Madame Biff's political fortunes

I'm personally not gifted with second sight, in fact my first sight isn't that good.

So with a view toward improving the scope of this blog I set out to get some predictions on what will happen at the election. Of course I went to none other than Madame Biff, an aunt for whom I was named. She is of course well known in new age circles and has her own psychic line advertised in the Manukau Courier.

Her house is a million dollar weather board house in Grey Lynn with 2.5 bedrooms.

"You" she said as I arrived at the door. "I was expecting you".
"You had a premonition?"
"No your mother rang."
With a weak cup of tea firmly in hand we sat at the table.
"So you've come to ask about the election?"
"Mum told you?"
"No all the brochures you're holding."
"So what will happen?"
"Which election? September 2005 or Oct 2006?"

With that we got going. I asked her who would win the September 2005 election. "No one," she replied, "except the anarchists."
I told her we don't have any anarchists in Parliament, "The greens" she corrected herself. "And the working for families ads with Maori and Pacific Islanders are working very well for National" she added.
"What will happen Madame Biff?"
"Jim Anderton will win Wigram."
I was getting a little frustrated by this stage,"And?" I asked testily.
"Peter Dunne will win Ohariu Belmont".

I tried a different tack, "Who will Winston go with, Labour or National?"
She supped her tea said it will be difficult but it won't matter as it'll all end in tears when Winston demanded to be the PM after 18 months.
"The polls are looking good for National," I said.
"Yes and they'll do very well, maybe Helen Clark's popularity will decline."
I went for the kill. "So Don Brash will be Prime Minister?"
She held a National Party brochure in her hand, "Ohh these policies look good."
"Yes, but will National be the government?"
"I agree we should be paying for cops not cabs."
"Madame Biff..."
"Treaty of Waitangi all settled!"
"Aunt..."
"No more politically correct rubbish.... and TAX cuts!"
"You won't get a tax cut, you're a pensioner!" I protested as she moved away reading intently.
"It says here I will. Winston Peter's will give me more money as well. Ohhhh this sounds good, no more arrogant government."

And with that she was gone to ring her best friend, Madame Enid, to discuss politics.

I got up and left with some insight but none the wiser.

Winston and the phones

I quite enjoyed Winston's little act with the telephones. For those who weren't there, missed it or ignored it: he pretended to have calls from Don and Helen at his press conference where he asked them 'who you gonna go with'.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0507/S00188.htm

I have yet to see a journo discuss this issue but the point he is making is a reversal of the way we look at parties from an FPP environment to an MMP environment. He might say "It's as up to them as it's up to me. Iif it's a coalition surely it's also up to National and Labour to say who they will go into coalition with."

His point being perhaps National and Labour should say who they want to go into coalition with. You can argue with him and say it's up to the small parties not the big ones, but I think Peters has a point, in MMP it takes two (or three or four) to tango

How could you lose? How can you win?

Consider ... record low unemployment, a bouyant economy (which hasn't yet slowed down), political stability and the All Blacks have just thumped the Lions, and yet the majority governing party is struggling. It defies all conventional logic. What happened? Why has Labour resorted to baby killing metaphors?

Well what happened has stumped all the political parties. It was a sea change. Last year people were grateful. Things were good. And all of a sudden Labour look like toast.

I was thinking about it and I think it's like NZ is suddenly full of noveau riche. There are quite a few millionaires walking around Auckland now. Ok all they own is 40 percent of a run down 2.5 bedroom house in Grey Lynn but they're almost millionaires! And like Noveau riche we want what we want NOW.

So rather than standing in the queue at MacDonalds to get a Big Mac, Kiwis now want to have a waiter come over to them and serve them a Big Mac, with extra fries and a deli roll, and be quick about it. We don't want to queue - we're rich. And we're not going to tolerate this PC bullshit. They can go and buy their own house in Grey Lynn and be millionaires too!

So there were these things that the Government did to burn off rural support, closing schools, carbon taxes, and now public access to farm land. And then burnt off some of middle NZ support, prostitution, civil unions, and youth drinking (ok it wasn't Labour but they've worn it), and then talked about marijuana. Oh and petrol prices. Two tax based price increases in two months in election year!? And NZ, about the time of the bill boards and the budget, said 'bugger it".

