Posts by Deborah
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Great speech from Jacinda. Measured and insightful and angry, all at once.
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I heard Beethoven's 5th live for the first time ever last year. I sat there with tears of joy rolling down my face through those dramatic opening chords, and through much of the first movement.
As for the duet in The Pearl Fishers. It was a three hanky moment when I saw the opera in Adelaide a few years ago.
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NZ Herald: Six giant pohutukawa trees saved
Six giant pohutukawa trees that Auckland Transport wanted to cut down to provide extra traffic space at Western Springs have been saved.
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Hard News: Masters of Reality, in reply to Kumara Republic,
What did these voters think the Greens would do, confiscate their houses and cars?
I never really pursued it too much. I can recall comments like, flakey, tree-huggers, all about the trees and not about business and people, going to put huge costs on people, unrealistic, no economic expertise, wanting everying to have composting toilets.
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Regarding Labour and the Greens… one of the things I heard many times during the last election, as I stood on doorsteps in both rural and urban areas, was that people didn’t like the thought that if they voted Labour, they would also get the Greens. The typical line I got was, “We can’t vote for you, even though we like you, because we don’t like the Greens.”
Okay then. I usually responded by talking about some of the people I have a fair amount of respect for in the Green caucus, in an attempt to make the Greens less scary to these voters. Pretty frustrating to be spending my time doing that, to be honest, when I’d far rather have been talking about Labour and Labour policies, and urging people to vote Labour (I was afterall, running for Labour, not the Green party).
It’s a little hard to know what underlay the comments from voters about the Greens being scary (and therefore they weren’t going to vote Labour). I’m sure that part of it could be that most people don’t want to say to your face that they won’t be voting for you or your party, so they find something else to say which is not openly opposed to the (pleasant, friendly etc?) woman standing right in front of them. But I do think that some of the sentiment behind the words was genuine: many of the voters I spoke to really, really, didn’t want the Greens in government, and that in turn became another negative for Labour in their minds, because Labour would likely form a coalition with the Greens.
So it’s not clear to me that as a matter of electoral tactics, Labour and the Greens should be too overtly allied. It’s not clear that they shouldn’t be aligned either, for that matter. But what seems obvious to some people here at PAS, which is a fairly left wing kind of place, is not at all obvious to many of the voters I spoke to in the six months or so before the election last year.
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Hard News: We can make things better here, in reply to ,
Steven, many, many times, the way you spell words has made me think new thoughts. Thank you.
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Tiso is Rawshark
Oh. I had thought that Giovanni was DPF's evil twin.
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1: Dr RUSSEL NORMAN to the Prime Minister: Does he agree with the OECD that "when income inequality rises, economic growth falls"?
2: ANDREW LITTLE to the Prime Minister: Does he agree with yesterday's OECD report that "focusing exclusively on growth and assuming that its benefits will automatically trickle down to the different segments of the population may undermine growth in the long run"; if not, why not?
3: TIM MACINDOE to the Minister of Finance: What progress has the Government made in delivering on its economic objectives for 2014?
The first three questions for oral answer in the House today.
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Hard News: Team Little: pretty good, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Bill English did have a stint at Treasury, and Michael Cullen's PhD was in economic history.
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I think that asking Annette King to stay on as deputy is a very wise move. Her accumulated wisdom about processes and how to manage caucus and all the day-to-day minutiae of politics is substantial, and we need to have some continuity as well as change. Also, having sat on the Party’s policy council with Annette, she is very, very astute, and her grasp of policy matters is formidable.