Posts by Keir Leslie
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Polity: House-buying patterns in Auckland, in reply to talkie_toaster,
(A) if you can't do something in a non-racist way then maybe you shouldn't do it and (b) yes it is very hard to talk about "floods of Chinese money" in a non-racist way because you've explicitly framed it in a racist way that makes it about race in a way that echoes previous racist discourse.
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Unfortunately the people you think are incompetents who should move on will be people who many others would see as important champions of whatever. It's a universal rule that everyone wants to get rid of the dead wood but very few people agree on what, specifically, the dead wood is.
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Labour holds the Māori electorate Tāmaki Makarau. Peeni Henare.
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Erm I think if George and Danyl say that factions or factional behaviours exist (to some extent) in the Green Party then that is evidence in and of itself given their political backgrounds.
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The last major reform of Labour happened in the 1970s, carried out by Anderton and Clark. It is still, essentially, a First Past the Post political party.
I actually disagree with this. There have been three really big changes made to the party post the 70s. The first was in the 80s, and especially under Ruth Dyson, when a bunch of alterations were made as part of factional warfare. The second was in the latter half of the nineties when the Clark ascendancy was put together. And the third, like it or not, was in the last term, when a bunch of reforms were made that didn't really help that much, at least in the short term.
And I also disagree with the thesis that the NZLP is an FPP party. Like almost all NZ parties, it is a hybrid between FPP and proportionality, because like all NZ parties it operates in a hybrid system. (The Greens are the only pure PR party in NZ at the moment, and this is a specific adaptation to imposed demand.) Labour's problems of reform are big but I think conceptualising it as FPP/not-FPP is a bit whiggish in terms of the whole implicit-narrative-of-progress. Part of Labour's problem is a regression since the Clark era.
The fact is that I would estimate that probably half if not more of the current senior organisational leadership are at least one of (a) burnt out (b) incompetent factional hacks (c) primarily interested in protecting their own power base. Under Clark this didn't matter because her and Cullen pulled the strings and the organisational wing was pretty much ornamental, particularly one you got beyond the Party President and General Secretary.
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The Scottish Parliament and the Welsh and London Assemblies use a form of MMP (with regional lists in the national cases.) The Northern Irish Assembly uses STV, and then proportional allocation of the ministers based on the d'Hondt method. The London Mayor, like most elected Mayors, is elected with a truncated form of STV. And of course, the European Parliament is STV.
The British voter, by and large, is familiar with and accepting of non-FPP voting systems. So there's no reason you couldn't see electoral reform, but voters are very suspicious of things like AV, which looked like a Lib Dem jack-up.
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Lianne didn't run as a Labour candidate - it's not really like we have any control over someone who explicitly ran as an independent.
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Speaker: Christchurch: how did it come…, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Not sure the People's Choice and the Labour Party are very distant on this issue - here's what Labour thinks about the Common Sense Plan:
The Common Sense Plan for Christchurch released by The People’s Choice today is a welcome relief from the shallow debate about rates rises versus asset sales, Labour’s Christchurch MPs say.
"We congratulate The People’s Choice for developing what is a sound financial consideration of how we can move forward as a city.
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Speaker: Christchurch: how did it come…, in reply to Hebe,
In the long run (i.e beyond the 2019 debt hump that we're being massaged through at the moment) though, turning productive capital into unproductive capital (i.e a white elephant stadium etc) will mean that rates will inevitably have to rise to cover the loss of income. Asset sales aren't magic - they just hide the cost for the time being.
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I think the narrative of forced-into-asset-sales is quite rosy.
Sure, there are some councillors who feel they have to make tough decisions - and the People's Choice councillors are well aware that partial asset sales may need up being part of mix - but there's also a strong ideological push to sell off assets from councillors who just don't think the council should own them anyway.
If you saw Jamie Gough's comments in the Press, he's already made up his mind - it's asset sales. Asset sales. That's it, done and dusted. And it's not like this is new - Gough (and the Independent Citizens) has always hated the idea of council ownership of CityCare, Port of Lyttelton, Red Bus, etc.
I also don't think there is a genuine will among the "brighter councillors" (whatever that means) for new ideas to come out of the submission process. I think there's an effort to railroad asset sales through as a cheap and easy way of making the council finances look good in the short term, and the long term damage done to the city? That's someone else's problem, in twenty years time. Just look at the very short time frame on LTP submissions, or the way the LTP document is so stacked towards asset sales that the Council had to put out a statement making clear it's not a done deal yet!