Posts by Tom Semmens
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But it seems that prior party allegiances aren’t a great predictor in Auckland
True, but that doesn’t mean many candidates adopted different labels to deliberately deceive voters and hide their otherwise unpalatable political affiliations. Stephen Berry is amongst the most egregious of these. A hard line libertarian who actively promotes the wingnut NZCPR website of Muriel Newman on his facebook page, he buried all reference to his libertarian beliefs, pretending to be a moderate on the “Affordable Auckland” ticket and claiming in the paper he is “…promoting affordable living if elected, calling himself as “the ratepayer’s champion”.
When I asked him on Facebook about his libertarian beliefs he said they were “in the past”. He then accused me of being a lefty conspiracy theorist. As soon as the election was over he posted his thanks to his supporters on… solopassion.
Berry, in short, constructively lied to Auckland voters and tried to use an astroturf front organisation to get elected.
Craig’s proposal would at least flush out dishonest candidates like Berry.
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with an actual, statutorily-independent oversight body
You know what? I've got this bridge for sale....
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Whether that period has totally ended is hard to tell
How can you say it has ended? Oversight of the police has got worse, and legal aid has been stripped. All that could have happened is the police are no longer getting found out in even high profile cases, let alone the dozens of nickel and dime framings they get up to all the time.
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I have no idea if Lundy killed his family or not. But what is emerging is a constant pattern of police over-reach with evidence that amounts to incompetence.
The police over-reach because they think they can – in trials they actively expect the connivance of juries drawn from a public radicalised by a sensationalist, crime porn driven media. Over-reach results in retrials and compensation, paid for by the taxpayer. The police are never held to account by the minister (who nowadays is simply the cheerleading apologist in chief) or by their own hopelessly compromised “independent” investigators. The upshot is the police know they can get away with over-reach more often than not, and if they are caught there will be no meaningful punishment to them individually or as an organisation – in fact the Kim Dotcom fiasco and the subsequent GCSB bill has taught them that if they do get caught, the government of the day will simply change the law to exonerate their illegal over-reach.
Since the police nowadays consider themselves infalliable and untouchable, we can rinse and repeat this Lundy malarky in plenty more case yet to come.
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alternative medicines
There is no such thing as “alternative” medicines. There is medicine that works, and medicine that doesn’t. if it works (“works” being defined as producing measurable and repeatable improvements in proper clinical trials), it will be quickly taken up by medicine and used as another useful treatment tool. If it doesn’t, it is consigned to quackery. By that definition,, natureopaths, iridologists, acupuncturists, osteopaths, chiropractors, and crystal waving new age hippies are all the same – purveyors of quack medicine.
As long as the Green party continues to dispute the centrality of science in medicine in favour of a general ambient enthusiasm for various manifestations of shamanistic quackery, they should and will be kept well away from any involvement in the spending of public money in the health sector.
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Hard News: Jonesing, in reply to Tom Beard,
Is it just me, or does it strike anyone as weird that middle-class intellectuals (academics and teachers and public servants and socially liberal professionals) aren’t considered part of Labour’s core voting base? Surely they/we have been for generations.
I have strong memories of my parents taking me to Labour Party events in the 70s and 80s, in between anti-Tour and nuclear disarmament rallies. A wide spectrum of social justice, environmental and yes, “identity politics” issues have been as much a part of that movement as economic and equality issues. When did we start turning the clock back to the days of cloth-capped blokey-bloke wharfies and miners and catering to some vision of their supposed salt-of-the-earth misogyny and homophobia as an essentialised emblem of “true Labour” voters?
The sneering tone you adopt in discussing those you clearly consider to be your social inferiors perhaps answers your question better than I ever could. It is called the Labour party for a reason, one of those reasons being organised Labour makes Jack as good as all his masters - including the condescending middle-class intellectual ones.
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Hard News: Jonesing, in reply to George Darroch,
This is an exercise in capturing their affections.
Yes and no. I think that the general zeitgiest on the left is a desire for someone who will start to talk about economics again, and who can espouse a believable, transformational alternative to neo-liberalism. Neo-liberalism is now seen as a discredited zombie ideology that is clinging on because it is has the advantage of being the comfy, incumbent position of the political/media “establishment”, and the left wants a candidate who can change that.
To me, at least, this is the attraction of Cunliffe as a candidate. He seems the only one of them who is prepared to mention the lengthening queue of hungry people outside the gossip dominated neo-liberal vicars tea party that parliament has become. In terms of capturing affection, this is Cunliffe’s shrewdest insight into the current political climate on the left, and it is one that has only belatedly (if at all) come to Robertson and Jones. It is this desire from the left for a mainstream party leader who is NOT a business as usual candidate that the courtier media like Garner and Espiner are ill-equipped to see or grasp. Like all courtiers, they are to close to the palace to see the revolution coming.
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Hard News: Jonesing, in reply to George Darroch,
What it has done for Labour is given them an open platform from which to begin the 2014 election campaign. The invigoration of members, the mobilisation, the flood of emotional associations, and their affects on the party’s challenged financial situation are all likely to be highly positive.
Unless Robertson gets the nod, in which case the danger is the war between his power base of aging neo-liberal museum pieces in caucus and the largely Auckland based R&F will simply re-ignite after a few months.
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Tom, you do seem to be claiming that “a gay machine politician” cannot talk convincingly about issues that matter to blue collar provincial males.
I think that the phone is off the hook with that constituency at the moment, and appointing Robertson as leader will simply keep it off the hook for as far as I can see. There is a degree of complacency about all this that I find quite frightening. Do people in the Labour party really still have their ears painted on?
I don’t think Robertson’s sexuality will be a problem if he becomes leader.
that isn’t the point. If Robertson was a lumberjack who got a degree whilst chopping down trees and playing rugby it wouldn't matter to anyone he happened to be gay. What I am trying to say is appointing leader of the Labour Party a man who is a careerist politician AND a machine politician AND who is from Wellington Central AND who is gay sends a powerful symbolic message to the electorate about the priorities of the Labour party that feeds a belief that it has lost it’s way and no longer represents “normal” New Zealanders.
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Hard News: So long, and thanks for all…, in reply to Keir Leslie,
Tom: Yes because you can’t be a gay man and do that. Obviously.
Does Labour have the luxury anymore of testing your hypothesis?