rumours of our demise III

It's in the news now - Matt McCarten, Laila Harre and some other officers from the Alliance are not seeking re-election at our National Conference at the end of the month, and some are actively leaving the Party.

Matt and Laila have indicated to the members that they will be going to the Maori Party - personally I believe that both of them find it hard to operate without the profile and money that Parliament provides, and the task of rebuilding the party has been too hard for them. Both have been busy with their union work - Matt with Unite, Laila with NZNO - but in reality this has been an excuse, as I have seen neither of them show much commitment to actively rebuilding the Alliance after 2002. I am glad that they are now moving on - it happens to all of us from time to time, and I appreciate that they are being honest and not pulling the Alliance down behind them.

Some of the other officers have said they will maintain their Alliance membership and support for the party, but that they are not prepared to be active anymore. But there is a solid core of the activist leadership, those who hold office and those who do not, who are staying and already actively taking tasks over. The National Conference will go ahead, organised by those who remain, including many who have been very disillusioned by the actions of the current leadership but now have a sense of hope again.

I don't have any illusions that the Alliance is going to get back into the House in 2005, and I don't think any others in the activist leadership do either. But we have a responsibility to rebuild this party of the Left - whether it be for the Alliance to have some success in 2008, or for the party to be the core of a future Left party that may develop. I for one am excited about the opportunities ahead of us now - we have actual contests for many of our leadership positions (something never before seen in the Alliance) from members who want to work and campaign.

It will be hard, but now that we no longer have a leadership who were always on the lookout for easier options the task is more achievable.

More comment from me on this later (when I'm not at work).

this street sign really means it

spotted yesterday in Grey Lynn

what procrastination drives you to

The Man in the Comfy Chair has an exam tomorrow afternoon and what is he doing?

He is, and this is true, hoovering his car. That's right, he took the vac, which is a bit broken, outside, got the extension cord out, hooked it all up and ran it all the way to the car, and is hoovering around inside it, sucking up all the dross.

I just hope he does mine next.

the next co-kermits

I've been thinking in the last few days about who the Greens are going to put up for their leadership in the medium term.

It seems to me that there is a division in the party within those who are Green rather than Left and those who would identify as the reverse; the Green-Reds versus the Red-Greens if you will. Sooner or later this will out, probably around a leadership fight.

As it stands I would personally categorise both Rod Donald and Jeanette Fitzsimmons as Green-Reds, (in fact I'd take the Red out for Donald), but Jeanette has so much mana that it hardly matters. But when she goes (and she had an agreement with her partner to lead the party until 2005, which I believe she has renegotiated for one more term, so she would almost definitely go in 2008) Rod will need a new co-leader. I can't see the Greens moving away from the co-leadership model, especially not for Rod, given the Green-Red, Red-Green make-up of the party.

So who have we got?

Locke, Bradford, Tanczos and Turei are all too scary to the electorate (although I would probably like all of them except Nandor, but then I'm not in the Greens, so who cares who I want).

Kedgeley is not going to wash with the Red-Greens, especially not when coupled with Donald.

Ian Ewen-Street is retiring in 2005, besides which I don't think two white men is a very Green look (which I suspect rules out Mike Ward too, who has had no profile so seems unlikely).

So this means the Greens need to bring in at least one new MP, possibly a Red-Green as opposed to a Green-Red, who is a real possibility for leadership. With only Ewen-Street standing down this is going to require a much better polling return than they are on now.

Of course this all assumes that Donald is still acceptable to the Green membership in the future (and that he wants to continue - I think this is a pretty safe bet given the man is very keen to be a Minister one day). If the party becomes more Red-Green than Green-Red his leadership would be less secure, and I am very curious about the nature of new recruits to the Greens since the Alliance was wiped out of Parliament in 2002 (especially after Matt McCarten pissed off a lot of Alliance unionists in the last two years).

