Curwen Rolinson

It’s been interesting watching the shift in discourse about Bernie Sanders from some of the local #ImWithHer crowd (and, presumably, those further afield/closer to the action).

On Friday, word reached us that the world’s foremost obstreperous atheist, Richard Dawkins, appears to be advocating we open our borders to the world’s “creative intellectuals” in a bid to make New Zealand a ‘new Athens’ for the ‘Trump era’.

So it finally happened. American Democracy, dependent upon your relative vantage point and biases, either ‘jumped the shark’, or reached its apotheosis. Possibly both at once.

So now that the dust’s started to settle and the excitement’s mostly over (barring one or two personages who’ll be sitting on tenterhooks awaiting the results of special voting), the attention of the Commentariat has sensibly turned to picking over the weekend’s local body electoral result.

Part-way through last month, I became aware of a number of interesting things happening down in the Wairarapa electorate. This is a National seat (and these days arguably something of a ‘safe’ one), but with a local MP widely regarded as an aloof and out-of-touch carpet-bagger who spends most of his time in Wellington. So we’d presumably be unsurprised to see the Nats putting a bit of work in to campaign there next year.

There’s nothing wrong with operating to the economic left of Labour. But it seems fairly patently obvious that that’s not what National are doing. If there’s any dyed-in-the-wool Cold Warriors out there in the audience, they may perhaps choose to disagree – but running a fairly broadly social-democrat economic policy is not supposed to substantially increase inequality by benefiting economic elites at the expense of just about everyone else.