Hard News: Media Take: The selling of the campaign
134 Responses
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Katharine Moody, in reply to
Thanks for the clarification.
I do hope some future government looks at the issue and then passes legislation, if appropriate, that indexes the tax brackets to the rate of inflation so that 'putting bracket creep right' can no longer be used as an election bribe. Time we stopped focusing electoral decisions based on a few pieces of silver that were effectively stolen from us anyway.
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Tom Semmens, in reply to
Ad hominem doesn't qualify as an argument either, Tom — but at least you have the balls to put your name to your unsubstantiated slur.
I was merely observing that one can't count on an idiot engaging in rational behaviour.
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Irony alert.
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The ACT belief that tax on unrealised income somehow counts as a real loss was also displayed by Muriel Newman a few years after all the NZ finance company collapses. In a DomPost letter to the editor, she argued that, because she had received no final income from her investments, the withholding tax paid on her compounded interest over the investment term should be refunded to her. Nice try — but choosing compounded over paid interest is a trade-off: more nett income if all goes well, more risk if it doesn’t. On paper the value of the investment goes up each year because interest income is added to it, and income tax is paid on that gross income. But the nett income is then subject to the same risk, and the same fate, as your principal.
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linger, in reply to
I've long argued that "putting bracket creep right" should be accomplished by actually moving the bracket boundaries (say, on five-yearly review, and quantized to nearest $10,000 increment), not by lowering the associated tax rates to make the system less progressive and/or out of ideological belief that government should do less.
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I have never seen so much blatant lying in a New Zealand election. Nor such lack of accountability for the liars. So the message is that lying and deceit wins. This behaviour also turns tentative or new voters off participation in the election as it reinforces stereotypes of politicians as liars. Nicky Hager has written about this two track dirty politics trick to undermine democracy. NZ just fell for it.
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Sacha, in reply to
two track dirty politics
but this time it only needed one track - which most media obediently followed.
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Bart Janssen, in reply to
two track dirty politics
but this time it only needed one track - which most media obediently followed.
Our expectation is the media has the role of bringing truth to bear on the state.
Sadly there are few media now where that is true and for those who did stand up for the truth often it was too weak and too late.
Some of that is fear of the law, but much of it appears to have been more about maximising ratings.
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Katharine Moody, in reply to
I'm with you on that.
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Katharine Moody, in reply to
NZ just fell for it.
It doesn’t feel that way to me. The swing was most certainly toward Labour. The Nats (and their coalition partners) were the biggest losers to my mind.
One of the best statements made on election night was, David Parker I think – who pointed out that Jacinda was the only Prime Ministerial candidate who came out with her integrity intact.
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Hilary Stace, in reply to
The swing towards Labour was one of the biggest in NZ political history - 14% in some electorates - but we didn't hear much about that from the analysts because they didn't win.
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Sacha, in reply to
Our expectation is the media has the role of bringing truth to bear on the state.
I'd like to see journalism activities regulated more explicitly, given that the media industry has shown us quite clearly now that it cannot be trusted to keep to basic ethical standards.
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Neil,
One of the best statements made on election night was, David Parker I think – who pointed out that Jacinda was the only Prime Ministerial candidate who came out with her integrity intact.
That's hard to square with her suddenly claiming she trusts and respects Peters. And no back down on claiming migrants causing our problem. But then it is being said by Labour supporters that Labour and NZF have a lot in common.
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Russell Brown, in reply to
Ad hominem doesn’t qualify as an argument either, Tom — but at least you have the balls to put your name to your unsubstantiated slur.
I was merely observing that one can’t count on an idiot engaging in rational behaviour.
To be fair, I'll have a nicer weekend if people don't call each other idiots in this discussion.
Tbh, it seems crazy tense out there in the public square. I hope the weather's good this weekend. (Actually, maybe I don't: I have a distressing amount of work to do.)
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Neil, in reply to
I would hope that all the members of parliament respect one and other.
I don’t recall her saying this prior to the election.
Trust and respect – for the politician with some of the most offensive views.
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Huh. Reading Glen Jameson's defense of National's ads & various responses from critics seems much ado about nothing. Political attack ads get made by ad agencies because advertising is propaganda & the pros do it best. What's all this about expecting ads to tell the truth?? If the left really wanted that a leftist govt would have legislated accordingly before most of us were born!
I do share the leftist moral outrage somewhat: watching Blinglish tell the nation "everyone agreed" that the eleven billion dollar Labour hole was real proved he's totally full of shit. The Nats couldn't even get a single prominent economist into the media to say they're right. Unless GJ can provide evidence to the contrary, that was a blatant lie. Uttered by Joyce, then repeated by the PM.
Still, Joe Public has had the opinion that all politicians are liars for a long time. So no amount of being offended is ever going to be effective in stopping elections being won by good liars, right?
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Katharine Moody, in reply to
That’s hard to square with her suddenly claiming she trusts and respects Peters.
Why do you say that? He proved himself trustworthy with the Clark/Cullen administration.
No one is talking about it - so I'll add it to the mix.
Winston Peters as Prime Minister - Ardern and Shaw as co-Deputy PMs and first time Ministers in the portfolio(s) of their choosing, with the balance of Ministerial portfolios distributed on a proportional basis.
In other words, the real kind of change that the majority of NZers voted for and MMP at its collaborative finest.
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Joe Wylie, in reply to
...the pros do it best.
Rather doubtful in this case. When someone feels the need to big-note their work online it only raises the probability that they got the job because they were cheap.
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Neil, in reply to
Still, Joe Public has had the opinion that all politicians are liars for a long time. So no amount of being offended is ever going to be effective in stopping elections being won by good liars, right?