Whoever the new Green MPs are in 2005 (if they get any) look out for a spunky not-mad woman who may be the new Jeanette...

all over bar the lawyers

Kerry has conceded, so that's that for another four years.

I'd been talking myself out of the hope that he would win, so I'm not devastated, it all seems so inevitable - would Kerry really have been that much better than Bush anyway?

Time to stop pretending I know anything about US politics and focus back on the meat here at home.

it must be summertime

because i just heard a Mr Whippy van driving past - wohooooo!

wishful voting

Many bloggers have linked to Betavote.com - where non-US citizens can have a vote for US President (seeing as how we all feel so frustrated at our disenfranchisement at the election of a leader of another democracy).

But I noticed that Betavote doesn't include any candidates other than Bush or Kerry, in particular Nader. Not that I'm saying I would vote for Nader (although I suspect I would find it hard to vote for Kerry I still would in the current situation) but it might make things (even) more interesting if it were a three horse race - would Kerry lose votes overseas or would Nader garner votes from those who would otherwise click on to the next website in disgust rather than vote for the lesser of two evils?

Anyway there is a poll on the Alliance website which does include Nader so those who want to exercise their totally futile and unconstitutional right to vote for someone else's president could always try that too - last I checked Nader was ahead 75% to Kerry's 25% (and no votes for Bush).

treaty myth #1 - maori seats set up to ensure maori got representation

When the NZ Govt was set up with seats and so on the basis for eligibility for voting was based on the situation back in the Mother Country, ie men with property. Maori owned property communally so didn't qualify, until they started turning communal property into individual property (a topic for another post).

At that time eligible Maori voters (considerably less than the number of adult Maori) were at least a quarter of the voting population. But non-Maori were given 60 seats to represent them, while Maori were given four. Yes, four. You read that right - four (4). Quite ignoring the voter eligibility dodginess, they should still have got 20, to be proportionate. But no, four was deemed sufficient to represent Maori in Parliament.

Maori were not allowed to stand in any General Electorates until the 1970s. I think that Winston must have been the first Maori elected in a general seat in 1975 (Hunua) although I'm aware there was some election funding scandal there (anyone know?).

Until the arrival of MMP in 1996 there remained just the 4 Maori seats. That's through the whole of NZ's parliamentary history, since the 1850s, only the four seats, regardless of changes in the population and so on.

Clearly all of this was not about giving Maori representation when they otherwise would have had none or very little - in fact it was about restricting their voice. Many Maori migrated to the General Roll prior to 1996, to try to get a say in how the vast bulk of the MPs were elected. Now that the numbers on the Maori Roll actually determine the number of seats there has been a surge back again - interesting that even today, at about 14 - 16% of the population, Maori get more seats (7) than they had for over 140 years.

i guess PHOs are branching out in a bid to keep fees down? Spotted in the Atrium on Elliott yesterday.
mara pic

how can this be true?!

Over at No Right Turn, IS has posted a picture of a leaflet apparently circulating amongst African Americans (in the USA of course).

this seems farcical - not to say it isn't real and happening - it is just so extreme as to be unbelievable. if it isn't a pisstake then it is very very sad indeed :-(

what (some) men in power do to women who threaten them

i have just realised that i have seen this happen twice now - the slow but steady insidious character assassination of a woman who threatens a man (or group of men) in power.

i saw it happen in a students' association back in the late nineties - a man, aided at times by his cronies, identified a friend of mine as the leader of a faction that opposed him and so he subtly harassed her and lied about her in public until there was a groundswell against her and he did his best to push her over the edge mentally. constant petty erosion of sanity by such seemingly innocuous tactics like sitting outside her office for hours on end reading an old newspaper upside down, always coming up to her table at the pub and taking her seat whenever she stood up to get a drink, deliberately baiting her in meetings in snide ways designed to force an emotional reaction through the use of trigger words which would get a reaction out of most people (the example that comes to mind is calling someone who has believed in honouring the Treaty since childhood a racist). and then there were the leaflets and speeches denouncing her as mad and misguided and incapable and incompetent (all of which was untrue).