Bugger economic growth, high employment, low unemployment, fiscal responsibility, we want Big Macs to our million dollar 2.5 bedroom houses in Grey Lynn and no PC sauce.

National on the other hand, who looked only 12 weeks ago, like outsiders are poised to do a deal with Winston Peters.

Labour are nearly ready to roll too. To also roll into talks with Winston Peters.

So not only does losing seem unbelievable, so is anyone actually winning. Well apart from Winston.

And Winston is loving it.

The election will be September. August 20 is a date you get when Clark leaves a Press conference early.

Wellington is the worst place to create political billboards

Billboards, billboards everywhere....

Last week Labour's first billboard appeared. When the first bad Labour poll rating appeared I read somewhere that it was okay because Labour had yet to start campaigning. The message was - okay National's billboards are pretty good but just wait till Labour gets going.

Then we got the 'hanging baby'. I thought, when I saw it, it was a makeshift preliminary ad while the creative boys at the agency (which includes suit James Hall ex Saaaaaatchi and Saaaaaatchi) developed the advertising that was going to turn it all round. The baby killing ad was clearly a cottage industry product, developed by an electorate office in Auckland. The amateurish graphics, weird wording and incomprehensibility reinforced this. The message seems to be 'Vote for us or the baby gets it'. Rather than giving the electorate something to use to make a positive vote, threatening voters seems to be the strategy, sort of like political terrorism.

(Really amateur looking) Scissors have been added to give the ad menace, and perhaps making it more comprehensible for the many people who can't understand it.

Well it seems this ad is not the interim one - it IS the ad. Does Labour want to lose? Probably not. Will Labour lose? The baby killing motif won't help.

The Biff Guevara creative shop gives you some future Labour billboards in the same style:

• Little old lady about to be crushed up against a wall (marked poverty) by a blue bulldozer (marked market rents).
• A sweet little girl in pink (called Lilly New Zealand) about to be blown up by a blue bomb (called tax cuts).
• A person in a wheedlchair about to go over a cliff (labelled unemployment) being pushed by someone in blue.

Wellington is the worst place to judge an election from

Several people I have talked to think National's billboards are ineffective. 'One suggested no one will change their vote as a result of them'. All the people who seem to think these billboards aren't working are in Wellington. Whereas people I talk to outside Wellington seem them as hugely significant.

For those that haven't seen them; the billboards are a neo con import, half red with the current Prime Minister and half blue with the Great Don and then a word on each side, or a short phrase contrasting the parties from a very cynical National perspective.

The Cabs/Cops one has been particularly effective with my uncle. The boards are doing exactly what they were intended to do... differentiate the 2 big parties and set the agenda.
The billboards also coincided with Labour's sink in the polls and National's rise. A conicidence?

What this shows again though is that Wellington is in it's own autistic bubble world. Not only do we see politics as more interesting that anyone else but we fail to understand what is happening in the rest of the country. (Me too!)

I had a friend who had Utopian visions of MPs being made to spend at least 10 months each year out of Wellington as part of a broader vision he called the 'Morris Minor society'. I think he got it wrong: it's everyone else that needs to spend time out in the provinces. There should be a Mao Zedong type programme where Wellington people are made to go and work in the regions slaving away in retail stores on Saturdays for 10 months of the year. Though you can hardly exempt MPs.

The date of the election

Because we don't know the date of the election we know when it will be. That is - as it hasn't been called yet; it can only be late September.

The question is whether taking the term to the very end has been a good or a bad tactic. There was some talk that it should have been called in January around the time of the John Tamihere kamikazi run into his own career. Force him to go and then call an election. Labour may well have romped home then.

Since then it's got worse. The issue is - was not calling it for August a good idea? As usual there are two views
1) Waiting is better because- National and NZ First support will peakand level giving Labour time to pick up.
2) Waiting is silly because it has allowed National to build and set the agenda. Oh and perhaps Labour is in free fall in the polls and rather than National peaking and levelling Labour will just haemorrhage support.

