Hard News: Popular Paranoiac Politics
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with even the stories of the early Moriori occupation that our generation was taught in school having almost disappeared
But when, oh when, will she investigate the even more sinisterly politically-correct disappearance of phlogiston and Lamarckian evolution from our curricula?!?!
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Just what then is New Zealand's leading Internet-based think tank?
Pick between The Standard and Kiwiblog.
Oh, sorry, I thought you said septic tank
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nzlemming, in reply to
One year they had Jim Hopkins and Kerre Woodham.
I call bullshit. The Earth would not have stood the strain.
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A friend of mine is a bean-counter in the Auckland corporate scene and he reckons the word among that crowd is that Brash is keen to get back in to politics. The recent Orewa-2 speech was a bit of kite flying, it'd seem.
It is pretty odd that the neoliberal diehards are unhappy. National and ACT are in power and odds-on faves to hose in next year, yet they still whine ? Surely they'd be happy with how things are and take a "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" approach ?
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In my view Don Brash the politician is actually a very interesting mix of radicalism, populism, and principled and opportunistic politics.
In other words: genuinely nuttily right-wing, but still cherished hopes of being elected?
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BenWilson, in reply to
Yes, Coddington seems to have lifted her game dramatically this year.
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BenWilson, in reply to
I don't get why he didn't just ask to be in the ACT party. Surely there's a huge gap now? Mind you, it would be shameful to have once been the head of the National Party, and to end up scrapping with Rodney Hide over who gets to be King of Act.
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David Winter, in reply to
There is actually an interesting bit of science behind Newman's "2000 year old rat bone" factoid. There really were bones dated to be that old (they were Kiore bones, so you'll have to imagine how the Celts fit into this scheme yourself) but it turns out there was a systematic error in the way the first radiocarbon dates were measured. All the bones measured before ~1995, including samples taken from dated archeological, were older than the first archeological evidence for Maori in New Zealand (around 850 years ago). All subsequent dates have been more recent than that the same cut-off.
The last nail in the coffin for the old rats was a recent study from Landcare, which is available as open access paper. They looked at new bones form the same sites as the "pre-Maori bones" and at rat-gnawed seeds and found no dates earlier than the first archeological evidence.
You know, just in case you were wondering.
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Craig Ranapia, in reply to
Yes, Coddington seems to have lifted her game dramatically this year.
From the gutter to the cellar? Oven-fresh cookies for everyone!
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Good heavens, Russell. You and Deborah Coddington appear to be on the same page, judging from today's Herald! And there are enough raving right fruitcakes in the twilight zone to make a Mad Moo/ I'm A Tea Pot Party a very interesting proposition indeed. However, what if it ends up resurrecting New Zombie First? Sock con twilight voters and activists tend to be highly prehensile when it comes to economic policy, which Brash and Newman don't seem to realise.
I would dearly love to publically strangle Chris Trotter so the post-paleolithic left could be rid of him too, for that matter.
Craig Y
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Oven-fresh cookies for everyone!
For me, they are only a sometimes food. Nom, nom!
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I suppose it shouldn't be surprising, given his Vicar-of-Bray principle-free populism, but I was bemused to see Peter Dunne nailing his colours to the mast in pandering to the anti-1080 crowd.
It's depressing how many minor party contenders there are for The Party That Science Forgot. -
So, for the sake of argument…
If you were a right-wing squillionaire who was disappointed at the poor showing and low influence of your chosen right-of-National-party….
Might you not find it worthwhile to spend a small pittance on funding a extreme-right-of-National party… not because you think it’s got a shit-show of being elected, but just to make your chosen party seem less extreme (and maybe bleed off a few genuine nutters too)?
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Lilith __, in reply to
Just what then is New Zealand's leading Internet-based think tank?
I think you might be writing on it ;-)
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Paul Williams, in reply to
Yes, Coddington seems to have lifted her game dramatically this year.
I agree. Her column was reasonable, that's a significant improvement on previous ones.
On a slightly different tangent; what is it with all these has-beens and retreads in the media? Newman, Peters, Brash? I say they should fuck off and let new people get on with it. There's plenty of new, comparatively young political talent to be bothered giving print space to these idiots.
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Lucy Stewart, in reply to
Mind you, it would be shameful to have once been the head of the National Party, and to end up scrapping with Rodney Hide over who gets to be King of Act.
