It seems to me that you’re rather bitter on Rob Salmond. I think this is misplaced. It’s perhaps a sad truth that a party like Labour has to consider positioning…

No, not at all, his work this year and the lack of confidence this work has given me in Labour’s future direction definitely irks me, but Rob Salmond, I don’t know him, it’s never personal, he’s just another number…

That's a significant part of why I vote for them – I looked at relevant financial policy and…

I'm starting to realize that stats is supposed to be that way.

It seems to me that you're rather bitter on Rob Salmond. I think this is misplaced. It's perhaps…

that political compass that was doing the rounds a few years back had far more to offer if only our surveys had been less one dimensional.

Well, ironically, when the parties are actually placed on it, they form a reasonably straight line (albeit on a slope), which pretty much…

Yeah that’s the limitation there, that political compass that was doing the rounds a few years back had far more to offer if only our surveys had been less one…

Heh! I can tell you the culmination of a few weeks work tossing the NZES data backwards and forwards was that I was…

Though we could just as easily substitute ‘left’ for the word ‘compassionate’ and ‘right’…

I'd sort-of unthinkingly assumed the Union votes would be as fully registered members. A friend who's a member told me before the election that there's a lot of top-down driven block-voting by the unions in these elections.

So…

Mildly annoyed I didn't stick a lazy £20 on him becoming leader at the originally offered odds of 600/1. Maybe I'll check out what's being offered on him becoming PM.

I'll pop my Fisking hat on for a…

Likewise, while…

Plain-speaking politicians, unguarded politicians, especially on the left, are liable to be monstered by the right-wing noise machine. As is already happening to Corbyn.

Possibly another reason National are…

That’s why the next Labour Government will take a lead on pay equity.

We’ll start with urgently working on paying aged healthcare assistants and caregivers fairly, and work out a track to…

What was his point?

Ponder no longer:

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/politics/news/article.cfm?c_id=280&objectid=11512750

Well, they'll either STFU and realise that the has an overwhelming mandate from the people they are supposed to be representing, and that they can like it or lump it.

Or they'll unite and conspire to undermine him…

We "politically irrelevant" Bus dwellers gave a rather stunned(who would have thunk it?) but resounding cheer at the news this morning. We tried not to get cross at the Natrad newsreader repeating the 'socialist Marx fan' narrative...and…

Or other meaningful change...for the worse.

I'm definitely not excited by the prospect of another Depression. Like a war, it's one of those times we're likely to romanticize after the fact (so long as we win), but at the time it's a real fuck. And there's no…

Or a war...

Which is why it often, and unfortunately, takes a Great Depression-grade crisis to push through meaningful change.

Ok, I submit... ;-)

Possibly but I was thinking the workforce back then also included children plus the fact that many just wouldn't be counted. Its a tricky one to figure but the fact is that neo-lib economics seems to claim…

I would like to think that the reason for doing it were as stated, increasing competition leading to lower prices, at least that what Bill Birch…

Thinking out loud, but the workforce in '29 would have (I assume) mostly been male (with certain industries such as the garment industry in New York/Chicago being exceptions), and family sizes would…

We've been conditioned to blame everyone below us for holding us back instead of those above…

It might improve the bottom line of the company, in isolation, but not add anything useful in totality.

My first job, we…

First thing that jumped out at me. There's a lot of departments in organizations that are cost centers in the first place, with negative bottom lines at all times. Excellent places for bullshit jobs. Thinking back, the whole Y2K team…

As far as I can see the article doesn't specifically say that and, although the conspiracy theorist in me craves that conclusion, I don't believe that.
I think it is just a…

This offers one theory. Strays a bit to far over the paranoia line, in my opinon (I don't (quite) think the…

...and, perhaps, had encouraged the Telly Barons to screen educational, informative and intellectually stimulating programmes....?

But no....we have eyes glued to Shorty Street and brains disengaged.

SNAFU

Now that's what I'm talking about... (Jeeze, I hate that phrase)
This is one of the reasons Labour are caught between a Black Hole and a Dark Place, the people who actually labour are few and far between…

Mightily impressed with Graeber's The Utopia of Rules. He's a bit like John Pilger, in that he's irrefutably insightful with most of his big-picture analyses, while seeming a little naively indulgent of some of his apparent fellow-travelers. For example, Crimethinc Collective, "probably the…

a fitting grovel

pa-ra-noia

I thought Steve Braunias's having him hide under Key's house was pretty good.

