Hard News: Metiria's Problem
376 Responses
First ←Older Page 1 … 12 13 14 15 16 Newer→ Last
-
izogi, in reply to
The departure of Dunn opens an opportunity for an anti 1080 champion
How so? Did anyone who dislikes 1080 vote for United Future because of it in recent times? From browsing the various communities, I mostly see anti-1080 crowd backing either Ban1080 or NZ First... but there's been mounting suspicion about whether NZ First is trying to rip them off as gullible voters. That wasn't helped by Dennis O'Rourke declaring a policy at the recent ETS conference which largely contradicts most of what Richard Prosser's been telling them.
-
Email
Wāhine Unite to Change the Government!
Wednesday, 23 August at 7.00pm, Space Academy 371 St Asaph Street, Christchurch
Nau mai, Haere mai, All welcome for an entertaining evening with some of the most inspiring and kick ass wāhine in NZ politics!!
Listen, laugh & learn as Metiria Turei, Poto Williams, Marama Davidson, Megan Woods and Golriz Ghahraman discuss their lives & their journeys into politics. -
steven crawford, in reply to
How so? Did anyone who dislikes 1080 vote for United Future because of it in recent times?
Difficult to know, but he pitched his... Sorry, the United future party's policy on pest control has moderated it’s stance on 1080 kills baby’s and your family dog! to something more towards the Greens slightly ambiguous stance. But they are explicit about protecting and maintaining a healthy population of ” big game animals in the wilderness" So I’m probably not going to vote United future now.
I forgot all about NZ First.
-
izogi, in reply to
Yes I think UF picked up at least some of that policy when it ran with Outdoor Recreation New Zealand from 2005. Hunting circles have always been a place where 1080 use is controversial, but even many in those groups are much less concerned than they used to be.
I forgot all about NZ First.
They're seriously going after it, especially Richard Prosser, I guess because in the MMP world a few thousand votes can cross a threshold to another MP. Prosser likes to hang out in Facebook anti- groups like 1080 Eyewitness where he religiously agrees about how terrible 1080 is and rallies their support in favour of an immediate 1080 moratorium to aerial 1080 drops (while we survey the entire landscape and reconsider, etc). Then he goes to the 1080 support forums where he can be seen, seeks out certain specific people whom the anti-1080 brigade hate with a vengeance, and gets into flame wars and insult fests with those people. But it's mostly been a sideshow for that extreme niche audience. Prosser's weird conspiratorial rant at the end of Backbenches, several weeks ago (4m:05s), was an exception to this. He also said plenty in earlier segments of that episode.
So I think NZF is most likely to get anti-1080 votes if they go to anyone useful. I'm sceptical if it'll actually amount to anything, at most token gestures. NZF already has so many bottom lines and none of them mention 1080... probably because there aren't many people out there who really feel that strongly about it either way compared with everything else happening.
(Correction: In my previous comment I typed ETS conference when I meant to type EDS conference [for Environmental Defence Society].)
-
Good overview of Richard Prosser’s tactics.
This is the sort of putty he’s playing with:
The Guardians of Pauatahanui are enthusiastically protecting the bird life in the Pauatahanui sanctuary, while turning the native fish into white bread sand wedges. Mike Joy told me he’s given up confronting these sorts of people directly. They just don’t get it:( -
Senior Green staffers resign.
-
izogi, in reply to
I thought it was strange to see that Andy Foster, a sitting Wellington City Councillor since 1992, recently signed up to run as Wellington Central candidate for NZ First. I guess his reasons are his own, but he's been a strong proponent of Wellington's pest control programme. Aside from the brodifacoum bait stations everywhere, that policy's even seen an aerial brodifacoum toxin drop to initially wipe out pests in the Zealandia sanctuary. A very similar aerial brodi drop in Nelson right now, for setting up the Brook Waimarama Sanctuary, has certain anti-1080 campaigners in a rage... even though it's more of a general rage against aerial poison than specifically 1080.
A contact of mine recently quizzed Foster on NZ First's 1080 policy. She reckoned he didn't actually know about it, yet upon being told he agreed there needed to be some tidying up of that policy... or something like that. To be honest it's not too surprising you'd not know about NZF's 1080 policy if you wanted to know about its stance on conservation, because the Environment and Conservation policy makes zero mention of it, despite 1080 obviously being a key part of NZ's existing conservation programme. To see the 1080-related policy for NZ First it's necessary to read the Outdoor Recreation policy --- they want hunters to see it but not environmentalists --- yet even that policy is open to interpretation as to exactly what it entails, and says nothing about the immediate moratorium that Prosser's been talking about.
-
Rich of Observationz, in reply to
Email
I don't understand a party employing hired guns whose underlying allegiance is to a very different party.
-
Katharine Moody, in reply to
Read them both – much of what is in the E&C policy is equally as open to interpretation or just plain “open ended”. One that is pretty clear is this one however,
Rights to take and use water are available only to New Zealand people (citizens and permanent residents) and New Zealand owned companies, and must not be alienated to overseas persons or interests whether directly or indirectly.
I do wonder just how many current water take permits are held by majority shareholders from offshore. Bet it’s huge. One assumes that specific legislation would be needed to revoke all permits nationally and then a new application process would need to be run. Suspect it would run contrary to a number of FTAs as well.
