ACT: the guts to do what’s right1 2
1. except when it comes to properly authorising our election advertisements
2. oh, and global warming
Tag Archive for 'act'
Dave at Big News has a good post up on a vagaries of the polls. It expands on something that Idiot Savant noticed at No Right Turn in his post Priceless.
I/S observed:-
I don’t normally poll blog, but this I can’t resist: according to the graphic for the latest Herald digipoll, the Christian Heritage Party - which disbanded in 2006 in the wake of its former leader Graham Capill’s conviction for child rape - is polling 0.4%, ahead of both the Alliance (which contrary to popular belief, is still around) and (this is the best bit) United Future. So, a non-existent party beats a sitting minister outside cabinet.
Dave’s post How weird is this? then expands:-
But it gets better.
The CHP’s vote has doubled since April - and it is the only party to achieve that feat as well. [ Update: Not true, Act also did].
After some examination, he concludes
Update watch the Kiwi, Family, and United Future vote jump at the next big poll or the one after. If the former two get their act together and let everyone know who they are. Most people - even Christians - don’t know the difference between Kiwi and Family parties.
I’d agree that could happen. I’m just not sure that the little fighting factions will ever get onto a common message.
Comment readers here are probably aware that there is little I like about the art of public polling in New Zealand. The results are all over the place because the methodology is very suspect and not published. In particular they do not show the numbers of people who they were unable to contact (because of lack of landlines or busy lives), the number who refused to participate, and few show the number of undecided voters. It makes them effectively useless for anything except trend changes amongst the politically engaged.
Well almost - this set of observations highlights the other side of the polling problem. So far, voters just haven’t taken that much of an interest in politics so far for the upcoming election. So much so that a significant voting population hasn’t figured out that they are ‘voting’ in the polls for a defunct party.
Thanks to I/S and dave for brightening my morning.
On the odd occasion I have time to read outside of the confines of The Standard and its ever increasing brawl of entertaining comments. I noticed we don’t have a external reading list, and it is within the range of my writing skills, so here are my oddities for the slow weekends….
From quote of the day on the Linux test box. It shows a correct appreciation of the art of development.
Scott’s second Law:
When an error has been detected and corrected, it will be found
to have been wrong in the first place.
Corollary:
After the correction has been found in error, it will be
impossible to fit the original quantity back into the equation.
Toms Hardware (great site) has a article 10 Ways to Beat the New Hands-Free Laws for the toy freaks on hands-free cellphones for cars. I loved the description of users…
..in recent years, headsets have acquired a nasty stigma. Depending on your point of view, Bluetooth headset wearers might either look like cyborgs, telemarketers or simply jerks.
If you already wear one, don’t take this personally. It’s just that some people have been holding out for as long as possible to avoid looking like unstable people that talk to themselves.
Not only do I get frustrated with microsoft software to the point that I don’t use it - it turns out that Bill Gates has the same kinds of problems. Full text: An epic Bill Gates e-mail rant. Very entertaining and I’d hate to moderate the comment stream on that site.
On a more serious note I dug around my favorite site at the Economist to find this gem. Down and dirty on an alternate approach to geothermal energy. We live on top of a slow nuclear reactor called the Earth where heat is generated from the slow breakdown of uranium and other heavy isotopes. Why would you bother with all of the problems with fast nuclear reactions when you can push down pipes in a variation of the mohole project to tap geothermal energy. It is a well known under-utilized technology set that doesn’t have a lot of gotcha’s.
Rodney Hide is calling for the Budget’s tax cuts to take the form of raising the thresholds to account for inflation since 1999, removing of the 39 cent bracket, and a $10,000 tax-free bracket.
What would ACT’s tax cuts entail for New Zealanders? Hide says the average cut would be $50 a week, so we would need to find $8 billion out of the Budget for that - $5 billion more than most commentators say is available for cuts. That means the first implication of such massive cuts is slashed social services – less money for hospitals and teachers.
But they’ve got $50 a week to make up for it eh? Well, no. That’s the average cut but most of it goes to the wealthy. If, like 50% of people, your income is less than $27,000, ACT you’ll get less than $33 a week (which will disappear on more expensive doctor’s visits, school fees, private ACC levies). If, like 1% of people, your income is more than $150,000, your tax cut would be more than $145 a week.
(data points are for middle of each band, assume average income $250,000 for $150,000+ bracket)
Well, you can’t accuse them of being populist.