Hmmm, good point. Now who else do we know that doesn't wear the required tie with those smart business suits? Ah yes... Mike, the psycho, Hosking, bog scrubber to the powerful.
;-)

Ah, but... who would then clean John Key's toilet?. You see we have to have poor people otherwise how could the wealthy feel so superior?.

My problem with anonymous blogs is that if you can't stand by what you say then why should I listen.
Aaron (Bhatnagar) Incognito as far as I know. You see it is a trick of the right to pretend to be left and then screw up,…

PS: Welcome to PAS

This has to be taken in context.
Labour inherited an almost bankrupt treasury after the “think big”

I’ve heard that trotted out as justification for the throwing out of the baby with the bathwater all too often by the monocular, but I’ve usually heard it as a…

This has to be taken in context.
Labour inherited an almost bankrupt treasury after the "think big" projects of Muldoon. In a typical National way someone had a great idea and the supporters of the party meddled with it for…

Cheap printing lets us make stuff like rocket engines cheaper, but it's never likely to make plastic parts more cheaply than injection moulding in volume.…

Yeah, prior to 2008 things were different. When I think political “centre”. Implementing a surveillance state in which…

Not only the electric motors but the turbines and even the two stage nozzles, a part that would be virtually impossible to manufacture by conventional means.
Of course, our beloved Government did little to help this company as the good ol' US of Eh? felt it would…

An argument I have been repeating for decades.
We were told back in the sixties that automation would give us more leisure time, all it did was steal our jobs and give the benefit to those…

This government has picked extractive industries, dairy farming and construction including roads. The results either support your hypothesis or just prove that dunces with a 1950s mindset make bad choices.

See, we can agree on some things. ;-)

Consequently, governments can't and shouldn't try and pick winners. They should…

__"No one should have to work more than 40 hours a week to feed their kids. Everyone has the right to the absolute basics – a warm, safe home, a social life, time off with the kids, good food…

yes, that part was not impressive

Quite coincidentally I've found myself adorned in a very similar waistcoat this evening.

Heh!
BTW Anderton's dumped Alliance colleagues aren't without effective political skills. It was a group drawn from these disaffected that mounted the legal challenge that brought about Bob Parker's first significant…

yes Steve I'm that easily fooled. If only we could all have your smarts.

Anderton goes way back with Clark, and behind the scenes was likely never really estranged from her politically. The strong network ties he'd…

...and Andrew Little said on the Nation this week that it was too far away from the Election to talk about coalitions but Labour had worked with the Greens and NZFirst in…

A big part of Helen Clark's victory in 1999 was…

Panic is never a good look and Clark was a hard act to follow. Trouble is, trying to get the leadership right distracted from the message. I can understand the panic, National's PR team…

Thanks Joe. Haven't heard that for years.

Calling Mr. Oswald with the swastika tattoo
There is a vacancy waiting in the English voodoo...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ydpablsm7f0

"I am not, and never have been, a man of the right. My position was on the left and is now in the…

Also, interesting. Hopefully he continues.

Labour and National too afraid to do what’s needed to stop rising house prices

Was that from before or after Labour rejected Green approaches to work closer during the last election campaign?

That's a two way street, not helped by this sort of thing.

While I can't speak to centrism, the term "centre left" is a widely understood shorthand for a popular set of policies and attitudes about mixed market capitalism, regulation and the redistribution of income. It's…

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…

Are you really saying you are happy with how Labour have conducted themselves since about 2007? I am hardly…

I could critique that anonymous pseudo left wing blog but I would rather not waste my time when I have more important things to do, like checking for navel fluff.

To who?
An anonymous blogger who thinks blue is the right colour for a "left wing" blog. Gimmee a break.
That is about as subtle as...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Azf320JDdqU

That is unkind. I would have said it assumes that change can only be made from the government benches, so that winning on a compromise platform of being a bit nicer is better than…

No, that is National, they refuse to work with anybody unless they promise to back their neo-liberal agenda to the hilt. Labour, after "9 long years" of getting most things right, have been subject to the continuous…

Winston on the other hand would be hard to trust, but he managed to be on-board for the…

As I see it, Labour should be automatically doing that with Greens and NZFirst. Point out what similarities exist, then how…

I think it's possible. You target each group with different emphasis…

Well, it's analysis that says being elected is vitally important to Labour, for sure. Which I don't think is false.

