On the night, Election 2017 delivered a victory for lies, mainstream media thuggery and lazy voter prejudice.
We all know the lies. And the liars. Stephen Joyce and Bill English’s alleged “$11.5 billion hole” in Labour’s spending proposals and the claim Labour would raise income taxes (if only they would on the top 10% of income earners)
Filthy lies. But they did the job stalling Labour’s rise and National’s drop. Depending on your political affiliation you could either call this smart politics or a particularly filthy attack on democracy.
National had nothing to offer the electorate after nine years of mounting economic and social problems and when Labour put up a half-decent campaign National resorted to negative attacks based on the cynical tactics of the playground bully. Any let’s be clear – it worked.
But the vilest incident of the campaign was not red-neck farmers protesting their right to pollute and degrade our waterways at our expense. It didn’t even involve the National Party directly. It was the vile, despicable, media-run campaign to denigrate Green MP Metiria Turei and drive her from the co-leadership of the party.
Others have claimed Metiria and the Greens brought it on themselves with poor political management but that’s irrelevant to what actually happened. Key political journalists in the mainstream media themselves ran the campaign – from the indescribably awful John Armstrong to the urban liberal know-all Duncan Garner. It was a media frenzy which fed into the National Party’s campaign to denigrate beneficiaries.
It was a campaign on behalf of the wealthy against the poorest New Zealanders. It was the opposite of speaking truth to power.
This is the vilest example of collective journalistic thuggery I can ever recall.
It was also Jacinda Ardern’s nadir. There was no integrity, solidarity or leadership as she threw Metiria under the Labour Party bus by declaring she would never have a cabinet position in an Ardern-led Labour government.
Lazy voter prejudice was the biggest winner on the night.
For those of us who follow political debate closely it can sometimes be a surprise to realise the vast majority of voters engage only superficially in politics. From the farmers in Morrinsville (driven by self-interest and self-absorption) to the beneficiaries in East Christchurch (focusing on survival in a world where voting hasn’t changed anything for 35 years) voters follow lazy prejudices which justify them ignoring economic and social problems provided they themselves are in the top half of the socio-economic pyramid.
Election 2017 was a victory for the corporate and the comfortable.
“On the night, Election…… insert-date-here …….delivered a victory for lies, mainstream media thuggery and lazy voter prejudice.”
Sorry John, but it’s naive to think elections have ever been otherwise.
Getting into power has always been about twisting peoples perception and winning them over.
As we’ve seen, any backtrack on stated campaign policy can be “justified” once power has been grasped. Nazional are the masters of Machiavellian politics. Hence their long grip on power.
Far more importantly, it’s what you do after you attain office that separates the good from the bad. eg Norman Kirk vs Roger Douglas.
I’m inclined to think the lesson to be learned from this lesson is work out what you stand for, let everyone know what that is, and stick to it.
yes the 2017 election campaign was a catalogue of awfulness, the snarly looking bumpkin in the photo above could be from 1981 if you swapped “…Pretty Communist“ for “Support the Tour”, “shoot the HART bastards” or other similar lumpen expression
some people still wonder how the German Nazis rose in the 30s, how did death camps occur under peoples noses? well if you really want to know, there is a masterclass in “othering” right here in NZ
the poor have been demonised here for 3 decades now, and this country is split into “winners” and especially “losers”–these despicable losers you see bring it on themselves, the working poor, beneficiaries and oldies in dire straits, have all made bad choices to become “benefit spongers” etc.
once certain sections of people are officially declared “not like us” they are fair game for all manner of sadistic and unfair treatment–particularly targeting–which is where the NZ media wing of the corporates and torys comes in as John describes
there is some truth in the “boomer/smug property owner” analysis, but not total truth, I and most of my friends are boomers that have spent their lives in unions, solidarity movements and fighting for social justice, a few thousand more funerals will not entirely solve the problem of social division, and low political consciousness, as a look at all the young Nat wankers on social media confirms
Me included Tiger mountain,
I am 73 and been knowed down several times never from ‘my own doing’ but eith cororate greed or other bussiness srewups.
I became disabliled by my corporate errors in workplacwe practices.
I bought my own house in 1974 and am still paying a morgage.
I never got anything I did not work for.
I still care and work for the underdog today.
The lesson from Metiria is how nasty some people in this country can be toward those on welfare. The vilification of Metiria was a lesson in intolerance and right wing moralism, cloaked in brutal misogyny.
You have to have integrity. You have to have principles. You have to have ethics. Then you can happily live your life subjugated by those who have none of those.
Funny old business politics. Ardern said Turei would never have a cabinet position in an Ardern-led Labour government.
If Ardern said “no decisions had been made about cabinet positions” would things (voting) have been any different?
If Ardern said “Turei would be considered for cabinet positions” would things (voting) have been any different?
