Hard News: That escalated quickly ...
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llew40, in reply to
heh, I see what you did there :)
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Jacinda has the intelligence, compassion and charisma to bring Labour back into government, but her elevation to leader may be too late for it to happen this time around.
I have been plumbing for Labour to make the change, but I also feel for Andrew Little, an intelligent, hard working and good person who lacks the public persona to capture the vote. We are such a fickle electorate in some ways.
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A quick question for Labour Party experts: Where's the constitution clause that describes the adjusted leadership election process leading up to an election?
I found the 2015 constitution on the Elections website at http://www.elections.org.nz/sites/default/files/parties/rules/labour_party_constitution_2015.pdf (pdf) and linked from the part's website at the end of http://www.labour.org.nz/party_resources .
On page 145 it states "The process outlined in Appendix E shall apply during a Leadership Election." but I cannot see appendix E in the document.
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BenWilson, in reply to
and (as is conventional) resigns the next day
I hope that ends. It's annoyed me since Goff did it, just when I was warming to the bugger, and it's been chaos since, stilled only by the competent but uncharismatic hand of Little, which has to go down as his legacy. That he threw his support behind Ardern speaks of a tactical vision that put his ego to one side.
I'm so stoked both for and about the Ardern/Davis ticket. It's like X-Gen in NZ is finally getting it's shot, well before I expected to see it. I'm less fussed about Ardern being a woman, that's not a political unknown in NZ, been done twice before, both well and horribly. What I like about Ardern is her Ardern-ness, frankly. We met once and I didn't know she was a politician, and would never have worked it out without asking. It does go down as one of those muppet moments in my life, asking the future Leader of the Labour Party, and hopefully the country, at a party, "so, what is it you do for a living?".
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Great story Ben. My son did the same thing with Kate Wilkinson who was minister of conservation at the time.
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Paul Williams, in reply to
It’s like X-Gen in NZ is finally getting it’s shot
This has to be a big part of the thinking; engaging younger voters by giving them someone who looks and sounds like a contemporary.
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Pete Sime, in reply to
A quick question for Labour Party experts: Where's the constitution clause that describes the adjusted leadership election process leading up to an election?
Paragraph B12 on p.150 in the appendices to the rules in the 2016 constitution (PDF):
Should a vacancy in the leadership occur in the 3 months prior to the announced date of a general election (where known) or in the absence of an announced date the statutory date (calculated according to the date on which the election is triggered or, in the case of a caucus vote, a meeting or speacial meeting is requested), a new Leader will be elected by Caucus majority vote. The new Leader will then be subject to confirmation within three months after the election, pursuant to the Party constitution (i.e. they would need to be endorsed by 60%+1 of the new Caucus, or a full leadership contest would be triggered).
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mark taslov, in reply to
“One does not expect an incoming centre-left administration to resolve everything, so staffing and funding of reassignment surgery will have to wait.”
Thanks for that Craig, trans-inclusive antidiscrimination laws are a must but, if Labour cares, and that's a big IF, for Labour to restore credibility within the wider trans community, they need to decisively indicate that they no longer condone using the trans community and our issues as comedy fodder, and that they are willing to decenter their own cis-needs in these discussion. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great that Andrew Little is “quite happy” with his gender, he’s a very fortunate young man in that regard.
Public healthcare has always been a core Labour value. Healthcare might even be considered by some to be a human right in New Zealand.
Last week Trump blew his dog-whistle attempting to ban trans people from the military based on the pretext of them being too much of a “burden”, meanwhile in New Zealand trans healthcare is also still deemed too much of a “burden” for our country.
How is a 50 year waiting list for surgery anything other than totally unacceptable to New Zealand? It’s extraordinary. How is it that we can’t afford to fork out for this non-cis surgery while being able to rustle up a roughly equivalent amount to fund a sailing outfit?
How is this staid line that we as a nation – with all manner of HR incentives at our disposal – have been unable to recruit a surgeon to perform these surgeries for four years – while countries like Canada are opening their second trans health clinics – anything but farcical?
I watched the NCW conference with a great deal of interest last week to see if these types of issues – issues that trans women face – would be addressed but unfortunately, and rather true to form, the National Women’s Conference discourse was trans exclusionary. That’s not a slur, it’s simply that our rights and our plights remain largely unequivocally excluded from these discussions at the highest levels – especially when it counts.
I get that when the neoliberal media declares trans healthcare up for debate people might feel a sudden rush of expertise to the ego, but this fifty year waiting list is no different from any other waiting list administered by medical professionals: surgery has been deemed necessary. Ordinarily, unaffected laypeople would never presume to second guess a doctor’s recommendations.
When the party line equates to ‘trans healthcare is subordinate to cis-healthcare’,we hear you New Zealand: ‘trans-lives are subordinate to cis-lives’.
TRANS LIVES MATTER
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Gee, this is a bit creepy:
Meanwhile, Cabinet Minister Gerry Brownlee today illustrated the sensitivity National has over coverage of Jacinda Ardern's elevation to the leadership yesterday.
On his way to Question Time Brownlee shook the hand of Newshub political editor Patrick Gower with an envelope marked "Cheerleader in chief" and inside were two sets of tassles, one red and one blue.
The note from him referred to Gower's "unbridled excitement" yesterday and he was including a blue one "in the hope that one day you may find similar enthusiasm for its use".
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11898088
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Trevor Nicholls, in reply to
wow, Gower should immediately report that the National Party is plotting a leadership change already
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izogi, in reply to
Paragraph B12 on p.150 in the appendices
Thanks, Pete.
