D is for Democracy, Disfunction and Disorder

This post is being written as sort of a preface before I spend most of the coming year pointing out what I see is wrong with politics in New Zealand because it seems only fair that as bad as I may paint things to be here, they are far far worse elsewhere.

Currently two of the oldest and most established democracies in the world, the US and the UK (known from here on in as USUK) are in a bit of a state at the moment, and by “state” I mean the dumpster fire to end all dumpster fires.

In green and fragrant Aotearoa the biggest political bump on the horizon (at least for the chattering classes because child poverty, homelessness, the housing hernia, immigration issues, education and health and labor abuses don’t matter to them) is making sure that our cabinet has the right gender balance because god forbid we don’t have the right ratio of women and men.

In fact, I wouldn’t care if they were all women, if they were all competent, but when perennial incompetents like Clare Curran, and self-justifying bullies like Meka Whaitiri get in some how its clear that Labour is going to let the illusion take precedent over any particular reality.

So yes, they are gone but we still have Kelvin Davis, Phil Twyford and Ian Lees-Galloway despite their “problems” so the issue is that Labour (including Ardern herself) has a shortage of competent MPs/Ministers and is getting by on a combination of luck and half baked, piss poor, policy ideas which have deviated so much from their original intent (that being a re-set to NZs perilous state) to voter appeasing fiascos (like Kiwibuild) which are doing a lot to had an electoral cudgel to National.

But we are not here to take issue with these clowns, and the circus they now run, that will come later.

Right now, it’s time to point out that no matter how bad could be here, they are mucho worse over there. However, what we are seeing over there could very well happen here if we keep on the way we are going because the situation in USUK is just a more advanced symptom of the same disease we have here so its prudent to sound the warning, so to speak, lest we allow ourselves to succumb to the comfortable illusion that everything is alright here while we laugh at what’s happening over there.

And that’s just in whats left of the worlds functioning democracies, let alone what its like in corrupt and totalitarian s**tholes like Zimbabwe and China.

Currently Zimbabwe is experiencing killings in the street by security forces, a social media blackout an already fragile state teetering on the brink (again) of chaos as the new dictatorial government (lead by mass murdering monster “president” Emmerson Managawa* who was responsible for the murder of thousands as the head of Zimbabwe’s secret police) fails to bring the economy into any form of order after decades of mismanagement and corruption.

Meanwhile fun-loving China has decided to behave like the communist police state it really is by condemning a Canadian citizen to death for drug smuggling, after he was previously sentenced to 15 years jail, by re-trying him as a blatant means to bring pressure on Canada for arresting a top Huawei executive for extradition to the US which just shows what China will do if it does not get its way**.

But back to USUK, those at least are still democratic in form but not quite in function as both now have succumbed to infighting among political parties and the issues they face have no clear exit strategy and as such one may either say that this is simply the veneer of representative democracy fading away to expose the controlling elites bickering among themselves as their house of cards falls apart or (slightly less depressingly) our states shifting from true representative democracies to ones which are run by, and for, competing elites with elections as the legitimating mechanism and nothing else.

Either way its depressing but it seems that when faced by a crisis beyond their means to control (that crisis being that once you deal with the devil and start down the path to corruption and total power) you start to veer closer and closer to being a corrupt and failed state like Zimbabwe or a totalitarian nightmare like China and all the talk in the world can’t save you.

US: Go away, baiting!

Currently the US is now nearly a month into its government shutdown and I think Cracked.com has summed it up best with one of its many lists of things which show that people might grumble about “the government” but holly hell the alternative is a lot worse.

You know those far right, ACT party style, “minimal government” wet dreams that tools like David Seymour keeps on getting “excited” about? Well the US is now, in effect, in that state of affairs and it’s not pretty.

Seems all those government services that people take for granted, don’t know about or simply think are “not essential” are in fact very essential for a complex technological society like ours.

So, Seymour's ideological masturbation aside, the US is now locked into a paralytic state of stasis, in effect seeing how long it can hold its breath under water while Republicans and Democrats play chicken with each other over funding for Donald Trump’s wall.

Idiots or the naive might say its all Trumps fault but it takes two to tango and this is not the first-time politicians have played the brinkmanship game with government shutdowns. Yes, Trump has dialed it up to 11 but given that this was the core of his election policy (as limited as that was) he can’t be blamed for wanting to enact that for his voter base.

What he can be blamed for is the fact that building a wall around the US might make good sense ideologically and appeal to his supporters but it’s not going to actually solve any problems unless the problems are how to keep employed an army of wall builders and border guards.

