MEDIAWATCH: The middle class weakness of The Spinoff

I’m currently reading Comrade Bill Anderson, A Communist, Working Class life – the biography of NZs great union leader, and what is fascinating to me is how similar all the problems in the 1950s, 60s and 70s are with what we are experiencing now.

The cost of living was too high
The cost of housing was too high
The workers were horribly underpaid
And The Labour Party was insipid and spineless.

Bill spends most of his time fighting the incremental Labour Party to do anything meaningful.

The middle class aesthetic Left never want to truly threaten the neoliberal hegemonic structure they live under because they benefit quite a bit from it, and there is nothing more middle class aesthetic Left than the woke micro aggression policing identity politics glee club that is The Spinoff.

I don’t read The Spinoff very often as it just annoys me, but this wee gem popped up in my feed and I couldn’t not comment…

How the Māori seats could hold the key to this election

That in turn means adding seats to the default number of 120. Some have toyed with the idea of Te Pāti Māori, with an eye on removing the incumbent government, encouraging their supporters to vote TPM for electorate MP and Labour for the party vote, explicitly or tacitly.

“The idea is, if you add, say, seven extra MPs from the Maori electorates, then you’d have seven more left-leaning MPs, and they would help make up the majority to form a government of the 127 or whatever it was.”

It was far from a straightforward prospect, however, “It creates a lot of issues because firstly you’ve got to nudge-nudge-wink-wink people.” That was risky in any seat; if it were a Māori electorate that would only grow, she said. If you consider the outrage over deals in Epsom or Ohariu, she said, “and then if we add a Māori layer to that, the public’s going to frown a bit more, right?”

And, were a handful of seats generated by overhang to prove crucial in determining which bloc became government, there was a reasonable argument that could be made about legitimacy, she said.

“Any time when you see people playing the system, people are going to look down on it… We don’t want people to feel like the political system is being played in some way.”

 

…The Spinoff project the pearl clutching offended Karen routine at MMP being ‘gamed’ by the Left.

Couple of points:

1 – Māori in the Māori Electorates are the most strategic voters in NZ, especially the youth demographic who are the largest recent enrolees and who are very connected online.  If enough of them candidate vote TPM and Party Vote Green, they create an overhang WHILE recycling wasted party vote into the Greens. That combination of overhang  and recycling Green vote could be the difference between the left having 51% or not.

2 – For those facing the most extreme elements of this racist Government, pearl clutching fears over ‘gaming’ MMP are a first world problem.

3 – When you consider the way this Right Wing government have gerrymandered the enrolment period to directly undermine the Left, pearl clutching that Māori might candidate vote TPM and Party vote Green in the Māori Electorates is laughable.

The Spinoff have the luxury and privilege to be offended by Māori using strategic voting in the Māori Electorates.

 

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