Posts by Craig Ranapia
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Hard News: To be expected, in reply to Russell Brown,
Steady on. No one was asking John Key whether he wanted to campaign jointly with Colin Craig, were they?
No - instead there were bizarre fantasies that Colin Craig was just going to be handed one of the safest National seats in the country, with the cheerful acquiescence of Murray McCully and the local organization. Which, let me tell you, resulted in some rather ungenerous speculation hereabouts about how many political journalists would pass random workplace drug tests.
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Hard News: To be expected, in reply to Keir Leslie,
Hard to see that's not the play though, right? It's a clever way to bash Labour as being untrustworthy etc --- the 2005 trope reappears with depressing predictability --- and emphasise the importance of voting Green if you're wavering Green/Labour. Shades of Corngate.
Oh, who's being a wee bit precious now? If you want to go there, this is quite a clever way for Labour to dog-whistle the Greens as flaky and entitled, so a vote for the Greens is just the splitter's way to guarantee three more years of National. That's the play, right?
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Hard News: To be expected, in reply to Russell Brown,
This is the thing I would like to know. Who leaked it? Because that does seem like an act of bad faith.
So would I -- and it's funny how many folks on my Twitter have assumed it's someone in the Greens, and that the whole thing was just a giant bad faith troll from the beginning. None of which makes a lick of sense to me, but moving on...
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Hard News: To be expected, in reply to Keir Leslie,
But if you want to define the Labour/Green realationship, you need to dedicate substantial resources to it and come up with an actual coalition agreement, and a pretty clear joint programme.
Or be able to clearly articulate your points of agreement, which should only be as difficult as you choose to make it. And I'm sorry, but what "actual coalition agreement" would be necessary. If Labour and the Greens don't actually have a pretty solid sense of their commonalities by now, I guess we should lay in the popcorn for a very long round of coalition negotiations afterwards...
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Hard News: To be expected, in reply to Russell Brown,
Your URL’s missing
Fixed - for once, I noticed it before the edit window closed. :)
which was formed after the 1922 general election. After. It's not the same thing.
Simple statement of fact there, but it's existed (in various forms) through every Australian federal election since. Not always peacefully, we're talking about Australian politics after all :), but it has worked.
You're quite right in the OP that Labour is perfectly entitled to maximize its vote (as are the Greens), but I just find it rather bizarre how high-handed and downright hostile the response has been from some quarters.
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Hard News: To be expected, in reply to Idiot Savant,
The difference is that without a formal alliance, it is National which gets to frame what a Labour-Green government will do, rather than them getting a chance to frame it themselves.
Yeah, and I think this is worth pointing out, but would require some homework from the press: This kind of loose coalition isn't exactly uncommon, and electorally successful, elsewhere. FFS, the current Prime Minister of Australia is the federal leader of such a grouping that's existed for over 90 years. And obviously I don't have access to Cunliffe's advice or internal polling, but I suspect a lot fewer people are terrified unto death of seeing Labour, Greens and coalition in the same sentence as the media-political complex conventional wisdom would have us believe. It's not my preferred outcome, but I could live with it and the people who can't aren't going to vote Labour anyway, I suspect.
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Hard News: To be expected, in reply to Russell Brown,
I fear you will be disappointed on both counts.
You're probably right, but since Winston's already started laying down quarter-arsed bottom lines like this it's a perfectly legitimate question to ask. Not that Winston's bromantic partners in the Press Gallery will bother.
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Hard News: To be expected, in reply to Keir Leslie,
And, of course, if Labour did do a deal with the Greens, Cunliffe would have to spend the next six months either defending Green party policy (much of which is (a) incompetently written and un-costed, and (b) off-putting to centrist voters) or repudiating Green party policy, in an ad hoc and damaging manner --- i.e, the coalition deal would end up being written in public, in an unco-ordinated and damaging way.
Weird how this has existed in Australian politics for over 90 years, with Tony Abbot spending precisely zero time on this kind of doomsday scenario.
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Hard News: To be expected, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
And isn't the whole "tea Party" thang that Key introduced with Act ,just the sort of thing that pissed us off last time. Dodgy deals look like dodgy deals, which don't please everyone.
Yeah, thanks for that Sofie. I'd like both Key and Cunliffe to decide what they think about Winston Peters this week, if you don't mind.
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Hard News: To be expected, in reply to Russell Brown,
This seems counter-intuitive to me -- surely National would be more likely to make hay out of the fact of a formal coalition?
No - and I'd suggest you learn something from history where Labour and the Alliance very publicly buried the hatchet elsewhere than in each other's backs. Of course, that didn't stop National trying to frame the possibility of a Labour/Alliance government as the harbinger of the Apocalypse but it didn't work. Not least because Clark and Anderton were defining the narrative on their terms, and not pretending there weren't genuine and deep differences that still existed.