[PS. have a peek at the press release. At the end, Roger Douglas says we should have a tax system as flat as possible, like Russia and China. Ah, imitating the dictatorships with massive disparities between rich and poor, that's the way to go.]
Thanks to ACT leader Rodney Hide for participating in our ‘Interview the leaders’ series this morning. Our next leader is the Maori Party’s Tariana Turia.
The general question remains:
Of which of your achievements in politics are you most proud?
For the two other questions we’ve gone with Higherstandard’s question:
Can you envisage a NZ when there is no need for Maori seats in parliamanent ?
and Daveo’s question:
Having an ethnic-based party makes a lot of sense when faced with a dominant settler majority often hostile to indigenous rights, but how do you intend to address the fundamental economic and class contradictions inherent in drawing support from both powerful Maori business interests and the large Maori working class?
While we haven’t been able to cover everything you asked we have emailed Turia a link to the questions post so she can have a look at your issues. We’re expecting to post her answers next Monday.
In the meantime, our next leader is the United Future’s Peter Dunne. You can place your questions for him in the comments section of this post. Reminder: tough but fair.
We’re very pleased to have ACT leader Rodney Hide respond to your questions as part of our Interview the Leaders series.
Question to all leaders:
Of which of your achievements in politics are you most proud?
Making the IRD legally and culturally more accountable and responsive and getting my Regulatory Responsibility Bill to the Commerce Committee and, I hope, into law. I feel proud and privileged every day to be the MP for Epsom.
From reader r0b: Do you believe that the Earth’s climate is warming? If it is, is the warming dangerous? if it is dangerous, what does ACT believe we should do about it
I don’t like to take issue with questions but this one I can’t let pass. 1) I find it disturbing that questions of climatology are now cast in terms of belief, i.e. “Do you believe the Earth’s climate is warming?”, not about the facts and the testing of our theoretical understanding of climate; 2) the earth’s temperature has never been static and so whether it is warming or cooling or staying the same depends on the time period you choose.
Now to the questions.
The earth has been warming almost continuously for 18,000 years after 100,000 years of the ice ages. Orbiting satellites over the last 18 years have measured a slight decrease in average global temperatures.
The “warming” is NOT dangerous.
ACT intends to stop the Emissions Trading Scheme which will prove extremely costly to New Zealand for no gain. We need to negotiate a much better deal than Kyoto I in the second round. We need a deal that is Smart Green with Smart Green policies for New Zealand, not costly political showcases that don’t deliver
From reader Burt: Would ACT implement tax deductibility for private health and education fees in recognition that by purchasing these services privately tax payers are funding the public system that they do not use?
Yes.
Even amateur, part-time bloggers sometimes make mistakes, and last week we didn’t send Clark her questions until Wednesday, rather than Monday, due to a miscommunication between ourselves. So, we extended her deadline to this Wednesday. We’ll post her replies when we get them. In the meantime, here are the questions to ACT’s Rodney Hide that we chose from your suggestions. We promise to remember to send these ones.
The general question remains:
Of which of your achievements in politics are you most proud?
For the two other questions we’ve gone with r0b’s question:
Do you believe that the Earth’s climate is warming? If it is, is the warming dangerous? if it is dangerous, what does ACT believe we should do about it?
and Burt’s question:
Would ACT implement tax deductibility for private health and education fees in recognition that by purchasing these services privately tax payers are funding the public system that they do not use
While we haven’t been able to cover everything you asked we have emailed Hide a link to the questions post so he can have a look at your issues. We’re expecting to post his answers on Monday April 28.
In the meantime, our next leader is the Maori Party’s Tariana Turia. You can place your questions for her in the comments section of this post. Reminder: tough but fair.
Earlier in the week we heard that Heather Roy may have broken the Electoral Finance Act by including party advertising messages in her weekly taxpayer funded newsletters without the required authorisation by ACT’s financial agent.
This time round she’s added the necessary authorisation but decided that it’s still ok to bill us for hearing from her.
She explicitly asks for our votes on the first page of her electronic newsletter (”Party Vote ACT”), then helpfully lets us know that we’re paying for the privilege by including the Parliamentary crest on the final page.
A big thanks to Greens’ co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimmons for participating in our ‘Interview the leaders’ series. Her answers provided an insight into how the Greens view themselves as influencing political culture as much as promoting specific policies. Our next leader is Prime Minister Helen Clark of Labour.
The general question remains:
Of which of your achievements in politics are you most proud?