And with the debate now down to the level of a high school feud as Nancy Pelosi and Trump are sniping at and c**k-blocking each other (as Pelosi blocks Trumps state ofthe Union speech so Trump cuts of Pelosi's travel to Afghanistan*3) you’re not looking at anything which we could call “representative” or even a functional democracy this is two spoilt rich kids fighting over a toy at day-care.

Its assumed that eventually a compromise will be reached but the damage will have been done and given that congress polls lower than the President its difficult to see the US going on for much longer because as the song says “somethings got to give”*4 and going without pay (or public services) for a month plus is going to do a  lot for arguments of political populists like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez who will happily take over if given a chance.

Could they do better? Probably not but at this point I don’t think the public is interested in that and is more interested in the cathartic effect of watching the rich elites having the heads lopped off via the guillotine ala the French Revolution, which interestingly enough was brought about by circumstances similar to those we face today (political deadlock and the parasitic rich sponging off everyone else) than getting their government back up and running.

So, on a democratic scale of one to ten, one being all’s good functioning democracy and 10 being holly s**t-balls democratic failure, the US is now about a 7 or 8 with a nine not far off the longer the shutdown goes on. And even when its ends, because it will eventually, or if Trump gets impeached or removed (because that’s also a possibility) it’s hard to imagine the US going back to normal because what’s happening now is the new normal.

The US is not going to suddenly discover good behavior and responsible politics just because the shutdown ends or Trump is no longer President but instead this is it for them and living with it is the only option. Suddenly films like Idiocracy no longer seem like satirical comedy but rather as a documentary warning from the future.

UK: No democracy please, we're British*5

Meanwhile, if you have not been reading the news (and possibly living in a hole), you would, only marginally, be forgiven for thinking in jolly old England all was sunshine, lollipops and rainbows compared to its transatlantic cousin the US.

But nope, if you thought the UK was doing better then guess again sucker because if the state of the US could be described as a dumpster fire then the Brexit crisis is Dumpster Fire Deluxe.

Consider this, article 50, the clause that triggers the UK from the EU, has already been invoked and is now in progress. All that the UK can do now is negotiate the terms of the exit and its clear that the EU does not want the UK to leave because if they do it not only makes the EU weaker but could give other members ideas as well and no supranational state wants parts of its empire falling off as it weakens the whole enterprise, let alone major members of it (as the UK is).

Sure, the UK could go back to the drawing board but as CNN points out none of the four options that could develop under article 50 are really going to solve things so in the end the choices are: Brexit, crashing out of the EU (also known a s hard Brexit), having a second referendum or changing the government. Choose wisely young Padawan.

If the UK takes the Brexit path, it’s out of the EU come mind 2019, what happens after is anyone’s guess but there are disaster stories both ways if the UK does or it does not and having a second referendum may reverse the vote but that sets an incredibly dangerous precedent because if you can reverse one vote you can reverse any vote and what’s to say that it could go around again and again once that Pandora's box is opened.

But if there is a second vote and the Britain decide to stay in the EU then those who voted leave are unlikely to go quietly and this sets up something close to a civil war scenario with an intractable position and no clear middle ground.

What is clear is that the UK can’t be both in and out and like the US, political revolutionaries are getting ready to pounce, as Jeremy Corbyn has already forced the issue by calling for a general election to break the deadlock.

Of course Corbyn, once PM, may also want to bring other parts of his manifesto to the table which is fine by me but with an emphasis on massive wealth redistribution from the richest to the poorest I cant see many of London’s wealthy bankers being down with that but Brexit, like the government shutdown in the US, is just a symptom  and not the real cause of the disease that’s eating the UK from the inside out and so reversing the vote will be nothing but a cosmetic fix and simply split things even further.

And Theresa May is damned if she does and damned if she does not, she has survived a no confidence vote but that matters little in the grander scheme when her plan for an exit is not palatable to anyone. All Brexit has really done is expose the divide in the UK, just like Trump has in the US, and in doing so presented having a hand cut off or an eye poked out as the only choice to voters.

So, at this point, the UK reminds me of England on the eve of the 1640s civil war which split the nation between Royalists and Parliamentarians, Catholics and Protestants and Cavaliers

 and Round-heads in which the decent, unlike the American Civil war in the 1860s, was not a supremely violent struggle to the death between two economic and political systems set inside a supposedly democratic state but rather a political schism between sides over a range of issues, magnified by religious difference and where the sides were emergent democracy vrs the older monarchical order.

