Posts by Sacha
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Blunt disagreement with the Salmond proposition at Te Standard.
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Polity: In defence of the centre, in reply to Steve Barnes,
National's PR team are top notch, they even have you believing Labour are useless and whining about them
yes Steve I'm that easily fooled. If only we could all have your smarts.
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Polity: In defence of the centre, in reply to Deborah,
And what approaches has Labour made to the Greens since the election to improve the relationship, do you know?
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Polity: In defence of the centre, in reply to Deborah,
That's a two way street, not helped by this sort of thing.
Was that from before or after Labour rejected Green approaches to work closer during the last election campaign?
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Mike Smith responds.
I don’t know where Rob Salmond was in 1999, the last time Labour won government in New Zealand. Labour went into that election with a declared coalition partner on its left in the Alliance, with declared policies to raise the top rate of income tax, to bring ACC back into public ownership and to restore income-related rents for state house tenants. Labour’s narrative swung left and Labour won; the Victoria University book on the election was titled “Left Turn.
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Polity: In defence of the centre, in reply to Steve Barnes,
I can't understand why you keep "putting the boot in" here, unless of course you are content with National having another term just to spite Labour. What exactly is your problem?.
Are you really saying you are happy with how Labour have conducted themselves since about 2007? I am hardly a lone voice in wanting them to pull their socks up for the sake of the whole progressive left - and more importantly all the people who are harmed by not having a coherent competent voice on their behalf.
If Labour do not demonstrate for voters right now that they can work constructively with progressive allies, we will get another term of the incumbents. Labour's caucus and party are kidding themselves if they imagine getting to 40% this time.
Seems to me most of the barriers to cooperation lie on Labour's side (and perhaps Winston's as mentioned). The Greens, Mana and others have better track records of openness to working together.
Do post links if you have evidence to the contrary. I could always be wrong. But not because I support the current governing clowns, ok.
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Sharon O'Neill. It's the eye contact, right? Sure aint the lip-syncing.
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Colonel Trotter weighs in. h/t Hebe
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Polity: In defence of the centre, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
You will recall it is not the Greens who have resisted working together. Labour does not need to 'point out' anything, they need to get over themselves and have a genuine conversation.
Winston on the other hand would be hard to trust, but he managed to be on-board for the joint Manufacturing inquiry so it can be done.
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Danyl offers some relevant reckons.
This pattern of left-wing centrists adopting ‘strategic values’ because ‘that’s what voters want’, and then getting annihilated because of total political ineptitude is becoming a depressingly familiar trend. There’s a cargo-cult mentality to it, I think. ‘Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were centrists’, the reasoning goes, ‘They moved left-wing parties to the right and they won. So to win you need to move to the right.’ So they move to the right and just sit and wait for the voters to fly in. But they never come.
Tony Blair and Bill Clinton were very astute politicians and they figured out at the beginning of their careers, all those decades ago now, that at that moment in history the best way to win was to move their parties to the right. But what if that moment in history has passed on now, and the best way to win is . . . something else? If they were starting their careers would they repeat the same strategy even though it isn’t working? Or would they look for something new?
I think they’d look for something new. And I don’t think it would be movement along the values spectrum. It would look, probably, like the data-driven grass-roots campaigning of Obama. But the closest we have to that in New Zealand is the National Party.
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