It does concern me that they run so many ‘pie in the sky’ policies that if/when in coalition they never have to be accountable for.
-
Rich of Observationz, in reply to
Email
For instance, Marsden Point is owned by Z Energy and several overseas oil companies and uses huge amounts of water. So does BHP owned Glenbrook steel works. Not to mention Tiwai Point.
Are the NZ government going to buy these substantial, if dying, assets? Or will they close down - that'd be popular...
-
Sacha, in reply to
How so?
-
Rich of Observationz, in reply to
Email
-
linger, in reply to
Oh. I read Sacha's question as "How would closing them down be popular?" and assumed you were merely being sarcastic on that point.
-
Rich of Observationz, in reply to
Email
Oh, I was (those plants are all in places where NZ First attracts its votes. Marsden Point is right next to Peters' electorate. I guess some of his voters might work there).
I thought they wanted to know how big industrial plants use water.
-
Email
Another interesting fact: maybe six times more water is used making a plastic (or glass) bottle than the bottle contains.
-
I'm completely unsurprised that, with Dunne's withdrawal, the Greens have re-entered Tane Woodley as a candidate in Ohariu.
I am quite taken aback at the amount of people in the comment threads who are expressing disgust at the Greens for running a candidate in an electorate they'll not win, accusing the greens of splitting O'Connor's vote, labelling this as a desperate hope to win an electorate because they're under the threshold, etc etc.
I know the tone of Stuff comment threads are largely dependent on a combination of whoever's stuck on the overnight moderation shift, and whichever sewer blog (or enlightened forum) happened to link to an article first, but it's almost like nobody reading Stuff has a clue how MMP works.
-
Rich, I was referring to this statement:
I don't understand a party employing hired guns whose underlying allegiance is to a very different party.
-
Email
Oh, I see: It was in relation to:
[Former Green staffer] Morris-Travers was appointed chief of staff in May last year. She was an MP from 1996 to 1999, first with NZ First and then as an independent. She was a minister in the National Party-NZ First coalition.
-
izogi, in reply to
Is there evidence that she has/had an underlying allegiance to NZ First whilst working for the Greens? That was 15+ years ago, after all. The political landscape was very different in the 90s, including for the Greens and NZ First. Sometimes people just change their minds about things, and sometimes parties and the people in them change, too.
-
I wouldn’t have believed it possible, but Jane Bowron has lost even more credibility with today’s hatchet job on the Greens ( Dominion Post 28/8/2017, p7, “All bets are off as agreement tossed aside” — online title “Greens agreement turns out to be worthless”). This time out her groundless flights of fancy are:
(i) Greens fielding a candidate in Ohariu to chase the party vote represents an end to the memorandum of understanding between Greens and Labour. Actually, it does nothing of the sort: the Greens are explicitly not chasing the electorate vote, and Ohariu voters have had more practice than most in tactical splitting of party and electorate votes, and are unlikely to be confused.
(ii) Greens could instead form a coalition with National.
Yeah, right. Where does Bowron get off peddling this nonsense? -
Joe Wylie, in reply to
I wouldn’t have believed it possible, but Jane Bowron has lost even more credibility...
Bowron had pretty much left the room by the end of her Christchurch sojourn. After a promising start as a fresh voice in the fraught world of post-quake recovery she sadly deteriorated into a vapid middle-class-busybody-on-a-bike persona, tut-tutting over the "untidiness" of the poor old book fridge, of all bloody things.
Despite being an apparent generation or so younger than the bizarrely fossilised Rosemary McLeod, these days Bowron appears hell bent on slipping into a similar curmudgeonly irrelevance.
-
Updating the earlier discussion on the party lists, according to RNZ Checkpoint, Shane Jones is ranked no. 9 for NZ First. He'll miss out if they only get around 7%.
So now we have every incentive to vote for the Lab-Nat-Green-Maori Popular Front.
-
linger, in reply to
More seriously, we really are voting for possible coalitions rather than for single parties this time. Contra MSM messaging that a Green vote could be "wasted", I would argue that if you want to have a Labour-Green coalition government, then that is more likely to happen if you vote Green than if you vote Labour. Similarly, if you want to have a Labour-Green-Maori coalition, then that is more likely if you vote Maori (since that partnership would work better if Marama Fox is brought in from the list).
Meanwhile, Winston's refusal to commit leaves voters unable to vote directly for a National-NZF or Labour-NZF coalition should they want either of those options. To the extent that Winston has a track record, it's supporting the single largest party, so those who do want such an outcome are safer voting for National or for Labour, respectively. -
Carol Stewart, in reply to
I agree. I'm not quite sure why Labour don't consider doing an Epsom type deal with the Greens in one of their electorate seats. It would benefit the Greens, and Labour, much more than the Epsom deal benefits the National Party.
-
izogi, in reply to
It must be a significant risk that voters won't like that, though.
All those likely Labour voters could elect a Green candidate if they chose to do so anyway, so they'll not necessarily be happy if Labour forced them to do that when they'd already decided they didn't want to.
Probably a few people in Labour would be happy to see the back of the Greens, even if it meant losing this election. Their presence has really complicated Labour's identity and campaigning for a long time, even if it's arguably been Labour's fault.
Post your response…
You may also create an account or retrieve your password.