Shameful wouldn't be the half of it. And there's a good chance the position he took while head of National poisoned the well with the real ACT free-market true-believers, anyhow.
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One probable side-effect of the fellow traveller effect would be that Newman and Brash might find that the Tea Pot Party fills up with weirdos like Trevor Loudon, the Citizens Initiated Referenda drones, assorted godbots and any remaining conspiracy theorists in squawkbackland. Entryism, anyone?
Craig Y
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After my public/online spat with the Celtic New Zealand crowd a few years back I now get sent pictures of pre-Māori artefacts, presumably to convince me of the wrongness of my views. I'm not allowed to place them online for you all to look at, and I wouldn't want to, either; the cognitive dissonance required to interpret rock formations and concretions as the carvings of some advanced and global superculture might kill those of you who haven't spent four years getting used to ingesting the wacky on a daily basis.
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Paul Webber, in reply to
just to make your chosen party seem less extreme (and maybe bleed off a few genuine nutters too)
There’s more to it than making National look good or siphoning off nut cases. Under MMP you need a coalition partner because no party gets more than 50% of the party vote. National needs a right-of-National party or a non-Labour centre party with which it can govern.
When MMP was first adopted, National should have split into a Conservative Party (country and Kings College Old Boys) and a Liberal Party (to compete against the centre-left in the cities).
But they didn’t split and therefore National has to rely on the monster raving loonie parties for support. But ACT has failed on the right and United has withered in the centre. And Winston is grandpa non grata even if he returns from the wilderness.
So National needs another party of somewhat similar philosophy (or at least with some popular support and a lust for power) to emerge and quickly.
Whilst I don’t think there’s a place in NZ politics for a home-grown Tea Party (Manuka Party?), surely there is a place for a liberal party. Economically conventional like National but reformist rather than conservative. Greener than National without the return-to-feudalism of the Greens. Not socially conservative like Brash and his brethren. Compassionate for the community without Labour’s reflex ritual of brother-unionist-against-capitalism. Where is that party?
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Matthew Littlewood, in reply to
It is pretty odd that the neoliberal diehards are unhappy. National and ACT are in power and odds-on faves to hose in next year, yet they still whine ? Surely they'd be happy with how things are and take a "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" approach ?
Much in the same way that Alliance imploded before 2002, I guess. Although that was more dramatic- they won three times the vote in 1999 than ACT (about 9 percent to ACT's 3 percent in 2008), and it seemed to be a single issue- namely the decision whether or not to support SAS involvement in Afghanistan--that finally did for them. Although the leadup to the notorious split was undoubtedly more complex than that, for sure.
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Andre Alessi, in reply to
I recall many years ago being stopped by a Scientology recruiter on Queen Street and allowing myself to be subjected to their personality test. The man got increasingly irritated at my insistence on answering the questions in a cheery, confident and optimistic fashion. I became increasingly amused by him.
I had exactly the same experience about 13-14 years ago. The very determined surveyer (who was writing their survey on blank bits of recycled newsprint) thought it was odd that my response to her question "What do you need to make you happy?" was "Well, nothing."
For some reason, this inspired her to escort me to a nondescript office building on Queen St, force me to watch interminable Scientology promo videos about volcanoes, take budget lie detector and IQ tests, before spending about 6 or so hours trying to get me to sign away all my worldly possessions and join the Church of Scientology as an employee (who wasn't even guaranteed minimum wage, by the way.)
I really wish I was exaggerating.
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Lucy Stewart, in reply to
For some reason, this inspired her to escort me to a nondescript office building on Queen St, force me to watch interminable Scientology promo videos about volcanoes, take budget lie detector and IQ tests, before spending about 6 or so hours trying to get me to sign away all my worldly possessions and join the Church of Scientology as an employee (who wasn’t even guaranteed minimum wage, by the way.)
I really wish I was exaggerating.
There wasn't a window to escape out of? Maybe an air duct?
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the return-to-feudalism of the Greens
Funny, I don't really get that impression of a party that's pushing for investment in high-quality public transport.
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One of the things I miss the most about feudalism are the electric buses.
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FletcherB, in reply to
There’s more to it than making National look good or siphoning off nut cases.
I wasnt so much talking about making National look good, as providing a third leg, so that Act look more central...
Can you grow Act back into relevance by creating some loonies further out than them?
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