Thus, at some point, something has to happen and when it does one side or another will not be happy and so another phase of the disease will kick in and further unrest ensues, making the situation in essence loose/loose.

Meanwhile in Godzone: Don’t say it can’t happen here!

If the political antics and chaos of USUK is not enough to make you wonder the we have our cousins across the ditch and their own political turmoil to consider.

Still NZ compared to USUK is a lot more viable at this time and if a cabinet reshuffle is all that gets into the media then we may be just a bit better off, for now that is as we shall soon see that being slightly further up the democratic anthill may protect us from the rising floodwaters of crappy politics and politician’s for a while but we also have to deal with the survivors from lower down scrabbling their way up trying to take over what’s left (I’m looking at you Peter Theil and China).

Democracy has its moments to be sure and it is having a bad day worldwide at this time but if USUK is anything to go by the alternatives to good government and real representative democracy (or even direct democracy) are rule by corrupt elites, genocidal maniacs and places that we don’t even want to visit let alone live in.

So consider this post a means of making sure that what’s follows on this blog is always with the perspective of what’s going on elsewhere lest I be accused of complaining about nothing because its not the state of NZ per se that’s the issue with me but the direction our own democracy is going in that has me blogging and it’s a lot better to sound the alarm before the whole mess goes off the cliff than pick up the pieces and rebuild (if such a thing is even possible) at the bottom or like USUK try and do so while free falling downwards.

Vootie!

*-Who has family happily living in NZ because reasons.

**-And people wonder why the National Party acting as a quisling for China is such a threat to democracy here.

*3-Why she needs to go to Afghanistan anyway is anyone’s business but I suppose she needs a holiday

*4- Yes Fitzgerald’s sentiment is upbeat and positive but the sentiment remains the same but if you need something more suitably dark then the Beastie Boys have you covered.

*5-with apologies to Messrs Foot and Marriot

Sticks and Stones and broken bones: four idiots and the things they said.

Guess who used to be a teacher?

Ok New Zealand politics! I go away for a few weeks to attend to my spiritual enlightenment (Kifflom! brothers and sisters, Kifflom!) and this is what I come back to?

I distinctly remember making it clear that this kind of outlandish and irresponsible behavior was to cease (see previous posts) and you lot were to get down to the business of guiding this country forward and representing your constituents rather than disconnecting your mouth from your brains and then blathering forth with the first inane thoughts that came skittering into your mind, like crabs on sheet metal.

I mean what in Kraffs name got into you? Did you think it was appropriate to say those things? So what have you got to say for yourselves?

David Seymour

I know David Seymour is irrelevant, you know that he is irrelevant and even he knows that he is irrelevant and this is why he behaves the way he does.

After his bid for TV stardom failed he has returned to the one other thing that he can do with his life; and that’s spouting random gibberish.

Listening to David on RNZ a few mornings ago it’s clear that Seymore knows he has absolutely no political capital or credibility and all and DOES NOT CARE one speckled olive.

Rebrand ACT, good luck with that as its likely to be effective as Bill Cosby changing his name and going out to a singles bar and with ACT having the popularity of NAMBLA nothing Seymour does is going to change its fortunes because the neo-liberal experiment has failed and we are now living with its ghastly consequences.

So Seymour, knowing this fact, has taken a leaf from the Don Brash playbook and attempted a few beats on the one drum which he thought could not fail to draw some like minded people to the ACT fold and that’s good old fashioned Maori bashing.

Sure its dressed up in the clothes of “fiscal responsibility” that ACT has always deluded itself into thinking was its creed but to anyone except the ACT hard core (which is now really just Seymour himself) this sounds just like a pedophile arguing that they should be allowed to drive the school bus, disgusting, distasteful and just plain ole wrong.

And listening to Mathew Hooton, later that morning on RNZ, its clear that ACTS days are really numbered if Hooton gets his way as ACT will be put to sleep for good come the next election when National cuts off its political air supply in Epsom and makes space for whatever political Frankenstein’s monster it wishes to create.

I would have more sympathy for Seymour at this point if ACTs ideas and policies were not the political and philosophical equivalent of child molestation.

All I can say further about Seymour and ACT is the sooner they die (and Seymour has to go out and get a real job) the better.

Judith Collins

Judith may not have realized it but when she tweeted out bat poo lunacy posing as real news that she was showing people how her feral mind works but then I get the feeling that Collins does not really understand how twitter or perhaps even the internet works given her previous tweets.

