Posts by George Darroch
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if your parliamentary democracy isn't worth standing in line for a few minutes, once every three years, you don't bloody deserve it.
Absolutely. There's a truism in marketing that if you lower the price of something, the value of that item to the purchaser goes down. Now I'm glad that registering and voting is easy. But to reduce it to a click of the mouse from my living room would be to lower the current purchase cost which involves participating/performing with other people, to almost nothing.
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if Labour cared that much, they could dispense with their own games and announce the date tomorrow.
The privilege of setting the election date is a relic of First Past the Post absolutism. Give it to the electoral commission, with the option of invoking the Governor General should the Government not have the confidence of the house.
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idle speculation seems to have crystalised into genuine knowledge at an alarming rate. How do you do that?
I'm being employed by Crosby Textor to repeat memes.
When I made my comment, I was thinking about how much noise I heard about National's tactics at the 05 election (Exclusive Brethren, secret trusts) in the years afterwards. These were genuine issues, but after a certain point even people sympathetic to your arguments are tired of hearing them.
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Any thoughts, Mr Hager?
Helen Clark and John Key could be getting their campaign advice from the devil, for all I care. The point of this, in my not so humble opinion, is that the major opposition party in NZ is engaging in an election strategy that relies on debating only the issues of its choosing, and keeping the public in the dark on everything else. That is the scandal.
Yes, to some extent every party chooses their messages and issues. But am I naive in thinking that a party parading as the next Government owes us slightly more than we've been getting? What, for example, is their policy on ACC?
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Paul - I should have used "would be" instead of "is" in at least one case there.
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It seems to me that Labour party supporters at PAS are building themselves a narrative to explain their parties upcoming annihilation and the Cosby/Textor revelations feed right into that, providing an excuse for the left that poor old Labour will only lose because of some sort of satanic, right-wing media sorcery.
Indeed. The only thing worse than having National sweep into power and do things I find distateful is having Labour hacks complain about their precious Government being "stolen" from them for months or years afterwards.
Having been a member of the Greens, losing out on having any say and being generally ignored or caricatured in the media is par for the course. You get used to it and it doesn't have any effect on you after a while. Kinda like the numb sensation brought about by continually losing world cups actually.
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And if he did, do you think The Standard would have posted it? Jus' saying folks...
That is one thing I don't like about the Standard. They do their credibility no good by ignoring some pretty serious failings of the current Government, like the Guantanamo style Immigration Bill being shepherded through at the moment.
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At least after the election I won't have to suffer the pain of journalists claiming not to have known.
A genuine question: do editors at major outlets sit down on Monday morning and discuss the major stories and decide which ones are the most interesting, which they'll run with? Or it is more informal and on the fly than that?
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I'm sorry, but Fairfax is beating this up.
I'm surprised to hear this. It was buried on Fairfax's stuff website yesterday...
It is a pity that there are so few genuine investigative journalists in NZ, so that invariably the messenger is shot at rather than the substance of his research.
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"Explaining is losing"
I find it difficult to comprehend the level of contempt for the ordinary person embodied in this statement - which is a campaign strategy repeated by Key and Brownlee.