Posts by Tom Semmens
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“…[7] Stacked against two walls, more than 60 cardboard boxes await our attention.
They contain all the ballot papers for Waitakere in this election. Each box represents…”Surely we don’t need more evidence that electronic voting is a corporate profit making solution looking for a voting problem that doesn’t exist.
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Damian Christie,
On a brighter note: I interviewed Holly Walker,
So Labour is a wicked party because it is full of professional Bowen triangle types obsessed with issues marginal to the day to day life of most New Zealanders and who are following a careerist path from the politics department and student activity to parliamentary researcher to parachuting into parliament as an MP with no real world experience.
On the other hand, Holly Walker is an impressive new MP because she did politics at Otago and Oxford (that well known bastion of hard nosed reality), worked in student media, and was a parliamentary researcher before parachuting into parliament as an MP with no real world experience and for a party that over 90% of New Zealanders adjudge to be worried about issues marginal to their day to day life.
Right. I am so glad we've cleared up the difference between the evil careerist machine politics monsters we must slay and the ardent caped crusaders we need more of.
And I vote Green, FFS.
Who could have guessed?
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But it seems that the caucus didn’t really pay all that much attention to the mood of those meetings, and the response of people there to the candidates.
Lew put it best over at the Standard :
Alienating the obsessive activist rump who still don’t understand why Labour has been doing badly since 2006 isn’t mad. Embracing them would be.
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David Shearers first statement as leader was very good. His call to be part of the poverty commission and his pledge to get out and re-connect over the summer shows that the man with the right diagnosis of the parties ills got the job as leader.
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Keith Ng,
I would love to. However, it was an event closed to the media and for party members only.
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I shall confine myself to but one comment only.
Anyone who was at the meeting yesterday and noted the exchange between David Shearer and Judith Tizard would know which of the two candidates represents change.
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In Helen Clark’s 1st year as PM, the Granny especially was egging on a ‘winter of discontent’ over the repeal of the Employment Contracts Act and related legislation – “Economy goes into nosedive”, much?
And I think the Herald was successful. Labour’s time in government was defined by that first winter – she and Cullen didn’t have the political courage to take on the neo-liberal establishment, and they were found out and routed in their first skirmish. From then on, Labour was petrified of upsetting the business class and simply confined themselves to a socially liberal agenda for an illusion of serious change. As for an economic policy, it was to use the tax take of the economic boom to ameliorate the harshest edges of Rogernomics and to tinker on the edges of the gigantic neo-liberal space with a big “do not enter – by order” sign on it.
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but I suspect that that will much harder to do than has been suggested.
Way to do it? Day one of parliament the first day a new Labour led government is sworn in, repeal it by ramming it through under urgency. The tinpot loons at the Hearld would barely have time to splutter into their coffee and it'll be gone.
I really wonder how far to right our newspaper editors actually are. Is there one crackpot mad-as-a-cut snake neo-liberal theory that the Herald's safely anonymous editorial writers wouldn't support?
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Good Lord, who wrote this morning's Herald editorial? Trevor "Zap" Loudon?
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cheery picked students
their smiling little faces
Upturned in wonder at the marvel of correct spelling.