For the two other questions we’ve gone with Matthew Pilott’s question:
Do you think the introduction of MMP has strengthened or weakened New Zealand’s Democracy?
and Andrew E’s question:
I’ve always voted Labour (was even a member of the party) but this year I’m planning on voting National as I’m very concerned by the erosions in our freedoms that have happened under your watch. Why am I wrong?
While we haven’t been able to cover everything you asked we have emailed Clark a link to the questions post so she can have a look at your issues. We’re expecting to post her answers on Monday April 21.
In the meantime, our next leader is ACT’s Rodney Hide. You can place your questions for him in the comments section of this post. Reminder: tough but fair.
I wonder if the ACT Party Secretary’s authorisation, top left, will make it harder for ACT to deny, as they have in the past, that ACT on campus are outside their control.
(Hat-tip: Alex N)
If you’re in the market for some cheap BZP but don’t want to sell your soul to the ACT Party to get your hands on it, apparently you’re in luck.
Two days ago we ran a piece called “If I were ACT’s campaign strategist” which suggested “ACT needs to lay claim to the true right, without going so extreme that National has to disown them, by articulating a series of classic right-wing policies including: tax cuts, spending cuts, asset sales, and deregulation”. I didn’t realise a) that ACT were such avid readers and b) they would take the advice so literally.
Yesterday, new de facto ACT leader, Roger Douglas, held a press conference where he promised to slash government spending by 10% to fund tax cuts (mostly for the rich), abolish Working for Families, privatise education, and rent out hospital space to private providers.
Roger! That’s what you should do but not how you should do it. You should have been more moderate and built the case more gradually. By going so extreme so quickly, Douglas has forced John Key to immediately react by disowning ACT to prevent Right voters going to ACT and moderate people making the obvious conclusion that a vote for National is a vote for ACT’s radical policies. Douglas has shown himself to be an FPP dinosaur in the MMP age and made his party politically irrelevant.
Or so goes the conventional wisdom. But it’s wrong. The mistake is Key’s. Yes, Douglas went too hard too quickly but he has said what a decent bloc of voters on the Right want to hear (the Herald loves it). ACT will pick up support from National, despite Key’s attempt to make voting ACT seem pointless. All it needs for ACT to take 3-5% of the Right vote and suddenly you’ve got National polling in the mid to low 40s, needing ACT (and probably other parties) to have a chance to govern. What then? National needs ACT but Key has just said he’ll “be buggered” if he’s going to work with them. Can National really afford to turn its back on a party that holds a hunk of the right wing vote? No, Key will be forced reopen the possibility of a deal with ACT, going against his comments yesterday. Another flip-flop, of his own making.
[next week: 'If I were the Greens' campaign strategist' - let's hope they don't take it as gospel too]
NZers’ wallets will bulge under Act, says Roger Douglas.
Sure they will Roger - with the bills from our kids’ user-pays schools, our privatised hospital fees, water charges, private accident insurance premiums and, if your party gets half a chance, the privatised oxygen from the air we breathe.
Because we all know who gets rich from Roger’s policies, and it sure ain’t regular Kiwis:
What strategy should the parties pursue ahead of the election? This series of posts will attempt to answer that question, party by party, starting with ACT.
ACT must gain support from hard-right voters who are dissatisfied with John Key’s wishy-washy centrism. They’ve made a good start of it by getting back Roger Douglas, the Dalai Lama of big business. He must be the centre-figure of their campaign. ACT needs to lay claim to the true right, without going so extreme that National has to disown them, by articulating a series of classic right-wing policies including: tax cuts, spending cuts, asset sales, and deregulation. Spending cuts, in particular, would put clear space between them and National.
This won’t win the centrist vote. It won’t bring ACT support from the swing voters or Labour. But it will bring in the financiers, libertarians, businessmen, and the young, wannabe tory-boys in their $500 suits that don’t fit them. That’s always been ACT’s base. They were lost to Brash but now they don’t see Key delivering much in the way of the policies they want. They are ripe for the picking by a de facto Douglas-led ACT.
If ACT can pick up 5% of the vote from the hard-right, they will be in prime position to demand Cabinet posts in a National-led government, perhaps even Finance for Douglas. Then, ACT will once again be able to say, to quote an ACT supporter in the documentary Campaign after they won Wellington Central in 1996: “this must be how the Nazis felt at Nuremberg”.