It’s not a series of tubes Judith it’s more like the largest unregulated experiment in human history and anything you say or do inside that experiment is recorded and remembered for posterity and then spat back at you when you least expect it.

And again Mathew Hooton, on RNZ clearly does not like Judith with his dig at her about how many votes she got in the recent National Party leadership challenge (that being one by his source) or her chances of ever being leader of National are when he summed up her behavior as that of a spoiled child daring her father (in this case Simon Bridges) to call her out for her said antics, to which Bridges wisely avoided doing.

But Did Collins back down or apologize for sticking her foot up her backside and then dancing the Hootchie Coo in front of the amazed eyes of all and sundry? No she did not and in an absurd display of not understanding how the Streisand Effect works went to double down on her claims by telling Duncan garner that apologizing “would only make things worse”.

Really? Really Judith? Is that how apologizing works?

You have clearly opened a doorway into your mind and your beliefs by tweeting out fact free mental diareha as something you think your twitter followers should know about and then then decided, very unwisely, to try and link it to the Labour party and the PM (and we will get to her later) and instead of admitting your mistake you sashay on like a pig in pink tutu at the first day of school and you think apologizing would be a mistake?

Remember the Orivida scandal? Remember that and all the other grotesque things you have said and done, because the series of tubes does and one quick Google search can remind people of all your acts of political bestiality in your ghastly career and as much as you lust for the throne you will never get it.

Your only hope is that the auto correct will change their search to Judy Collins rather than Judith because otherwise you are only a step above David Seymour as something that has only just learnt to walk on its hind legs but never quite got the habit of appearing human.

Back to your scum pit at once!

Marama Davidson

In your case Marama I really don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

“Reclaim the C word?” What the F word are you talking about? You sound like a mid-90s campus radical, you know, someone who does not really have any idea of what they are talking about but will regurgitate any platitude or saying they hear as the faux radical they are.

You are aware of the perilous space the Green party exists in and you’re ok with wasting its valuable (and extremely limited) media exposure on this kind of backwards feminist antics when things like #metoo and equal pay movements are now things.

Worse still you said it at a rally against racism and thereby high-jacked the events agenda with your pointless political grandstanding, you are about as on message there as Seymour and Collins. What in the name of our Lord and Savior Xneu were you thinking?

Ah but of course you weren’t thinking were you and like Collins instead of apologizing you’re going to crystallize your position and be now and forever known as the “C-Word lady” rather than  for anything else meaningful, like for instance the environment, you know that thing the Green party is supposed to be about.

Oh wait, I forgot, this is the “new” Green party, the one that has pretty much sold out its ecological agenda under the queasy leadership of James “anything for the dollar” Shaw and decided that it’s just going to abandon any real pretense to its environmental and social base and simply allow itself to dissolve into a seething mass of radical posturing and empty sloganeering.

Your shallow Marama, very shallow; going out there and shouting profanities is not going to help anyone and certainly not yourself or your party and it does nothing but sell the image that the Greens don’t know what the hell they are doing and need to be treated with the same scorn and disdain that ACT gets, is that what you want?

And for the record it’s not the word itself, profanities come and go and a bad word today is common currency tomorrow but it’s the fact that you seem to think that your use of them is appropriate, or even helpful, to the causes you are supposed to be representing.

The only thing you have reclaimed is the idea that the Greens don’t know how to handle being in power and that your role as deputy leader is just window dressing under the Shaw junta.

Jacinda Ardern

And now to our PM, who in the face of the increasing unrest and industrial action in the desperately overworked and underpaid nursing and teaching sectors (ones where the majority of workers are women by the way Marama!) decided that it was a good idea to not to make time meeting with protesters, only to crap her pants with fear when thousands of them filled parliaments grounds and other public spaces around the country.

Watching your speech to those protesters it was clear you had, as you said, looked down from your window on high and realized that you had screwed the pooch (so to speak) just as Seymour, Collins and Davidson had done. And just like those cretins you could not just go down and hear their demands and show some sympathy but instead thought it was a good idea to go out there and waffle on about how it’s not “us and them” but “just us”.

Really Jacinda, really? I mean REALLY? You have critiqued the teachers for walking away from the bargaining table and implied that they should have held out for a better offer like the nurses did. Is that the way a Labour government wants to run its labor relations?

You had the nerve to front a crowd simply wanting to get paid what they are worth and tell them that you’re down with radical change but that “radical change takes time”. Are you kidding me?

