Posts by Craig Ranapia
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Hard News: The Next Labour Leader, in reply to Keir Leslie,
Greens to overtake Labour in number of MPs is such an absurd idea it is very hard to take seriously anyone who holds it.
Yeah, and once upon a time it was an absurd idea that the Greens weren't going to go down with the Alliance. Just saying.
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Hard News: The Next Labour Leader, in reply to Bart Janssen,
What care about is that it’s a failed strategy that is only more and more likely to fail again as folks become more familiar with MMP and the idea that a small party can represent their specific interests.
And if both Labour and National can't grok that voters are not their bitches, they have nobody but themselves to blame for the results and no amount of pissy dolchstoßlegende whining will change it. Seriously. Not rocket science.
Well, they got a 50% vote increase so more and more people think they are.
And if Labour decides that a 'Doctor No' strategy a la Tony Abbot is what works for them, the Greens may find they're a lot more influential outside government than inside it. One thing commentators haven't picked up on is a larger caucus also leaves the Greens a much deeper bench to cover select committees - just because the lamestream media doesn't cover them properly doesn't mean they don't matter.
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A throwaway comment or the real attitude of PA participants to the older generation that surfaces periodically ?
@Bulbul: Keith was obviously, and sarcastically, noting that you can't just wish away the bleeding obvious spike in superannuation costs coming down the pike without 1) dramatically raising eligibility very quickly or 2) dramatically reducing the pool of claimants. I find it hard to see how you drew the conclusion Keith was disappointed that he can't tuck into a big plate of Soylent Green...
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asset impairments
I could think of something really really tasteless, but won't lower the tone of proceedings quite so early. :)
Under this limit expenditure will grow no faster than the annual increase in the rate of population growth multiplied by the rate of inflation.
But I will be bitchy enough to point this out - isn't it funny how the one area of public expenditure that can't be linked to inflation is MPs annual pay increases -- even while, of course, civil servants are told by successive governments to show "wage restraint" for Team Kiwi.
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NB: Labour is a right wing party, just not far right like National.
Yeah, well I don't see the point of arguing statements like that because they're basically impossible to falsify. Ask your average Tea Bagger in the United States, and every center-right government in the Anglophone world with any kind of welfare, public education and public healthcare might as well be North Korea. From where they're standing, they're right.
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Elsewhere, the usually sensible Tapu Misa gets over-heated:
It’s true [Cunliffe] isn’t overly endowed with humility but this seems to me more in the order of a precocious teenager who hasn’t learned to dissemble than an egomaniac. Like someone with Asperger’s, he seems to lack the kind of filter that would have kept him from, say, making that sexist comment about Judith Collins during the campaign. [Emphasis added]
What. The. What. I think I know what Misa meant to say, and there are people around here (including our host) who have a lot more day-to-day experience of living with Aspies. But I can’t say my relationship with Jimmy Rae-Brown, who is a great chap, has been marked by out-gassings about the post-apocalyptic MILF-ness of various senior female politicians. Dunno, perhaps he's atypically neurologically atypical :), but I'd like to think columnists are lot less inclined than they used to be to used "schizoid" as lazy, misleading and insensitive short-hand for "indecisive" or "ill-tempered". Perhaps the Herald Style Book could become equally mindful that being an obnoxious twatcock and on the autistic spectrum are not synonyms.
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Hard News: The Next Labour Leader, in reply to Russell Brown,
Which is the thing to say, and has been the thing to say for simply ages, but can you actually point to any recent example of the Labour leadership “trashing” the Greens and the Maori Party, over and above the normal electoral contest?
@Russell: No, because I think even Trevor Mallard at his most over-caffenated got that Helen’s “haters and wreckers” blurt was a serious error of judgement. But I have sat in a room (with very few white faces and NO media) not long after the Maori Party joined the government and listened to Shane Jones go on the attack in terms that were well beyond a robust campaign debate and don’t bear repeating here.
OK, you can say “harden the fuck up, be-atches, and deal” but the idea that there’s a lot of bad blood between Labour and the MP doesn’t come as a great surprise to me. And, of a kind of you don’t shake off overnight. What keeps politics interesting is the involvement of human beings - with their parchment-thin skins and near-Balkan abilities to bear a grudge attached. :)
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Hard News: The Next Labour Leader, in reply to Euan Mason,
It’s mental illness, really.
No. It's not. And could I ask you sincerely and in good faith to be really mindful of how you talk about mental illness in this context, and how it might sound to PAS readers who are living with such conditions either in themselves or friends and family? Thanks.
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Hard News: The Next Labour Leader, in reply to Euan Mason,
However, a leader of a major party has to be an effective communicator and Shearer has some work to do on that account. ……..
I wouldn't disagree with you there - but I also think the CW that Cunliffe is the media master (and I though Paul Holmes got a little over-heated on that score on Q&A) needs qualification. He's been a very good finance spokesman; but the leader of the Opposition can't afford any crude outbursts about the post-apocalyptic MILF-osity of Judith Collins distracting from policy. It's not just the "smug" that irritates me about Cunliffe, but the occasional fits of big swinging dick machismo that are as ridiculous as they are distasteful. (Really, did anyone need to know that John Key and Phil Goff both think Liz Hurley is a smokin' hot piece of totty?)
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Hard News: The Next Labour Leader, in reply to Isaac Freeman,
When Labour people try to talk to Greens, they’re stymied by the misapprehension that they already share the same values and speak the same language.
I think they're more "stymied" by the bizarre misapprehension that they can go out and trash the Greens and Maori Party then expect them to come running, tails a wagging, whenever they snap their fingers. I don't think Turei and Norman (or Sharples and Turia) are utterly psychotic - they know the gaping policy gaps with National. But it's interesting how far "don't be a dick" can get you in grown up politics.
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