If Ardern said “Turei would most likely be in cabinet” would things (voting) have been any different?
If Ardern said “Turei, as a coalition partner leader would be in cabinet” would things (voting) have been any different?
I believe the last case scenario should have been the right call. I believe if she had said that the Labour vote would have been considerably less.
I agree with your sentiments John and many of the comments above.
The response of the media carrion was far and beyond anything I’ve seen in 40 plus years of political awareness.
I spoke repeatedly to anyone that would listen about the lack of coincidence with the neo-lib putsch to change the leadership when the poll numbers were clearly indicating exactly the outcome of saturday’s poll.
The difference only in the percentage of seats that the three non-gnat parties would bring to the coalition talks.
Our owners , clearly did not like the numbers of progressives vs dry’s that the pre-Turei massacre polls indicated .
At this point all I can hope is that t least 1 of Winston’s much conjectured bottom lines is a multi agency [ GCSB included] investigation of 2017 campaign funding.
It was in my view Ardern’s role to say whilst she doesn’t condone what Metiria did, she understands it! That would have been a good start and she shouldn’t have been answering any questions about who would be in her cabinet.
look why are people still harking on about this in my view Metiria should have zipped the lip. The gnats took her out she was a threat to them polling at 15% and they used their media circus to do it they also took out Jacinda and they used the same clowns. They tried to take Winstone out but he is too smart and wasn’t having a bar of it they don’t call him the silver fox for nothing. The system is geared towards the ruling class the people with all the money and power.
Now the Maori party can moan, cry and throw their toys out of their cot but they only have themselves to blame. Did the maori party get out and get our people to register? did they expect to dump candidates in Maori electorates for example Taarre Reedy a very bright articulate women but no one knew her and what has she done for them shes been in America for 10 years this to me is bad practise and taking our people for granted. How long were the Maori candidates working in the electorates they were standing for. Tariana your hate for labour is showing you are biased you say national are the only ones that have done anything for our people. If this is true why did we need the closing the gaps policy. Why is it that every time the gnats are in power statistics in every area of life get worse for our people. Lastly why did the Maori channel put up those bullshit polls saying tu ururoa was ahead by 20% and howie tamati was ahead. I believe they also showed there bias. Now the people have spoken and once again our people have shown we do not like the gnats we do not trust them and our people were looking for a vehicle to take them out and many believed that vehicle was labour. Now whether that is true we will find out and if they fail our people will do just what they have done to others vote them out
and i believe you are wrong on all counts
whose wrong Teresa our people have spoken and they did it with a pen the same way everything was taken from us
When banks and other corporations control the information flow and control most of the economy you must expect information that challenges the phony corporate narrative to be censored, and for the masses to be fed an endless stream of pro-corporate propaganda.
Also, you must expect corporations to promote those politicians who work hand-in-hand with corporations to facilitate their short-term interests.
This corrupt money-lender and consume-till-you-can’t based system is called ‘freedom and democracy’, and is arguably the best short-term system money can buy.
Longer term most humans are completely fucked as a direct result of the lies the corporations and their bought-and-paid-for politicians continually tell.
2017
412.63 ppm on Arpil 26, 2017 (NOAA-ESRL)
411.27 ppm on May 15, 2017 (NOAA-ESRL)
2016
409.44 ppm on April 9, 2016 (Scripps)
409.39 ppm on April 8, 2016 (Scripps)
2015
404.84 ppm on April 13, 2015 (Scripps)
https://www.co2.earth/daily-co2
However, the liars will keep lying until they can’t. And they will keep promoting the money-lender corporate agenda until they can’t.
I did pick up in Winstons election night speech that he absolutely agrees with your headline John and that he will be looking into the foreign financial influence on our election. Does this give evidence as to which way Winston may go, who knows?
Will,he won’t be able to look into foreign influence if he joins a National coalition and I’m sure Labour /Greens would be most interested in exposing the depths of National’s corrupt practices.
Could be a match made in heaven.
100% Barry.
“Election 2017 was a victory for the corporate and the comfortable.”
Spot on!
The journalists who hounded Metiria out of politics should reflect on the fact that the sheer ugliness of persecution tends to show up starkly in hindsight, when the expedient reasons for it have evaporated. Even if they don’t give a shit about those who have been made poor by the system that feeds them, they might consider whether they want to find themselves shamed and embarrassed when public opinion no longer supports them. Racists, sexists and vehement homophobes also rested safely once in the folds of “public opinion.”
“Election 2017 was a victory for the corporate and the comfortable.”
Oh so true that is!
Trouble is that it is also due to the complacency of so many, who do not bother looking at issues and policies more thoroughly, who do just follow politics rather superficially, they never get properly informed, and thus vote in ignorance of the truth and of facts.