Personally I think the smart National neo-con billboards and the budget were the turning point waiting to happen, after Labour destroyed the electoral support base it established in 02 bit by bit. National's billboards, the budget, the Benson-Pope situation were catalytic rather than causative of the switch.

Still it does show that despite being a sensible and cohesive government it's not the big wounds that can drag you down but a lot of paper cuts.

MMP has failed - Politics and the new era

MMP has failed.

Okay, I voted for MMP. It was a rush of blood to the head in an effort to do what parliament (well Labour in the 80s) had been doing to the rest of us, that is restructure them. Like all liberals I qualified my support, 'well it does make parties stronger, but it's still going to give more control to voters than we have now'. You know liberal bollocks stuff.

What I spose has surprised me is that it's not the parties that have been the problem with MMP but the voters. You see I mistakenly thought that people would think tactically. What I didn't realise, and I should have, is that people really don't care, so tactical considerations are really just irrelevant.

MMP has failed because every time a small party is constructive it gets it whacked. Voters insist on voting for these small, often pretend, parties but only vote for them again if they are noisy, oppositional, and generally negative. New Zealand First in 96, the Alliance in 99 and and United Future in 02 are suffering the same fate - voter approbation because they were constructive. (Yeah I know United isn't part of the government but supports Labour on confidence and supply, and yeah NZ First and the Alliance did misbehave at the end but only because they had disappeared to below 2 per cent in polls and the horses bolted.)

When MMP was coming in there was talk of either the German system, where voters congregate around 2 large and one small party, and the Italian system where, at the time there had been 51 governments since the war. I have these horrid middle of the night flashbacks where I wake up in a cold sweat recalling a passionate argument I had, at a particularly messy party, with an anti MMP person and I said the Italian system would never happen here,..... and on the basis of my persuasion they changed their mind and voted for MMP. I wouldn't be so horrified except that it's about the only time I've succeeded in changing someone's mind.

Now there may be those of you who read this and say... 'it doesn't matter'. And well it does. The economic growth and stability we enjoy is about stable reliable government. Clark and Labour, despite all their faults, and misguided policy have made a one vote majority on supply and confidence look stable.

And as we head towards Bad Decision 05 ....of course while the electorate is guilty, so too is Labour.

More on that later.

London

Bugger.

My friend Mike says that since Islamic militants want to die a martyrs' death, and the rest of us want them to as well, we should put them all together in a large field with bombs and we have a win-win situation.

The world is tough enough as it is without this sort of tragedy. Ok Iraq's invasion was awful, and so was Afghanistan, and lots of innocent people died but ..... the problem with this stuff is that trying to balance out what is the lesser atrocity and what constitutes a just war is all bollocks.

It's all wrong... the Taliban were nasty oppressive tyrants, as was Saddam Hussein, and so is George Bush. The thing that infuriates me so much about the Islamic fundamentalists is that they would use our relative freedom to take it from everyone if they could. It's almost as perverse as bombing for peace.

But the deaths in London were just nasty.

Winston and the Don

Today Winston Peters, leader of NZ First, said that he thinks Don Brash, leader of the National Party, would make a terrible PM because he's inexperienced. Conventional wisdom says Winston said this is either to place himself as the obvious PM if National and NZ First did form a government, or to cosy up to Labour. Another view is that maybe Winston believes this and is just enjoying the media attention.

The issue has become the media focussing on everything the Winston says. He loves it. That's today's political landscape.

Of course this all misses the real issues. Which are to come....

Getting Started

In the beginning there was an idea. And the idea was okay. The idea was to prove that I could write a regular column and get into a newspaper.

The problem was nearly making it, and just missing out on three occassions to other people. And so I decided to keep writing my columns, but after a few weeks, it seemed a little pointless. So I stopped.

Then came 2005 and our general election; it was always going to come. New Zealand has them every three years. In fact they're so popular, that under our MMP system combined with voter ignorance, we're going to start electing unstable governments and have a lot more elections, sort of like Italy.

I used to work in the Beehive. Years ago. I have almost been a candidate. I'm sort of centrist, much as I'd rather not be. I'll leave you to work out which side of the centre I prefer.

More to come.