And is my wont, hunting out late 80s hits on Youtube. Alison Moyet, Yazoo, The Front Lawn etc.

A brickbat: the election?

Lovely shade of orange on those pens I thought...

Rather lighter than last time, I thought.

(P.S. Preview is kinda broken)

I don't have a teev, so I'm not sure where I should point my browser – whether at a streaming media of some kind, or some interesting people doing a live blog. (Although I assume this thread will fulfil?

Eating a dinner made entirely?

http://www.scoop.co.nz/ER/

7.40pm: The advance votes are 90% counted. Let?s do some sums. As Antony Green of the ABC says in his blog votes cast early tend to favour National. In 2008 the advance vote for National was 49.15% but the final result?

I'm not feeling disconnected here in Pittsburgh. Slightly delirious, but very much invested. I also felt a kind of pride sending my fax off in the Pitt history department in Tuesday,?

Think I may need a stiff drink soon if National?s lead doesn?t start dropping. God help us if they get to govern alone.

Delighted to see the Greens doing so well though.

In the relatively long term (in political terms), that's the vote that matters, and I'm glad that it's turned out that way. Had it lost, it's likely that former MMP supporters would have overwhelmed FPP with votes for STV or whatever anyway. That's the positive outcome?

Really, really disappointed at how this election has panned out. The Greens will have no power, and the parties that Key will be?

Currently at Listener Live HQ. Two guys working really hard and everyone else chillaxing.

Yes. Oops. Back to the passive consumption of results for me.

Bugger, they are too. However, if what's been said about advance votes favouring National is true, it's encouraging for the outcome of the votes cast today.

Wonder if that's helping NZ First this time? Could be a contributor to Conservative vote too I guess. Tentatively.

I am really glad to see that MMP is winning, but am rather surprised at the size of the informal vote for the second vote.

Good point. While I?m of the liberal-green persuasion, I can?t discount the conservative element that has not liked the neoliberalism of modern National (+Act), and the ?Waitakere Man? that would vote?

They already can't govern alone. As if results held then they would be on 60 seats out of 121. Of course they will be able to govern with Banks and Dunne as?

Or do they need another seat?

It has almost become a tradition for the Greens to pick up an additional seat from the specials – at whose expense will be interesting.

But National could easily drop another seat and then they would be looking to another party.

They lose one vote by providing a speaker but that would leave them 61-60. I gather that your first electorate seat is never an overhang one, so if Maori Party stays below 1.4% there will be two overhang seats?

The?

Thank u Gudrun Gisela for the pic.

David Parker is ?bloody proud of Phil Goff? and adds that, ?People haven?t yet come home to Labour. They will eventually.?

Just priceless watching Banks give a speech – he is?

Stuff wasn't prepared for the possibility of a tie – their results system shows Wagner the winner with a majority of 0

Chris Trotter was saying that Labour have reduced that to 1 by winning back Te Tai Tonga from the Maori Party. That's when he wasn't foaming about Labour's need for more Waitakere Men.

Ex-Labour president Mike Williams reminded that thousands of voters previously registered for the Chch central/east suburbs have been displaced outside Chch and many will be special votes. They'll skew left (though presumably be subject to the same trend in party votes?

Does he seriously mean the Kiwi equivalent of Essex Man/Reagan Democrat?

Realised I was one of a very select group in the country allowed (required?

Piltdown Man, methinks.

Just as I thought, even 2008 was 75%. I suspect this time round there's a?

I should add even more so than the last 9 elections. It's getting dangerously close to American turnout proportions, where they have the added cynicism factor of an entrenched two-party FPP system.

It never did.

He certainly doesn?t have the unbridled power he thought he was due. No matter what the specials do (which are likely to erode his lead), what he wanted as a second choice was reliable and significant coalition partners. Instead, he?s got?

According to the MSD link in my earlier post, it's a pattern?

And I voted Labour... for the first time since 1984! (I?

unlikely – for ideological rather than practical reasons

Get your head around the fact that Key and the National party got a record majority, add Act and the Conservatives (who came out of no where) and it is outstanding

But the wheel turns and once?

That makes sense. Will the Yours Not Mines?

Super fund sells a billion dollars of US?

A very clever move on his part. It?