With the largely commercially and ratings focused media preferring superficial reporting, chit chat and hitting headlines and slogans, they perpetuate the widespread state of ignorance, and manipulate the bulk of voters into the kind of voting or abstention behaviour that makes such results as we got possible.
Polls should not be published for two weeks out from an election, full stop, as they are only like self fulfilling prophecy coming true. When early voting starts, there must not be any polls allowed to be published, and advertising should also be stopped with the commencement of voting.
Absolutely. The media hystericals won’t like it but too bad.
And the electoral commission will need to get its act together because so many people wanted to vote early, but their electoral forms had not arrived. They could of course still vote, but the process could have been smoother.
The advance polling booths need to be more strategically situated. Putting them in CBD areas in the cities, where parking was a hassle, was not a good move. In suburbs many polling booths were sited in heavy traffic areas also with limited parking.
Clearly there’s some work to do in the advance voting environment.
Rosielee I think the electoral commission was deliberately under-funded
My partner received 4 lots of the same forms yet we change his address details at the last election. Then 2 weeks 10 working days before the election date I sent two lots of forms back to ensure at least they would receive one. Yesterday Monday 25 Sept we got our electoral notice back saying he was enrolled to our current address. He had to do a special vote because of this. Now to top it of I checked to make sure online that he was enrolled at our current address and he was. Yet when we got to the voting booths he was still under our old address. Now also I know of some people that walked away from an advance polling booths because of the que these are people that have to work so they went to vote after work the booths had only 3 staff members clearly not enough. I would like to know for something so important why so few staff and who is this more likely to benefit. This is clearly not in the bests interest of democracy and I believe it is the reason we have so many special votes.
I presume those of you who’ve been pimping for NZ First on this website for the last few years have been busy since Sat night, on the phones and pounding tables to make sure they support a change of government, as you’ve been claiming they will. This is where the rubber meets the road. I think you know, and I hope they know, that if NZ First prop up an exhausted and increasingly unpopular 4th term government, they will be toast in 2020.
Will it be a repeat of 1996, or 1999? I wait with baited breath…
I am still in despair at the way NZ ers were steered by the parties and the media over Metirias situation. This time I voted double Green … for the party with the most integrity, in my opinion.
I agree with John about Labour’s mis-handling of the Metiria issue, but I feel that people seem to let the Greens off too lightly. If we look beyond the strategic errors that were made by Metiria and the Greens in relation to the admission of benefit fraud, it was interesting to watch the Greens and their “partner” Labour eventually abandoned her. These parties, supposedly of the left, did not have the fortitude to keep the media focused on the message that Metiria was trying to drive home about poverty and the way the government and the justice system in this country treat those in need. In my view, both parties lost a lot of integrity by not working hard enough to drive this important message home, by being too scared of the media. The Metiria issue was bungled by both parties in too many ways. I see it as a major lost opportunity of the campaign, with both parties losing integrity.
Of course, this perspective is in hindsight – I acknowledge that the media pressure was intense at the time.
I’d like to see that sign changed from “she’s a pretty communist” to “I’m an ill-informed redneck fuckwit”.
It would be more accurate.
Posted by a facebook user…
Question for National supporters: given the following list, I would genuinely love to hear an argument this morning for why you aren’t completely ashamed that your self-centered & empathy-less voting keeps so much company, and how you interpret “A Brighter Future” or “Stable”.
1. NZ is now #1 in the OECD for worst rate of homelessness (1% of population / over 40,000 people). We almost double the rate in Australia which ranks #3, and easily double Canada who are #4. (America is #11 with 0.17%).
2. #1 for Youth Suicide (ages 15-19) in the developed world. That is 15.6 suicides per 100,000 people. Double the US rate and almost five times that of Britain. Consider too how many people a suicide hurts, if not permanently breaks, when looking at those numbers.
3. Highest percentage of indigenous prison population in the developed world. Māori make up only 14.6 percent of the population, but 50% of the male, and 65% of the female prison population. In 2014 the UN told NZ such institutional racism “constitutes arbitrary detention and is illegal under international law.”
4. NZ is #1 in the world (not just the OECD or developed world) for most un-affordable housing. “New Zealand has had the highest rise in house prices, costs the most against the average person’s income and now has the biggest difference between house prices and renting prices.” & “the past 46 years New Zealand’s house prices have risen by more than 8 percent on average a year.”.
No doubt this is great if you’re a baby boomer who bought houses in a central city suburb, hugely subsidized & built by the government, and then costing just double a single annual income. Not so great when a living wage (more than most gen-x/millennials get) barely covers the cost of rent to live in a cold, un-insulated flat, shared with 4 people, in which you have almost no rights & can be evicted at any time.
