Posts by Danyl Mclauchlan
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Craig - they still went along, didn't they? And take another peek at the broadcast coverage, particularly.
What journalist worth the name would have stayed away?
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I assume the Act-aligned blogs are awash with blood and bile at the moment, although I'm not inclined to go looking.
And that's the difference between you and me. They're mostly pretty quiet, with terse comments on the issue or nothing at all.
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seeing that I'm writing a PhD on conspiracy theories
Threadjack. Cool - what's your favorite book about conspiracy theories?
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one man's social engineering is another woman, child, homosexual, impaired person's basic human rights.
We're drifting away from reality here: policies that regulated lightbulbs and shower pressure were what upset voters and they weren't guaranteeing anyone's human rights.
A few pages back someone blamed Labour's inability to sell it's policies on 'the media'. I'm sympathetic to small parties like the Greens when they complain about misrepresentation in the media - but when you're in government you have more press secretaries than there are journalists in the press gallery. You have millions of taxpayer dollars to spend on public relations consultants. You have 'researchers' to write letters to the editor and call talk radio shows pretending to be members of the public. You have the PM who can go on any tv or radio show they want any time they want. If you can't communicate your own policies properly when in power it's your own damn fault.
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There was a similar degree of pearl-clutching in National when John Key decided to swallow dead rats like asset sales and scrapping the nuclear free policy - 'they're great policies, it's just the media's fault the public doesn't understand them', ect (although obviously the Nats didn't have all the special pleading: 'trying to be popular and get elected discriminates against women and gays! Somehow!') that Labour will have to put up with as it reconnects with voters. Key's lesson is that ruling out a handful of unpopular policies still gives you a huge degree of flexibility once you're in power.
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Your idea that it's only by being more like National that Labour will win has to be tested in reality - it may just as easily be that faced with a choice between actual Tories and Tory wannabes, the electorate will make the very rational decision of selecting the genuine article.
Key won on a platform of moving to the centre and being 'Labour-lite': like Labour without all the sneering 'we-know-best' arrogance. My thesis is that if Labour shows some contrition and distances itself from those negative qualities then the public will vote for them rather than the now-drifting-to-the-right National Party.
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Or, to put it another way, accept injustice, discrimination and bigotry, and do nothing about them.
Fuck that.
I wonder what portfolios Anne Tolley will get in her second term . . .
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I'd go the other way - governments should accept that they're going to do unpopular things, and that they're not likely to get elected four terms in a row.
I'd much rather they make a bit of a difference in the world rather than sit on their hands to be national-lite so they can get elected.
The section 59 amendment closed a loophole that allowed a couple of assault cases a year to be dismissed. Worth doing? Sure. But equivalent to homosexual law reform? Worth losing power over and having Paula Bennett and Judith Collins as government Ministers?
And how did their policy to ban incandescent bulbs work out? It made them a bit more unpopular and the new government reversed it as soon as they took power. Way to change the world.
I have been noting with interest the coverage of various government social initiatives since the election. A wonderful example was provided by the recent proposal to ban smoking in prisons. This proposal was not 'framed' in the media as any kind of "over the top public health measure", "nanny state" or the much beloved "pc gone mad". I don't think that any of those descriptions would be accurate ones, but I am fairly sure that such a proposal under a Labour-led government would have been framed in exactly those ways.
My phrase for this is Natatonia: n. Serene, coma-like stupor shown by National Party members and supporters towards government policies they protested against vigorously while their party was in opposition. One who strongly opposed the Electoral Finance Act as anti-democratic but supported the actual dismantlement of democracy in Canterbury, or attacked Labour’s perceived pro-Maori bias but endorses Whanau Ora and the proposed Foreshore settlement is in a state of Natatonia.
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Most people define 'social engineering' as parliament making laws they don't like.
Yeah. Labour were voted out partly because the public was 'sick of the nanny state' and now they're angry the government won't lower the blood alcohol limit for drink driving. Go figure.
And so we're stuck with "social engineering" and "telling Kiwis how to live their lives". Jesus wept.
Labour and their supporters can either go on relitigating these debates, almost certainly lose them all again, and definitely get a lot of potential voters pissed off at them again - or they can draw a line under them and say 'we're just not going to go there anymore. People didn't like it. We listened. So our focus will be on the economy'.
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But who'd want to be the president who pulled out of Afghanistan and ushered in, say, a civil war in which half a million people died?
I doubt many people in the US would notice or care; the political danger is a withdrawal followed by another terror attack inside the US.