Public Address | Cafe | Polity: A wilting rose

Kumara Republic

Sun, 10 Apr 2016 22:20:50 +1200

To me that is the distinction of voting conservatively (which can actually either be right or left) for fear of losing what you have, and voting radically (which can either be right or left) because you have nothing to lose.

Voting conservatively left: "I fear losing my job."
Voting conservatively…

Kumara Republic

Sun, 10 Apr 2016 18:07:26 +1200

The worst of the "trougher" bunch are Generation Rentier – those who relentlessly preach the free market, but are quite happy to use the power of "Big Government" when the free market threatens to disrupt their rentier monopoly licence to print money. The hostility to the Auckland Unitary Plan is…

Gregor Ronald

Sun, 10 Apr 2016 01:41:18 +1200

"Trougher" is a Slaterism, but it only applies to the left. National list MPS like Kanwaljit Bakshi or Joanne Hayes (did I hear someone ask "who"?) are never described that way.

Ian Dalziel

Sat, 09 Apr 2016 23:30:24 +1200

I just think “Business Attire” is the wrong thing to wear in Parliament,
I thought it was all about business satire...

Rich of Observationz

Sat, 09 Apr 2016 18:39:39 +1200

Maybe the MP should just have to provide evidence that they were engaged in the business in question before entering politics. I doubt Curran had many starts for the Highlanders.

Steve Barnes

Sat, 09 Apr 2016 16:26:01 +1200

I just think “Business Attire” is the wrong thing to wear in Parliament, it ain’t no stinkin’ business and we don’t need no stinkin’ badgers.
Singlet and shorts may be a little too slack though.

Rich of Observationz

Sat, 09 Apr 2016 10:49:50 +1200

whereas more mainstream MPs turn up in football shirts, or that stoopid yellow jacket Hide wore:

Rich of Observationz

Sat, 09 Apr 2016 10:48:48 +1200

In more recent times,, Nandor was obliged to wear a suit, such as the rather dapper number here:

Ian Dalziel

Sat, 09 Apr 2016 07:04:42 +1200

tired of 'rent a crowd' – you can own this one!
yearning wistfully for a bit of rabble-rousing
https://www.rebelpress.org.nz/publications/rabble-rousers-merry-pranksters
:- )

Rob Stowell

Fri, 08 Apr 2016 22:19:58 +1200

Listening to Andrew Little this afternoon was interesting. He said almost all the right things. And he seems decent and smart. But there was an audience who, given a little sauce, would have lapped it up; given a little fire, would have exploded. Little was wry and thoughtful but also…

Rob Stowell

Fri, 08 Apr 2016 22:13:09 +1200

It doesn’t matter how you dress it up, ever-increasing pollution, increasing poverty and falling living standards outside the 1% are not “wins for the left”, but they are core business for the right.
Yeah. This 'we're winning, really!' just seems daft. "They're flogging off everything they can get away with…

Rich Lock

Fri, 08 Apr 2016 20:31:21 +1200

And when things turned to shit, they discovered Labour´s salaried class professionals preferred clinking champagne flutes with the investment class and kissing the asses of bankers to doing anything to help them

"I’m just a poor white trash motherfucker. No one cares about me."

and

"[[http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/07/donald-trump-why-americans-support|...I decided to watch several…

Steve Barnes

Fri, 08 Apr 2016 17:30:01 +1200

Couldn’t hurt.
Could it?
Hardie won the election and became the country’s first socialist M.P. The tradition at that time was for MPs to wear top hats and long black coats. Hardie created a sensation by entering Parliament wearing a cloth cap and tweed suit.

Mr Mark

Fri, 08 Apr 2016 17:24:52 +1200

So, Steve, basically your solution to the Left's electoral woes is for Andrew Little to grow a hipster beard, wear a shirt/tie/suit (as the young Keir Hardie is clearly doing here) and, presumably most important of all, be seen about town in a Sherlock Holmes-style Deer-stalker hat ?

Steve Barnes

Fri, 08 Apr 2016 16:49:12 +1200

If Andrew Little would only turn up dressed like this instead of looking just like all the other stuffed shirts in pinstriped suits that pass for politicians these days the boot would be on the other foot I can tell you and that foot would be put down with a…

Kevin McCready

Fri, 08 Apr 2016 14:42:58 +1200

Rob, there's a huge difference between National saying the words people like to hear and National actually doing what people want. I'm surprised you think saying the words cuts the mustard. But then again, maybe I'm not surprised.