If that happened, wouldn?t that expose private workplace insurers to litigation? Then we?d be back to where we were in 1967.

not for long

So, turnouts in National seats are 35k or so, turnouts in Labour seats are 28k or so. Basically, National wins by default when poor people stay?

to Australian and other foreign insurance companies, as planned

1) Must walk my talk, and respect the 135,000 electors who cast their party votes to return to Parliament a man I hold in utter contempt. OK, media get off your knees, wipe your chins and hold Winston Peters and his ghost chips caucus to account.

2) Am?

Roughly their 1996 level, so they managed to cut their losses to a certain degree.

Conservatives didn't get into parliament. They got substantially more votes than four parties that made it. That's ludicrous.

When the prospect loomed of an actual collapse, yes.

I think Labour has to transform now. The union movement doesn't justify its constitutional status in the party at the moment. It's just wrong that Darien Fenton is safe and Carmel Sepuloni is?

Oy, wait for them specials before you call it. It's damned close.

Especially when we're talking about flipping the most marginal seat in the country from, let's face it, an incumbent who isn't exactly from the deep end of the National Party gene pool.

I most certainly agree that it?s dead wood time. And if I were Andrew Little, I would have?

Any way: this is why I like unions

this is why I dislike weakening unions

Are we really up for a race to the bottom? And if we were as the TVNZ article suggests what on earth would?

election 11 man, its been a blast

So does Robert Reich, one of the more enlightened speakers to visit NZ. He basically correlates strong unions (not too-big-to-fail ones like 1970s Britain) with a strong middle class.

A big part of the problem is that those with big money have?

At the risk of sounding like a downright concern-troll, a good place to start would be to stop using the list as incumbent insurance/the most brutally efficient recycling scheme ever. Yes, it wasn't pretty in National when some dead wood got exactly the?

Nope. The Speaker gets to vote, and no longer gets a casting vote: a change introduced to Standing Orders after MMP, now that parties cast party votes in the House.

Jesus, if you think the Central margin was nervy, imagine being at the Chch Labour election night party.

Not that I know of. At least not in a while. Wait for specials. I still a tie, automatic judicial recount. If still a tie "draw lots". But in reality,?

I may come at this from a different perspective, and I don't know the man personally, but I don't think Winston is really so?

Not great, but not as bad as 65%.

So it takes an earthquake to change a staunch labour electorate. The Nats should pray for a few more in the next three years.

Winston did not have a?

Bad taste, Ross. Very bad taste.

They got 48%.

Posted without further comment.

Er – which electorate would that be? Christchurch Central was a marginal seat in 2008, with a margin of 935. Doesn't take an earthquake to swing?

I see National taking the party vote by 40% to 50% Labour/Green. Which is who they were running against, according to me.

But yeah, on an FPP party vote they would've won.

Biggest share of the party vote anyone received in an MMP election. Which is not a "record majority" – you'd have to climb into the wayback machine and nerd-fu FPP election results to find that. I can't really be arsed.

I'll write it down to a case of 24-hour PEST (Post-Election Stress Trauma), because you're infinitely more classy. I prescribe a nice mug of sweet milky tea?

In other media there?s analysis of the respective effectiveness of the various campaigns, but how much of a decision to vote is based on diffuse, slowly-established impressions? Campaigns and their events, I think tend to trigger or enable decisions, not directly determine them.

For?

I am?

Says the man who can't make a single post without a gratuitous, explicit sexual reference. Pot, kettle, black, Craig.

You know what? Just for once I want Labour to be on the side of the majority on?

Tax increases, perhaps reducing WFFs and spending cuts are going to be the taste/flavour of the future for the next say 2 to 5 years.

Globally the Euro zone is in the crap, China is?

I think it also about the tiredness of Labour's political method. National didn't renew after 2002, but they parachute in a new leader and they did clear out the deadwood on their 2005 list. Combined,?

plus the whole 'Boo' bogeyman thang
-?

That odd little garage is a neighbour. He cleans it out every three years. Its where I vote, usually. Its been a polling booth for a long time – there's no public buildings around here, unless you count the public?

The old tradesmen-type Labour voters are more likely to be four-door-new- ute-driving pragmatists who vote with their wallet now.

If you actually talk to such people you discover they are just old school Labour. They support?

No, Ambassador Sarek, I think your logic is flawed where you son is concerned. Obviously, Labour took a hell of punt that this was not only unpopular but?

Not for the first time, I think voters are a little more complex?

Agreed. What I mean by pragmatist, wallet-voters is that they know they must support themselves and their families and go with the vote that they think will help them best do that.

As for the?

Totally agree.

Quite right – and sorry for not being entirely clear about that in my snark of a silly idea you don't actually hold.