We've got 2 main points in contention:…

– I think the bar chart Rob provided is really important;

– the centre-left emphasises the way in which majoritarianism lends legitimacy to change. The tension between authenticity and the allegedly compromised character of the centre-left is too…

Anyone thinking…

Also if people don't think National…

a: the flood of propaganda in the media, not just Mike Hoskins style blatant partisanship, but the more insidious narrative of division that we are continuously fed, even from ostensibly liberal sources (imaginary…

If Labour had done better in England, they could have chosen to bury the hatchet with the SNP and form a government, or sulk in opposition to a…

I care how good it is. I don't want either radical or long lasting change if they're for the worse.

That’s why Working for Families is better than a UBI and high…

Paywalled, unfortunately. But you snipped the bit that's the evidence? I can't say I have any feel for how amazing getting 5,000 volunteers is in a country of 64 million people. That it was unexpected doesn't…

The purpose of the Labour party is to be a vehicle of LASTING change, to stand for something that gives hope to the…

http://mams.rmit.edu.au/es4cefpg6ifj1.pdf

I heard Sanders mention his rejection of the military-industrial complex in the US, for example, and he supported that assertion by pointing out his No…

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…

You are flat wrong. The polls may be wrong (YouGov has Corbyn on 57% of the Labour electorate) and the 400,000 people who have swelled the number eligible to vote in Labour’s leadership to…

This.

Also, if it's so hard to move the centre against whatever objective yardstick we choose, what enabled the right to do it in the last 30 years?

In fact I don't like this metaphor of "pulling people toward you"…

Politically competent maybe but that does not equate to…

I'd feel a lot more hopeful about that if you had some evidence.…

And how has the same worked out for UK Labour the last few elections? Like I said, times change. This site is full of forty and fifty somethings who grew up knowing a…

I think the sad answer to that, Tom, is "at no point". Democracy is not a single system with highly specific institutions and a binary level of satisfaction. You could argue…

I think the most fraught part of it is that the moving goalposts means that discussion is always comparing apples and oranges. Because Left and…

http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/voting-intention-1979-1983

190,000 since the 2015 general election according to the guardian – that was at 9 August. Mostly union members. Look, this is great and all, but it reminds me of the Milifans before the last general election. They formed a lovely little…

If you had a lifestyle block and Mr Semmens strayed onto it you wouldn't shoot him any more than I would.

That's probably the best post of yours I've ever read on here, Tom.

First, actually let’s not consider the alternative. Let’s first consider where clinging to the “centre” has got the anglosphere Labour parties. Look at the UK – Kendall. Blair. Mandelson. Cooper. UKIP hosing up their traditional working class…

And sadly today's hyper-class can opt out of…

They could do worse than to look to Iceland for a least worst solution.

TPPA anyone?

(I'm not snarking, this is a genuine question that I'd like to hear answers to?)…

Blair won 3 straight general elections

How did he deliver different policies to those which John Major would have pursued in those years? If anything Major might have been less likely…

The real failure is the succession of Labour leaders who each went down in a hail of ideologically correct bullets. But that's the left for you. Better…

So did I. I got a free university education, just as one thing I wouldn't get today.

Sure, it wasn't the easiest place to become very rich, but the working and middle classes were somewhat better off than…

Received wisdom is that there is no support for their moving to the left.
It's unlikely, given ACT's poor showing, that they could usefully move back to the Roger…

Corbyn isn't offering new solutions. He is a fossil. As far as I can see he is promising to wind the clock back to Labour's 1983 manifesto, aka the longest suicide note in political history (copyright G…

Not exactly –

This makes the presumption that no one else would have been electable at the time. Given 17 years of Tory rule there was a lot of anything but a Tory will do. Failures in the previous…

Well they weren't killing themselves doing so...I'm not that presumptuous about what goes on in the privacy of one's own home.

Little has said Labour will keep trial periods. Clark presided over 9 years of widening the gap between wages and benefit payments.

I guess the question might be whether someone perceived as an old-school class warrior is the best person to address late-stage capitalism in the 21st century.

90-day employment trial periods, for instance. Not increasing benefit levels, for another.

Coalition might go to the left this time – if Labour can pull its weight, and Winston doesn't slime back…