i have seen it happen again in the now and i hate it. i hate it passionately because it is so dishonest.

if you disagree be honest enough to disagree on the principle, or the policy, or the idea, but don't take the nasty despicable path of demonising the person to lose their side of the argument support. it is much easier to drive things on an emotional basis - people will react without thinking and write other people off much more quickly.

of course we all slip up and make remarks that we probably shouldn't. but what i am talking about here is a systematic attempt to undermine someone, usually a woman, by making them out to be weak, emotional and not capable of rational thought. this is so much easier when the target is a woman - even other women will write off their own once they start crying at a meeting, i have seen it happen. just because you are emotional does not mean you are irrational, but in our culture this is not the dominant belief. think about how women who make allegations of rape have been treated historically - false allegations get media coverage when proven ones do not, and yet false allegations would be well less than 5% of all those made (not to mention all the ones that are never made).

an emotional reaction does not mean you do not have an intellectual or moral argument to support that reaction.

strange things lurk in the blogosphere

found this strange little blog whilst just looking around places - i can't imagine why you would have a blog but not post on it!!

ps we really must come up with a better word than blogosphere. it is so HG Wells.

one hundred sixty nine years ago today

the Declaration of Independence was signed by the United Tribes of New Zealand. Sounds like a good excuse for a much needed public holiday to me! (i know we just had Labour Weekend, but i need a day off already!)

early election? bah humbug

this may well come back to bite me in the arse, but anyway:

the Tamihere saga is unlikely to cause an early election. Let's look at the scenarios:

1. JT gets off the allegations - he'll stay out of Cabinet but in the House - i suspect Labour will bend over backwards to keep him in

2. JT doesn't get off and resigns (or is kicked) - by-election in Tamaki Makaurau that basically only MP or Lab can win - if MP wins and doesn't come to the party on confidence and supply then it will lose a lot of its support base. of course they will want concessions (and fair enough) and Lab will have to give them, as its polling rating is likely to dip after losing a by-election and Lab won't call an early election unless there is some advantage to it. also the Greens would probably promise confidence and supply in return for support on the zero tolerance issue around GE food, a pretty cheap price for Lab.

so all in all, no excuse for an early election (just like last time really) but this time the difference is that Lab won't want to go early as their polling is not high enough yet. end of story.

rumours of our demise etc II

just got a call from a party member who was called up not long ago by a telephone polling survey person. when they asked who he would vote for if an election were held tomorrow and he answered the Alliance he was told "they don't exist anymore". he put them right.

now i suspect that this was not in fact one of the major polls - they have shown low level support for the Alliance (roughly the same as Destiny or the Progs) in recent months - around the 0.3% mark.

i reckon the pollster was in fact from Act or National - the party member is in Epsom...

donna under the legal spotlight again

still hanging out for the Supreme Court decision (as blogged about back in early October)

but in the meantime Donna is certainly racking up the court time facing fraud charges with her husband, regarding the Pipi Foundation, stomach stapling, a pre-signed chequebook, etc.

what will she do if she loses the SC case? she'll be out of Parliament and have little credibility to get another job, even if the SFO charges aren't proven. obviously if they are she'll be in prison, so in little need of a short or medium term plan.

what an amazing life she has had - maybe she should update her autobio once all this is over...

these blogs abandoned?

i know i'm not that up on the daily blogging, but i really wish that Mike and those two rascals at RTM would post more... Also being slack lately are Generation Y Not and Mr Kearney (who has at least explained himself). Number 60 has also posted after nearly a month off.

sorry to crack the whip people but i like to read your stuff!

Update: Antipodean Journal is also guilty of not posting recently - v sad span.

last pic on the matter - Hikoi II pic 10

the future?
mara pic

woman in charge - Hikoi II pic 9

maori warden looking spiffing

juxtaposition - Hikoi II pic 8

fashionistas meet your doom