Matthew Hooton

Fri, 08 Apr 2016 14:10:08 +1200

The people who work for an hourly wage (the cleaners, the shop workers, council workmen, you know who I mean) were Labour´s grassroots. The people who will turn out to Jerry Collins funeral, who used to open the halls and provide the tea and biscuits and sweep up afterwards. And…

Moz

Fri, 08 Apr 2016 13:59:16 +1200

Au contraire, Labour needs to keep Mallard, King, Goff, Cosgrove, and all the other troughers around so the voting public

The problem is that the people who most revile the troughers are giving up on voting. If those people were still voting, and voting vaguely green/left then Labour hanging on…

william blake

Fri, 08 Apr 2016 13:24:29 +1200

That Economist graph. The plunge of the left follows the rise if ISIS and the GFC is a short slippery plateau on the way down, which is odd as it is the equivalent to the Berlin Wall coming down for capitalism. It seems to prove that the fall of the…

David Hood

Fri, 08 Apr 2016 12:56:52 +1200

"that during a garden-variety recession, or a major fiscal cataclysm like a bubble"

BenWilson

Fri, 08 Apr 2016 12:53:23 +1200

Of course the big question for progressives here is less “where did it come from,” and more “how do we fix it?”

Yes! The Future of Work Commission seems like a good idea, and I very much appreciate your insider insights to it. For the first time that I can…

BenWilson

Fri, 08 Apr 2016 12:45:21 +1200

Even though the progress is much slower than I’d prefer, it’s good to see progressive change happening even when the progressives are out of power.

Absolutely. To me this is a sign that the debate has been captured by progressives. It could even be that more progress is made under…

Rich of Observationz

Fri, 08 Apr 2016 12:19:53 +1200

Wasn't Shipley "Coke" and Mallard et al "Pepsi"?

Kumara Republic

Fri, 08 Apr 2016 12:08:16 +1200

Au contraire, Labour needs to keep Mallard, King, Goff, Cosgrove, and all the other troughers around so the voting public can be reminded what the party stands for.

And there are still a fair few hangers-on from the error that was the Shipley era.

Kumara Republic

Fri, 08 Apr 2016 12:03:28 +1200

"Tough financial times are, in general, more likely to lead to conservative government."

Is that during a garden-variety recession, or a major fiscal cataclysm like a bubble burst? The latter often proves to be a catalyst for meaningful change, as happened with the Great Depression.

Paul Campbell

Fri, 08 Apr 2016 10:59:22 +1200

Au contraire, Labour needs to keep Mallard, King, Goff, Cosgrove, and all the other troughers around so the voting public can be reminded what the party stands for

I'm not sure "trougher" is actually a word – my spell check complains, so does my dictionary – perhaps you are speaking…

Bob Mason

Fri, 08 Apr 2016 10:52:09 +1200

(applauds)

Excellent post, Rob. And I am glad that you acknowledge that the current Nat government has had to swallow a number of rats (from its perspective) due to the success and popularity of the previous Labour government. John Key said WFF was "communism by stealth" when in opposition, and…

SHG

Fri, 08 Apr 2016 02:19:18 +1200

Au contraire, Labour needs to keep Mallard, King, Goff, Cosgrove, and all the other troughers around so the voting public can be reminded what the party stands for.

Tom Semmens

Fri, 08 Apr 2016 01:35:06 +1200

If Labour's deadwood were just a bunch of has been reactionaries determined to resist any move back to left and determined to keep their overwise miserably unemployable asses off the dole queue, they might not be a problem. But they are also the rotting corpse of Labour's betrayal grining grotesquely…

Mr Mark

Fri, 08 Apr 2016 01:10:03 +1200

Yep. The 2011 New Zealand Election Study found that, for the first time since such polling began, Labour was no longer the pre-eminent Party of "Blue Collar" voters. In other words, the Nats managed to win a slightly larger proportion of skilled and unskilled workers than Labour. Unprecedented.

But (as…

Tom Semmens

Thu, 07 Apr 2016 22:12:41 +1200

Whats gone wrong? The collapse of the waged class in the face of globalisation, recession, fraud and corruption. The people who work for an hourly wage (the cleaners, the shop workers, council workmen, you know who I mean) were Labour´s grassroots. The people who will turn out to Jerry Collins…

Rob Stowell

Thu, 07 Apr 2016 21:11:47 +1200

Bold, eh. that would be nice. Because Labour too often come across as – "We don't know what we believe in but if you tell us what you want maybe we'll send out a researcher to write a prelimimnary report ..."
(Also – lumping Sanders with Trump and Le Pen?…

Rich of Observationz

Thu, 07 Apr 2016 17:55:04 +1200

I would argue that politicians like Sanders and Corbyn as well as parties such as Syrisa and Podemos are merely re-establishing a left-of-centre alternative that had disappeared.

The Attlee government, for instance, introduced a comprehensive health service, free education, welfare benefits and nationalised the key industries of the day. They…

martinb

Thu, 07 Apr 2016 17:29:30 +1200

Just to confirm Rob- are you endorsing the idea that Bernie Sanders is an extremist not a social democrat? If so, could you perhaps explain that a bit, as I believe you are closer to the US political scene than us muggles?

I agree that redistribution seems like a good…

Public Address

Thu, 07 Apr 2016 17:29:30 +1200

Discussion from blog post.