Andrew Little pours cold water all over Memorandum of Understanding – rules out electorate deals

January 30, 2017

So it turns out all the symbolic rhetoric at yesterdays Joint State of the Nation were really the empty leftovers of a meal no one wanted to eat.

Andrew Little poured cold water all over the Memorandum of Understanding this morning by admitting for the first time that there wouldn’t be any deals in the electorates.

That means Auckland Central, Ōhāriu Christchurch Central and Maungakiekie which could turn Labour if Greens didn’t stand a candidate are still in play for National and their supporters.

It makes the Labour-Green desire to over throw the Government look less than convincing when they are happier to fight amongst themselves.

The silver lining is that if MANA and Maori Party work out their issues, they can do what the Greens and Labour won’t and actually work together in the electorates.

9 COMMENTS

lloyd jordan January 30, 2017 at 5:19 pm

so once again queen KING has asserted her power
Takere January 30, 2017 at 5:33 pm

I enjoyed the music from Warren Maxwell otherwise the sun was out & the people we spoke on behalf of the Socialist Candidate Joe Carolan to seemed to get it … shame the polys don’t.
fatty January 30, 2017 at 5:51 pm

Labour still don’t get MMP. What a useless excuse for a political party. Electorate deals are the key, but they still act like it’s FPP
J S Bark January 30, 2017 at 10:04 pm

“It makes the Labour-Green desire to over throw the Government look less than convincing when they are happier to fight amongst themselves.

The silver lining is that if MANA and Maori Party work out their issues, they can do what the Greens and Labour won’t and actually work together in the electorates.”

Yeah, right…

Another three years of National…

Ho hum…
mikesh January 31, 2017 at 7:59 am

Probably the only electorate where an electorate deal would be useful would be Ohariu, and in that electorate I would hope that the Greens would refrain from fielding a candidate.

After all it’s the party vote that determines the result of an election, not the number of seats each party wins. Andrew Little is quite right to insist that Labour contests every electorate.
- Martyn January 31, 2017 at 8:31 am
  
  So you didn’t the blog you are commenting on Mikesh?
  
  I’ve listed the electorates where the combined total of Labour + Green can knock off the National Candidate, you only read it as one, and in the one electorate you think it’s a good idea to stand aside, Labour intend to run the fucking Cop Cheerleader who has constantly called for arming Police, you claim THAT electorate is where the Greens should cast aside their political values for???
  - Matthew Whitehead February 1, 2017 at 7:45 pm
    
    It’s worth noting that the dynamics in some electorates can shift by hundreds or even thousands of votes between elections, so we shouldn’t necessarily assume that every electorate that was close in 2014 will be in 2017.
    - Sam February 1, 2017 at 8:23 pm
      
      But reading manuscripts of failure is instructive
- Matthew Whitehead February 1, 2017 at 7:43 pm
  
  Well, they MIGHT refrain, but the issue is essentially that they will be much more likely to do that if the candidate isn’t Greg O’Connor, who’s pretty antithetical to Green ideas and honestly not a good fit for Ōhāriu in general, because the area is full of wealthy liberals, not wealthy conservatives like in Epsom.
  
  The issues with not fielding an electorate candidate in Ōhāriu is twofold:
  
  * The Green Party won over 5,600 Party votes in Ōhāriu, about 2.1% of their Party Vote, and about 0.23% of the total Party Vote. Would that go down if they failed to field an electorate candidate who could speak to local issues, attend any local debates, and so on? Indications are yes, but nobody can exactly guess by how much, so it would cost the GP in their Party Vote to do this, it’s possible it will cost them little enough that they MIGHT not lose an MP to do it. The trick is that nobody will know ’til the vote is counted how close the Greens come to picking up an extra MP, but then again, they usually get 1 on the specials, so it will probably come close.
  
  * Will the 2,700-odd people who voted for Tane Woodley in 2014 actually crossover to whoever Labour selects if the Greens don’t stand anyone? How many of them are never-Labour voters, and of those who aren’t, do they actually support the idea of say, a Greg O’Connor?
  
  I think the Greens will absolutely consider not standing a candidate if there is a realistic chance that doing so will crossover enough votes to Labour to kick the Peter Dunne out of the House, as it will likely not cost them an MP to not stand in Ōhāriu, and there’s a real chance that if they kick Dunne out this term, he may simply retire from politics, as he got less party votes in total than the Greens got in his electorate. But they will have to consider that against the fact that Labour won’t give them anything in return, so it could solidify the perception of them as a junior partner on the left as opposed to the genuine contender they’ve proven to be on policy issues, with every significant party in Parliament having been convinced to at least one Green policy by now.
  
  I don’t think it’s unsurprising that the Greens and Labour didn’t manage to progress on talking about who stands in what electorate, given that the Greens would reasonably have to ask that Labour stood down in at least one electorate in return for however many the Greens would agree to stand down in. (2 or 3 would seem reasonable given the comparative Party Votes and polling, so probably Epsom, Ōhāriu, and somewhere that is very close in reality but is perceived as deep blue, so Labour can make a shot at embarrassing National)
  
  The fact that they continued to talk about this and didn’t make a big deal about not being able to agree on it in public, and only mentioned it casually during an interview is the MoU working exactly as it’s supposed to, and as usual doesn’t fit into this narrative about bad blood between Labour and the Greens.