Posts by BenWilson
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Wow, I can see why that never sold, and also why I've never started a band. I haven't got the patience for 42 minutes of the same baseline.
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I dislike this idea that you have to appeal to some nebulous “middle”.
That's democracy for you. Most people are in the middle, so if you want to win, that's where you've got to be. The idea that government "leads" the population is a conceit. It "rides" the population, and if it goes anywhere too scary, it gets thrown.
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Hard News: Triangulated by Fools, in reply to Andre Alessi,
I think that framing overstates the wonkishness of most voters.
Swing voters are wonkier than most, I'd say. They are who I'm talking about.
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Hard News: Triangulated by Fools, in reply to Barnard,
I agree with all of that, and have said so many times on this site, that the terms left and right are big sweeping brooms. I use them only as a convenient way of ordering the parties, a look at them across one dimension. It's just one way of visualizing what Labour torn in half would look like.
Labour do need to be taking votes off National & targeting the current crop of non voters.
Much less the former, much, much more the latter.
Or it could be much more of both, if they were actually two parties. One would be far more credible to potential swing voters from National, the other would be less repulsive to the huge pool of people opposed to neoliberalism who can't bring themselves to go all Green. The overall pool grows, even though both parties are smaller. National swing voters might actually want to pump up the centrist party to make it a stronger foil against the other coalition partners, if they see the writing on the wall for National.
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Hard News: Triangulated by Fools, in reply to Barnard,
Of course, but if that's to happen & especially if it's to happen without relying on Winston then Labour do need to be taking votes off National & targeting the current crop of non voters.
Yes, this is the real dilemma. There are two directions they can strike. Left is where they probably have the richest pickings if the want to be a bigger party. But if it comes entirely at the cost of their coalition partners, it's not going to win an election. Right is a direction in which their support will probably stay the same size, but each vote that they take from National counts towards their chances.
Or they can strike in both directions at the same time, which is what they seem to be doing. This can either make a broad church, or it can tear it apart. The latter is probably more likely, if it continues down the path of increasing internal democracy. I don't think that would be disastrous at all. They could easily make two perfectly healthy 20% parties which are natural bedfellows, utterly routing National between them and the Green Party, and then running a highly consensus-based government without needing wildcards like Winston Peters. Hell, if that kind of thing continued, we might end up with representative democracy again, like how our system was designed in the first place, before the party system crushed it.
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Hard News: Triangulated by Fools, in reply to Barnard,
Surely it's likely to be more of an issue the closer you get to an election, or the more plausible the idea of Labour government becomes?
Not sure. We have MMP here. It won't be a Labour government, it will be a coalition. The public is slowly coming to acknowledge this, and the idea of targeting only one pool of voters is dying at about the same rate that the pool itself is dying (which does come rather hard and fast at the end). If Labour is to have a future, it needs young vote, and it needs it now. But it will continue to be supported by old vote for a while. If the two camps can't co-exist, the party will shrink.
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Labour cannot afford to end up with what would be a hopelessly divided caucus. That is not a recipe for good government - or even good Opposition.
I'm not sure about that. They've slowly risen in the polls all the time that this division has been there. I don't think that piece of political wisdom is guaranteed to stand the test of time. Divided leadership can be highly functional, at times, just as powerful unified leadership can be disastrous.
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Hard News: Calling the race before it's over, in reply to simon g,
they must have spent the last four years in a sensory-deprivation chamber (I wish I had).
Heh. Isn't the world record like 4 days or something?
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Hard News: Calling the race before it's over, in reply to Paul Williams,
Goff and Ardern seem odd additions to this list though.
They could have been informed of such approaches to other people, though. But:
I'm guessing, but I suspect
Is the tale of this weekend.
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Hard News: Calling the race before it's over, in reply to Felix Marwick,
Phil Goff, David Parker, Damien O'Connor, Jacinda Ardern, Kris Faafoi, and Ian Lees Galloway also referenced it publicly as well. I've had on the record quotes from all of them
Wicked. Did they say what they base their opinion of a coup brewing on? I seriously haven't heard any evidence other than tribal opinion. Which might be enough, it's not like it's a court, but it's just not something I'm going to base an opinion on. It reminds me of corporate decision making, and not in a good way.
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