Posts by Tom Semmens
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I was talking to a young DINKY couple last night, always voted Green. Last Xmas at the height of the market they brought a modest two bedroom place at the height of the market.
They both voted already, for National. As he said, "we want to protect our investment".
And I guess on their mortgage an extra $20 each in a tax cut would be welcome to. Meanwhile, children go hungry in hard working families and the mentally ill largely live on the streets.
I felt profoundly sad for my country.
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Politik say they have seen National's internal polling which indicate a 1% lead to the left bloc and softening of the National vote.
My bones tell me the National scare campaign worked right up until Bill English jumped the shark on the whole slaughter the dairy herd thing and the media started calling National's advertisments straight out lies.
I am going to make my call - A Labour-Green 62 seat win on the back of a late swing to Labour.
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I hope it's policy is coherent enough for the new minister to make it clear the new funding will require the likes of Hooton and Farrar getting kicked off the airwaves.
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Hard News: Where are all the polls at?, in reply to simon g,
97% of the olds, but only 67% of the youngs. That makes any "youthquake" a fairly mild tremor ... so far.
Has anyone reported the late enrolment pattern from last election?
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So now we know Labour's real problem - it is insufficiently well connected to be able have a foreign spy in it's caucus for six years. Makes me wonder if the Aussie citizenship requirement isn't a good idea after all.
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I’m trusting Ardern’s government – being often an optimist – to rebuild the public service
The Public Service is dead and buried - surely the attempted hit on Winston Peters, clearly connived at by senior civil servants, has shown that.
The biggest favour an Ardern government could do would be finally put the myth of the neutral public service out of it’s misery (chalk it up as another victim of neoliberalism) by demanding the tendering of resignations by every senior civil servant, so they may be re-confirmed or replaced at the pleasure of the incoming government. Then everyone, including the public, would know where they stand, every utterance of a public servant could be taken for what it is, and the actual radicalism of an incoming administration could be ascertained by looking at their likely appointments to key roles in the bureaucracy.
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Oh and talking about having to stop, I think it is outrageous polls are still being released AFTER VOTING HAS STARTED!!!!
It would be a very simple law change to ban them from the day advance voting opens.
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Hard News: Where are all the polls at?, in reply to Dennis Frank,
The TV3 poll results were presented in a way designed to give TV3 the biggest possible headline. Presumably on discovering there was insufficient movement from their last poll to justify an hysterical headline, the numbers were "re-worked" to give a hysterical headline - namely, the undecided vote was excluded.
Paddy could then engage in the worst sort of manipulative hyper-ventilating faux-journalism and TV3 got a nice ratings bump.
God forbid a story that pointed out the solidity of the National vote, the size of the undecided vote, and the fluidity of the change vote, you know, a headline that might give the voter food for thought (oh, the horror!).
God help me but to agree with Matthew Hooton, but this election the determination of a tiny group of unelected and self-appointed media opinion jocks to set the agenda (tax! Tax! Oh my God, TAX!) and decide the outcome has shocked me. Sure, it has been much more to Jacinda's benefit than National this time round. But we need to seriously reform our media landscape. We can't have a tiny coterie of people actually thinking they have a right to hijack our democratic process and manipulate the news to suit the needs of their networks and their personal opinions. It has to stop.
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Hard News: Where are all the polls at?, in reply to simon g,
Latest oddity: a sort-of poll (illustrated by a not-sort-of propaganda video from the Nats) on NZ Chinese voters, which is described as being “at odds with some other mainstream polls”.
Given the number of current and ex-National party MPs firmly in the Chinese communist parties NZ fifth column, this doesn't surprise me.
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Hard News: Where are all the polls at?, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Since The Greens have polled from 15 to 4% and back to 6% thus far giving them a random point here or there is as good a method as the polls for guessing what they’ll have on election day.
I hear tell the Greens themselves are confident they are polling in the 6.5% range, but their big worry is historically they need to be polling at least this much to get over the threshold on election day, given how lazy their supporters are.