Also (unrelated), watching today's media, ugh. Hopefully Labour doesn't get too bogged down in the conversation about having a conversation about whether politicians can have babies. I bet that's exactly the type of distracting discussion that government campaign strategists would like to see it in the news for. -
simon g, in reply to
I don't think it does Jacinda/Labour any harm at all with the voters, so I don't agree re- gov't strategists, but it is sadly another example of our media embracing the clickbait. I guess the underlying question is "Do we have to accept now that in the modern media environment, it's live by the superficial, die by the superficial?". Little and his predecessors spent years talking about Labour policies, not their personal lives, and they were buried on page 13 somewhere, hidden under the Kardashians.
The positive media coverage of the last 24 hours has included some nonsense (e.g. the Herald and its online "polls"), but - at last - it's positive nonsense. An informed electorate and a fourth estate debating the issues would be far better, but in the absence of that ... well, it's New Keyland, this is what we do.
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izogi, in reply to
Yes you're probably right that it's just a shallow media and I thought she did as well as could reasonably be expected in politely shutting it down when asked...
But even RNZ Checkpoint, this evening, spent around 50% of its Labour leadership change coverage time (about half of 6.5 minutes) talking about appropriateness of asking her that question, and that's only an abbreviation of everything I've seen around the major media sites and social media today. Much of that Checkpoint coverage was spent giving soundbite space to probably every MP they could get their hands on.
It's as if it only takes some dumbell to ask a particular stupid question and suddenly the only thing worth covering by media in politics...at least until something else comes along... is the superficial nature of whether it's okay to ask that question... And by the way let's poll all our readers and listeners to broadcast all their opinions and comments about it, and try to to get our own opinion pieces to spread virally.
Hopefully she can see it through and give it the general ignoring that it deserves.
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Jesse Mulligan and Mark Richardson should be interrogated as to their intentions on breeding or more pertinently, as to their impending vasectomies, as regressive genes like theirs are mixing and muddying 19th and 21st century thinking. New Zealand needs to know.
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Neil,
I think the problem is we don't yet get to ask a youngish prospective male PM what happens if they take paternity leave.
It's an important contingency to take into account given the significance of leadership in the campaign and governance.
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People voted for a "John Key government" and then got a Not-John Key government*. I don't recall many of his interviewers demanding to know if he was going to take permanent leave. But he did.
*(to forestall the pedants, yes I know what people actually vote for, but we're talking perception - or misleading presentation - not electoral law). -
mark taslov, in reply to
I think the problem is we don’t yet get to ask a youngish prospective male PM what happens if they take paternity leave.
The problem Neil is society’s regressive attitudes towards women. That’s the tipple fortifying Richardson’s Dutch courage. This has become about more than just an election – regardless of the outcome the wickets have been shifted. We have two incredibly articulate and switched on women leading our political left, and now both, in the space of weeks, have stepped up to the crease and hit the ball into the stands.
These conversations we are having; conversations about the way we treat our most vulnerable; conversations in which we identify who our most disadvantaged are and reflect on the manner in which racism and sexism reinforces structural discrimination and inequality; conversations about the autonomy of women and the right to coexist without biological interrogation and imposed control are anything but superficial distractions in the grander scheme of things.
These are the first plays of a new innings.
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I guess my original thought about this wasn't so much to do with whether or not it's appropriate to ask a prospective PM that question. Not to say that discrimination isn't important, as are a million other things, but it's more a problem that we're now all spending so much time talking about it.
If media and public can spend days on end fawning and arguing about this, it just fills up the narrative with random people's thoughts about Labour and eclipses whatever other issues Labour would probably rather be talking about. That's part of the trap that Labour's been falling into in the past.
I was impressed with how rapidly and maturely Jacinda Ardern was able to smother that discussion when confronted, instead of fanning it, but it still didn't stop everyone else from wanting to express and scream their opinions on something that, whilst important, probably isn't intended to be a core message for the campaign. People who want Labour to be successful should hope that Labour can take hold of the conversation about itself again in coming days. If it can't control it then everything's up in the air again.
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Peter George is running the idea that it was all too smooth, and there was skulduggery in the background.
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Steven Joyce sounded not so confident, and full of bluster, this morning on the radio.
Not sure he has the chops to change on the fly... so he'll probably revert to attack dog mode. -
Ian Dalziel, in reply to
Peter George is running the idea that it was all too smooth, and there was skulduggery in the background.
Building on the foundations of Hosking's 'shenanigans' meme - I guess they can't divorce other people's actions from their own world view and processes.
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BenWilson, in reply to
Peter George is running the idea that it was all too smooth
If that's the calibre of what they're up against, I suddenly have a wild sense of hope.
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Unexpected New York Times top stories: "North Korea, Russia, Jacinda Ardern". Yes, really.
Meanwhile the Herald has pieces today by Raybon Kan and Barry Soper. One of them is funny.
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Craig Young, in reply to
Labour should immediately scrap the primary leadership selection format as soon as possible. It hasn't worked. And as for Grant, he's still finance spokesperson. That's number three, and a fairly powerful Cabinet role in its own right, as well as being a major policy platform. I don't think he's 'keeping clear' of Jacinda at all, any more than he did Andrew Little before her.
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william blake, in reply to
Not sure he has the chops to change on the fly… so he’ll probably revert to attack dog mode.
Chops..attack dog; hopefully he will devour himself like some kind of west Auckland ouroboros.
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