[Update: I stand corrected, ACT's campaign strategy is treating with soon-to-be banned narcotics]
Oh dear. It started with Roger Douglas and now political ad-man John Ansell has got on board the ACT train to electoral oblivion as well. Ansell’s most famous work to date is the National Party’s racist iwi/kiwi billboards of the 2005 election but our sources tell us his stocks dropped considerably with the party after his involvement in the ramshackle PR fiasco that was the Free Speech Coalition (he “designed” their long-winded and baffling billboards). In fact he’d been told expressly that he was not getting the contract. Which of course makes this quote particularly hilarious:
He said he had not left National in the lurch by going to Act, despite having agreed to work for the party again.
“They’ve been very understanding.”
Yes John, I’m sure they have.
It’s not surprising that Ansell has ended up with the party of the extreme right, because as anyone who knows Ansell will tell you he actually talks like the comments section of Kiwiblog. Conversation with him is littered with terms like “Helengrad” and “nanny-state” and he is a reasonably regular commenter there. We’ve also been graced with his comments here at The Standard which ended with the PR man being firmly handed his arse by a couple of our more aggressive commenters. Always a bad sign for a “pro”.
But don’t worry, John’s got a new vision for ACT and a whole new slogan, ‘Ripping the Guts Right Out of New Zealand’ ‘The Guts to Do What’s Right’. Now I’m not saying that’s a stupid catchphrase but, nah, I’m saying that’s a stupid catchphrase. I wish ACT all the luck Ansell brought the FSC.
Polling consistently around 1% ACT have decided that the only way forward is rejuvenation and fresh ideas.
In the wildly twisty turny inverted think of Rodney Hide it is both possible to say all violence is wrong and that smacking isn’t violence so that’s OK.
Mr. Hide’s October media release states:
“violence in any circumstance is unacceptable”
In May Mr. Hide stated that:
“I think the issue of the smacking of children—not abuse, not violence, but smacking—should be one of conscience for individual MPs”.
Perhaps if Mr Mallard had been more vernacular and said he’d given Mr. Henare a smack all would be well?
Here’s a tip you can take to the bank: if you’re ever worried you’re no good at your job and need some cheering up, you can’t go too far wrong with Heather Roy’s Diary. Of all the dreadful, party-approved pap that streams out of Parliament on a Friday afternoon, Heather’s newsletter is surely the pick of the bunch.
Oh it’s dull, possibly duller than any other, and even on a good day it reads like your average fourth form social studies essay, only lacking the originality and depth of analysis you’d expect from a fourteen year old child.
This week’s effort was no exception. After 965 tortuous words on fart taxes, the family plantation and why her husband tells her not to recycle, Heather finally turned her formidable intellect to the Government’s new emissions trading scheme - and she wasn’t having a bar of it. “Before we commit to the expense and economic disruption of the ‘Cap and Trade’ regime,” she opined, “we should look at the evidence”:
The world hasn’t warmed since 1998 - and 2007 will not break any records. For the US, 1934 was the warmest year in the past 100 years. Since 1900, there has been one 23-year period - 1975-1998 - when a temperature increase was associated with a significant increase in CO2. From 1940-1975, CO2 went up and temperatures went down. There is increasing evidence that the sun and cosmic rays control our climate, not CO2. If this correct, then we’re entering another little ice age. The rate of sea level rise is small and is not increasing. The Arctic had less ice in the 1930s and in the Medieval Warm Period.
Of course, to anyone with even a passing interest in climate change, Heather’s ‘evidence’ is laughable. These denialist myths have been doing the rounds for years now and have been thoroughly discredited elsewhere.
But a bit of climate change denial is nothing new to ACT. Or National, it would appear. See, if the passage above seems a little familiar it’s probably because Heather Roy plagiarised the entire thing, word-for-word, from National MP Richard Worth’s newsletter of the very same day. That would be the same newsletter that had been publicly debunked by No Right Turn before Heather had even clicked the send button.
It’s all just a little tragic. I mean, if you’re going to take the risk of plagiarising someone, why not make it anyone other than Richard Worth?
To put an end to this whole sad, sorry debacle, Heather sought refuge in the last hiding place of the climate change denier: the conspiracy theory. “We must study the evidence, not believe people with hidden agendas”, she pleaded. “We urgently need an independent, objective scrutiny of the evidence.”
Heather, we already have that. It’s called the IPCC, and it’s been around for some time. Seriously, what is this woman doing in Parliament? And why isn’t she wearing her tinfoil hat?
