cases, the issue hinged on that word ‘intentional’ but the Police used very different definitions, and investigative tools.
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Ok, I know this image has a lot of issues. It is a 256 color animated gif. Dithered to hell. Bad colour balance, tilt and even a moving focus point. But it certainly makes its point about what kind of road space we’re paying for to inefficiently fill with cars? Have the idiots at NZTA and in this incompetent National government not read their own statistics? Roads aren’t filling up. Public transport does.
In a surprising development, John Key has taken to bringing “a friend” with him to serious media interviews. Key was accompanied by Bill English. Key justified the new approach stating that their unique “chemistry was obvious to all in parliament” and he wanted the public to know, just how well they got on. When questioned whether this was relevant and important in the lives of ordinary Kiwis he said “…frankly its one of the key platforms we will be contesting the 2014 election on”.
Scott laments the hard life of the rich white man.
This Saturday the voters of Christchurch East vote for their next MP. Labour’s hopes are pinned on Poto Williams. But even though the seat has been Labour’s for a considerable period of time anything is possible. And turnout will be vital.
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I’ve been thinking about what next years’ election is going to be like. Not like 2011 that’s for sure. Labour was in the doldrums and ran a largely negative campaign. Let’s assume that Labour has learnt its lesson about running an effective campaign and ticks all the boxes. The secret weapon that Labour and the Greens have eschewed for as many elections as I can remember is actually working together.