5. The Climate Change Performance Index rated New Zealand ‘poor’, in 43rd place of 58 countries, and the seventh worst in the OECD. Denmark was ranked as the best-performing, followed by Sweden and Britain. Climate change is real, that’s what scientific CONSENSUS and facts are. If you doubt that you either don’t accept a fact based reality, or you are the victim of the climate change denial think-tanks who in a previous line of work killed millions of people by denying for decades that tobacco caused cancer and promoting it as a ‘healthy option’.
6. #10 in the OECD for income inequality. Statistics New Zealand found the country’s richest individuals (the top 10 percent) held 60 percent of all wealth by the end of July 2015. Between 2003 and 2010, those individuals had held 55 percent. The poorest 40 percent held just 3 percent of total wealth.
7. UNICEF rated NZ 34th out of 41 developed countries for child well-being. Unicef said New Zealand’s presence in the bottom end of the rankings is proof that “high national income is no guarantee of a good record in sustaining child well-being.” & “This ranking reflects performance in neonatal mortality, suicide, mental health, drunkenness and teen pregnancy.”
8. #1 in domestic/family violence & sexual assault against women. The UN study “found a third of the country’s women had reported experiencing physical violence from a partner during the period 2000 to 2010.” “In the past year, 2 per cent of women reported experiencing sexual violence from a partner, ranking bottom of the list.”. And this is with the knowledge most sexual violence isn’t reported.
Oh gee-whiz, it feels great living in a brighter future!
The Lazy prejudice of the Labour Party
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/09/07/latest-tv-one-poll-labour-43-national-39/#comment-399156
The Labour Party achieves Victory….
“The choice before Jacinda Ardern is stark, does Jacinda Ardern want to be leader of the opposition or leader of the country.
We will see which way she chooses.
If Ardern chooses not to work with the Maori Party. And instead succeeds in Labour’s stated aim to to expel the Maori Party from Parliament. And then falls short by the amount of seats needed that the Maori Party could have brought to a Labour Green Party coalition.
Then on losing the election to a National New Zealand First coalition, Ardern should resign in shame, it would be the decent thing to do..”
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/09/04/the-possible-labour-green-maorimana-party-government/#comment-399149
*(…against the Maori Party)
In a repeat of the last election. The real big winner in this election has been Petty Labour Party Sectarianism.
A victory for lies, media thuggery and lazy prejudice. And sectarianism
(You forgot one John)
The Labour Party can’t say they weren’t warned. They knew, and they still made the decision to carry on with their mad sectarian campaign against the Maori Party (and Mana).
Any mathematicians or election experts about?
If party votes were exactly as they were but all Māori seats had gone to Māori Party candidates, what would the difference be to the overall picture to what we have now ?
Yes, so true, we have of course a bias on either side of the spectrum, some here do still not see that in fact, Labour did NOT win the most votes, and they only gained by taking votes off the Greens, NZ First, Maori Party and a small number from the Nats.
Combine Labour and Greens, and all that is achieved is 52 seats out of 120. Hence they absolutely need NZ First to form any government, in whatever form. Shifting vote shares between the left of centre is what largely happened, Labour was returned to something more like what the party had in 2008, and the Nats do still get most of the votes, while voter participation had hardly improved.
Those hoping for a ‘youth quake’ in the special votes are dreaming. If there was a tiny ‘youth quake’, it was only happening at the universities, which Jacinda visited during the end of her campaign for Labour, but only a percentage of all youth go to university.
The overall result is a great disappointment to me, and should be to others. And listening to Jacinda Ardern on RNZ this morning, talking almost academically and smartly about negotiations to be prepared with NZ First and Greens separately, I felt, she still has a long way to go, before she would be a competent and good PM leading the country. If any agreement with NZ First happens, it will be Winston First in the driver’s seat, not Jacinda, watch that space, if it happens. He is so far playing is cards well, others sit and wait by the phone, what a joke:
http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/morningreport/audio/201859953/election-2017-ardern-plans-negotiations-with-peters
A static election result 2017 which solves nothing but costs precious time.
That’s you in the photo isn’t it IM RIGHT?
Nice one Bert
You forgot to mention Labour spending three years lying that health spending had been reduced, and the Greens lying that their polling had them ahead in Nelson.
Hardly a lie, Gormless. Per head of population, Vote Health has reduced. Which means current spending being spread further to meet increased demand.
And polls fluctuate. What may be “true” one week may not be the next.
@Bert
re: 6. #10 in the OECD for income inequality
to what degree has the National gov’t contributed to the income inequality in other countries by providing a tax haven for the rich over seas?
There is nothing to be proud of about being labeled as a tax haven/ international money launder for foreigners avoiding their tax obligations to their respective states.
Free rides for corporate mates at the expense of the Cullen Fund for our own pension folk to come.
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