I don’t think Honesty is easily defined. The mechanism of easy definement is called Religion.
I go more for Bad Faith. One can act in bad faith without lying and one can act in good faith but not tell the truth
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Trevor Nicholls, in reply to
Trust and respect – for the politician with some of the most offensive views.
Tell you what, when I lived in England many decades ago the two politicians I had the greatest respect for were Tony Benn and Enoch Powell. From hearing them talk (a lot!) I have no doubt that they each found the other's views on dozens of topics completely offensive, and yet had the greatest respect for each other. Trust and respect do not require agreement.
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Kumara Republic, in reply to
I'd like to see journalism activities regulated more explicitly, given that the media industry has shown us quite clearly now that it cannot be trusted to keep to basic ethical standards.
I've said it before, but what NZ needs is to bring Justices Leveson & Finkelstein here to chair a Royal Commission. If there's a regulatory template to follow, it's Scandinavia, which ranks in the RSF's Media Freedom index top 10, while still holding journalistic misconduct to account.
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National Wear Your Heart On Your Sleeve Week - pt II
I see Duncan Garner has outed himself with this intemperate rant:
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/opinion/97391717/duncan-garner-the-megalomaniac-reigns-all-over-nationals-paradehe adds unreasonable ignorance to the mix
But right now it's all deja vu, which has turned into Peters and his daily verbal spew. It's been a week of rock 'n' roll, insults and threats. No-one is any the wiser.
The clocks went forward an hour last Sunday, but collectively we've gone back 21 years to 1996.
Peters is squeezing every last bit of patience out of New Zealand voters. And we have only ourselves to blame. MMP was always going to have the annoying, yappy little chihuahua biting the face of the rottweiler.
One man with 160,000 votes now dictates terms and holds to ransom the two political beasts with 1.8 million votes between them.
NZ's patience can only be tried if he goes beyond the Oct 12 deadline - we have not yet had our patience tested.
It's sad that a commentator with such a wide audience should be so ignorant of MMP's processes and intent.
Between him, Hosking, Joyce and English they have strewn our electoral landscape and zeitgeist with landmines (or memes) of misinformation that may well blind many in the future - they certainly did this election.
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On the viability of a NZF/Labour/Green govt, I keep coming back to some research I did a few years back on the NZES, which was a properly conducted very large scale survey that tied actual votes to a large range of opinions. My project was to remove from the questions anything that was either demographic, or an outright statement of political support for a party or political alignment. That reduced it to about 80 questions that were about a range of political opinions, divorced from statements of affiliation or identity. So they were mostly questions about what kind of general policy the person preferred. That was my intention.
I then attempted to model how people voted, based only on these questions, and also to simply find the clustering and principal axes of the respondents.
What I found was that NZF voters were very hard to distinguish from Labour voters. The most dividing question was not (as I’d predicted beforehand) something to do with immigration or opinions on gays. It was whether the person trusted internet banking. This was pretty clearly a proxy question to a demographic distinction (probably age).
Green voters were much more readily identified. The environment was always going to be their largest concern.
Distinguishing all of them from National and ACT voters was easy. They pretty much put taxation as their highest concern. There was not enough data to make any kind of robust statements about Maori Party or UF voters.
The PCA clearly put every party except National and ACT on the Left. This is a “mathematical Left” rather than making any ideological assumptions. It simply finds what direction most divided the group (in the high dimensional space of all the questions) and splits them in half along that. The outcome is partially a result of National being such a large group, that one side of the spectrum had to be dominated by them. But the closer proximity of all the other parties to each other was unmistakeable. National and ACT were in a class of their own, when it comes to how their voters thought. NZF voters, as I mentioned above, just look like older Labour voters.
Of course the fragmentation of the Left makes it hard for people to see just how close they are to each other. We are fine tuned to homing in on the one or two issues that distinguish us, in order to recognize our tribes and be able to verbally war with our enemies. But when the aggregation of views on matters of how the country should be governed is taken in a broad and algorithmic way, they’re clearly much closer together than they care to admit.
ETA: And obviously, now that our archaic method of declaring tribal allegiance in our votes is behind us, the more serious matter of making a government that works means that the similarities are at least as important as the differences, and Red/Black/Green coalition is (IMHO) much more about the differences between NZF and Greens than NZF and Labour. So the Shaw olive branch to Peters is (IMHO) the lynchpin of this. A Blue/Green coalition is (IMHO) a very remote thing, barely worth considering.
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I also think that Labour is likely to be aware of this. They're big enough that they get strong statistical analysis done. The question of the coalition is not how Labour can get along with NZF (that's been done before, for starters), it's how they can broker a relationship between NZF and the Greens. Which means they sit in the middle, really, and they are the ones holding the cards. At the end of the day, they are going to be the Lion's share of the government, they will have the PM, and it is on them to show how this fragmentation on the Left is not really over the issues that mainly concern their voters as much as their voters will to oppose the much more stark contrast with the option of another National government.
My gut feeling is that Peters will want to make his last days as politician in NZ something to be proud of, a final vindication of the reason he formed his party in the first place, to oppose neoliberalism and all it's repulsive ilk, rather than spending 3 years as a junior partner to more of it.
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Sacha, in reply to
What I found was that NZF voters were very hard to distinguish from Labour voters. The most dividing question was not (as I’d predicted beforehand) something to do with immigration or opinions on gays. It was whether the person trusted internet banking. This was pretty clearly a proxy question to a demographic distinction (probably age).
You sure it wasn't an indication of *who* they trust, more broadly? Private sector, state, community, family, self - that sort of thing. Did any other questions bear on that?
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