Posts by Craig Ranapia
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Hard News: The sole party of government, in reply to izogi,
I think it also assumes that the reason people don’t vote is because they can’t be bothered to visit a polling booth
It's an assumption that begs the question why turnout at the last round of local body elections was twitching around 40% despite it hardly being onerous to have two weeks to take your papers out of the letterbox, fill 'em in and mail them back. IMO, making a fetish out of e-voting misses the point that if you're disconnected from politics and the political process the medium doesn't signify.
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Hard News: Five further thoughts, in reply to ,
Fair enough -- Greg's rather tacky figure of speech wasn't really worth extending. But I think Labour can quite easily "reconnect with the center" without going full Waitakere Man, so to speak. Then again, I don't actually work on the assumption that "the center" is intrinsically racist, misogynistic and homophobic. It's a false binary that, among much else, sells people short.
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Hard News: Five further thoughts, in reply to Dylan Reeve,
I’m not convinced the foreignness is a *huge* part of it… I think the bigger part is his questionable moral/criminal history (and present) and how conspicuously he was trying to influence the election.
The fact he isn’t a citizen is certainly part of it, however if everything else were the same but Dotcom had been born in Matamata I think the spin, fear and outcomes would be very similar.
THIS. Yes, I found the endless sneering references to his nationality and weight obnoxious and offensive (which is pretty much Paul Henry's default setting), it's glib and facile to dismiss all criticism and scrutiny of him as a xenophobic "smear campaign". Especially from people I suspect would take a very different view if KDC had been a very big ticket donor to National and/or Labour.
And let's not lose sight that The Moment of Truth was being billed for months as the big reveal of irrefutable evidence that Key was a lying liar who was balls deep in baiting a residency honeytrap at the behest of foreign governments and multinational corporations. He didn't deliver, by any rational metric, and it's a tad rich to complain that people noticed.
Something a little more disturbing (but weirdly amusing) is Lila Harre's oft-repeated spin line that poor Hone Harawira was "ganged up on". What does she think happens in elections? Like it or not, what I'm hearing is that Kelvin Davis just got the basics right in ways Labour hasn't in Te Tai Tokerau for a long time -- reconnected with a lot of flax roots networks, rebuilt up an effective and energized ground operation, and worked his arse off in a huge electorate that's really hard to stay visible in because it's geographically huge and your target voters are widely dispersed.
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I am thrilled to see the inevitable calls for Labour to throw the gays, the women, and the children under the bus in order to compete with National.
Really? Looks more like Labour trying to figure out why pretty much everyone was lining up at the bus stop to give 'em a short, sharp shove into oncoming traffic.
The media has seized on the 1922 year as being the last time Labour received so few votes . It is getting rather boring unless...
it's a simple statement of fact, Bodmin. Not one anyone in Labour particularly wants to hear, I'm sure, but no less true for that.
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Hard News: The sole party of government, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
Winston Peters has said, very loudly and very clearly, that he can’t think of any job he’d like less than being Speaker. I don’t know why people keep suggesting it.
Because it's been far too long since he did this?
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Hard News: The sole party of government, in reply to Alfie,
Is she in the current All Black squad?
No, Alfie, but she wasn’t a political eunich when she was a dual international. You’re being as absurd as the people who had a rather unedifying shit fit about professional tennis player Andy Murray posting a pro-Yes Tweet the day of the Scottish referendum, or Robyn Malcolm expressing left-wing political opinion while appearing in partially publicly-funded television and theater.
Current All Blacks are perfectly entitled to express their political views, just like everyone else. What they’re most certainly NOT entitled to do is break electoral laws while doing so, and that would be no less true if their political leanings were more to your liking.
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Hard News: Five further thoughts, in reply to Matthew Hooton,
As soon as Labour does that, it is saying “we are not one of the big two mainstream parties, alongside National, but just one of a bunch of parties on the ‘progressive’ side of politics”.
I'm not feeling your reasoning there, Matthew. Did the cessation of hostilities between Labour and the Alliance -- however awkward -- really do either party any harm?
I don’t think Labour needs to do all the soul-searching and so forth that people are talking about.
Worse result since 1922 strongly implies otherwise, IMO.
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Hard News: The sole party of government, in reply to Alfie,
I can see why some of our top paid (newly rich) sportpeople might be inclined to vote for National. But if you’re an All Black, try to keep your public image clean and non-political, for God’s sake.
I wonder what Louisa Wall would have to say about that, Alfie.
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A bunch of my Facebook friends are beside themselves, and that doesn’t mean they’re out-of-touch wankers. They’re entitled to be disappointed that their priorities are not shared.
And that's fair enough -- can't say I was a box of birds on July 28, 2002 if I'm being perfectly honest. But we held a free, fair and credible general election yesterday and you don't have to agree with the outcome to show some baseline civility to your fellow citizens -- all of them, because frankly there's more than a few people on the right who need to learn being a graceless winner isn't endearing either.
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Hard News: Five further thoughts, in reply to David Haywood,
I wonder if part of the reason that voters have not seen Labour as fit to govern is the number of leaders they’ve gone through in the past electoral term (and the internal divisions within Labour that are highlighted during each campaign for leadership).
Of course it is -- and Cunliffe did some rather smart positioning in his concession speech by explicitly invoking National's stability in leadership and caucus. Fairly or not, if a party is perceived as not being able to keep its own house in order why should anyone trust them to run a country?
