Posts by Mr Mark
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David, I don't suppose you'd have the NZES stats for % swing (ie vote movement/flows) between the various political parties 2011-2014 would you ?
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Yep, great post, David. Polly sounds like a right little whirlwind of energy (and imagination). Possibly with Gifted Child tendencies ?
Precisely a year since our 2 week self-drive road trip through western Norway. Spent the final day/night in the very relaxed, laid-back pretty little city of ... yep, you guessed it ... Trondheim. Blue skies and sunshine almost the whole way. Walked across the iconic Old Town Bridge ( Gamle Bybro ) - to the beautiful Bakklandet district. Just a nice little two hour stroll before heading to the airport later that afternoon and back to Blighty.
Norway is superlative upon superlative - I'm always a sucker for Mountains, Fjords, Lakes and - above all - mountain road passes (the more serpentine the better).
Lurrrved the Trollstigen on the way from Geiranger fjord to Alesund.
http://i.imgur.com/nZZ2s1J.jpg Not to mention the Snow Road north-east of Flam. (though possibly could have done without some of the longer, narrower and more claustrophobic road tunnels)But moving on to some of my core obsessions, Trondheim is:
- home to Norways top football club (Rosenborg Trondheim)
- for my fellow Leftie types here - it's the most Left-leaning of Norway's major cities. In fact, trade union community and student groups in Trondheim played a central role in moving the Norwegian Labour party away from its recent neo-Liberal excesses.But I digress outrageously ...
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Hard News: About the King's Arms (updated), in reply to Russell Brown,
"It's worth noting that this is also an area where many more people used to live, before the motorway junction built in the 1960s forcibly displaced as many as 30,000 residents"
Newton, Arch Hill and Eden Terrace were at the core of one of the great Labour strongholds of the post-war era - the Arch Hill seat. Labour could usually rely on it being one of their three strongest electorates (often second only to Mabel Howard's Sydenham). So I'm assuming (as a Wellingtonian with limited knowledge of the minutiae of Auckland's social / cultural history) that it was a high density area with a very strong working class (presumably, above all, unskilled wkg class) population ?
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Polity: A wilting rose, in reply to Steve Barnes,
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 ?
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Polity: A wilting rose, in reply to Tom Semmens,
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 you've rightly implied) this wasn't a corollary of workers moving Right - indeed National's share of the Blue Collar vote actually declined by one or two points. Rather, it was first and foremost a consequence of working-class voters swinging heavily from Labour into Non-Voting.
Haven't seen the Class voting stats for 2014 but - given Labour's on-going electoral decline - you'd have to assume the trend's continued. I doubt the small increase in overall turnout in 2014 would have reversed anything.
- Mr Mark/Swordfish
(give my regards to Sevilla, Sanc, - traditionally one of Espana's more Left-leaning Cities) -
A Yes/No Option
Audrey Young thinks that "it should be easy for John Key to defend himself against inevitable criticism" on the flag process, clearly implying that most voters will accept his responses.
For example, she tells us: "To those who say people should have been asked first if they wanted change" Key's reasonable response would be "it was a question biased toward no change"
But is Young right when she suggests that most of the public would cheerfully accept that argument from Key ?
Given that:
- an April 2015 Herald-DigiPoll (ie The Herald's very own Pollster) found that almost 80% believed that the first referendum should ask if the public wants a flag change in the first place
- 66% of voters in the February 2016 UMR Poll (including 47% of Nats) agreed that the flag referendum has been a distraction and a waste of money
- that all recent polls suggested large-to-overwhelming majorities opposed a flag change
and
- a February 2014 Colmar Brunton found only 2% thought changing the flag was an important issue
... I suspect Audrey may be barking up the wrong tree.... Bless her.
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I played football ( The Beautiful Game ) both competitively and socially through my 20s and 30s and I gotta say I felt borderline -concussion more than a few times after leaping to head a ball that'd been blasted toward me with a good deal of power (always worst when it happened to be an unusually heavy ball). All of which possibly explains a lot.
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I've set out the details of various public polls conducted over the last 5 years on who people prefer as the next National Party Leader here ...http://subzpsubzp.blogspot.co.nz/
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Polity: Key Derangement Syndrome…, in reply to Tom Semmens,
Yep, Tom. Whenever I'm in the UK or mainland Europe (or, indeed, just across the Tas), it drives home just how freaking diabolical our mainstream (and, in particular, broadcast ) media is.
And I always feel honour-bound to point out to overseas visitors (complaining about our MSM's woeful quality) that it didn't use to be this way. In fact, in the 70s and 80s, it was often pretty damn good.
The Spanish Left, incidentally, have always impressed me with their vibrancy, their sense of urgency and their intellectual rigour.
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Polity: Key Derangement Syndrome…, in reply to Andrew Robertson,
What I find quite interesting about the two latest UMR Research Polls is that:
(1) Like other recent polls on the flag referendum (including your own One News Colmar Brunton ), they find that younger voters are a little more opposed to change than the older cohort.
(2) They find younger voters (as in General Elections) are less likely to say they will vote in the Second Referendum, while older voters are most likely to.
And yet
(3) They also find that, among those most likely to vote (irrespective of age - just likely voters in general), the current flag's margin actually increases over the Lockwood alternative.Suggesting, perhaps, that either the minority of older New Zealanders unlikely to vote in the Referendum are disproportionately Lockwood Design supporters or those younger New Zealanders who say they will probably or certainly vote disproportionately favour the current ensign (meaning: even more so than their age-group as a whole).