Do you know what those two words imply when put together or more to the point what they implied 30 years ago when it was perfectly OK for the then Labour party to embark on a program of radical economic change in no time at all and damn the torpedoes? Do you even know what punctuated equilibrium means?

However the crowd did not seem down for your panicked platitudes and twitchy hand waving because the only cheers they made where when you referenced them and not you!

It’s clearly an Us and Them situation when you have decided that crisis management style employment bargaining is the way to go rather than just paying what they are worth (especially since you get half a million a year), settling the issue and getting back some respect and credibility for it.

And it’s also clear that when faced with anything less than an adoring crowd you don’t know how to deal with people who have not bought your BS posturing hook line and sinker when they know that you could give them their pay rises and then some if you simply did not spend billions of dollars on a few maritime surveillance planes. Which do you think is the greater priority to them and NZ?

Is this what you mean when you and other Labourites keep saying that you have failed in your messaging because it’s clear that YOU think you’re doing a great job and expect the populace (that would be the Us) to simply thank you for all that you have done in those first 100 days and get with the program.

Well Jacinda, the program is that between 30 years of Labour and National hollowing out this country there is  not a lot left of the socially democratic state that was created by your forebears all those years ago and what we are left with is a government willing to play politics, give the illusion of change by creating a whole lot of committees (often staffed with Labour cronies) and keep on with the same business friendly agenda that National had but with a slightly more oppositional tone to maintain the illusion that you’re not just another lackey for business confidence crowd.

As our PM you have squandered almost all the goodwill generated from the election and done nothing to refill the coffers. You think that you can take a leaf from the Poodle Blair book of politicizing and try and foster a feel good personality cult around yourself and that will be sufficient to compensate for all the other failures to meet public expectations.

Well I am happy to say it won’t and there will be more not less of this kind of stuff (that being strikes and industrial actions) until you actually do what you and Labour promised and implied when you went out there and said “Lets do this!” to the voters.

And of the four you are the worst offender here. The other three are political wastrels and minor players while you are supposed to be something else. But it seems that your star is already on the wane when you can’t even show genuine sympathy for a crowd of ticked off teachers and instead have to use the moment to try and make some demented political point rather than just saying they are worth it and paying them.

It is worth noting that previous PMs of the National party would probably not even have fronted such a gathering so I am acknowledging you had the guts to do that but one individual action, in and of itself, does not change the fact that the government of the day is fundamentally responsible for this situation and if Labour does not address it fully and fairly then they are bad as National under John Key was when they ignored it and refused to front. Is that something you want to be identified with or remembered as?

However as Mighty Kraff has recently taught me that “dinosaurs are a lie that people believe because they are weak” so perhaps I have bigger things to worry about than four idiot politicians and their idiotic comments. 

Post election fallout contaminates TOP, the Maori Party and National

File this under “what were they thinking!?”

The last few weeks has seen a number of activities which could be accurately described as “post-election fallout” as the particular “coalition oriented reality” that the 2017 September general election has imposed on the denizens of New Zealand’s political ecosystem (that of Labour, NZ First and the Greens as government) makes itself felt.

And in this case the fallout is coming from what could be politely termed as the three “losers” of the election, that being TOP, The Maori Party and National*. Further two of these cases can be seen as the direct result of bad decision making regarding a parties particular electoral strategy prior to the election while the third (in this case National) can be seen as laying the foundation for a similar type of catastrophe if ever implemented.

And as I am back from my blogging sabbatical lets indulge in a jolly game of seeing which of these three dumpster fire, train wrecks stacks up as the worse and how it came about.

TOP tops itself

First up is the Gareth Morgan vanity project more commonly known as The Opportunity Party (TOP).

 In the two months prior to the election I researched and wrote a whole 2000 word post on TOP which went in the dead end file because no matter how I spun it, the phrase “rich man playing at politics” kept repeating itself and there was really little else to say about Morgan treading down the same path as Kim Dotcom and “Creepy” Colin Craig, all of who did little more than spray round blobs of their wealth to purchase political media which had little more content on it than their respectively gormless faces.

Therefore it was not surprising to read last week that Morgan pulled the plug on TOP by resigning from the party, along with other senior members, as the odds of Morgan hauling his political carcass over the 5% threshold became starkly clear round about June when TOP had been in operation for six months and had little to show for it except Morgan looking down on people from billboards (and that metaphor can’t be labored enough) like a baby-boomer version of Big Brother from 1984.

And I will happily go on record in saying that my prediction that TOP would bring some “excitement” to the election campaign was way off the mark as in making said prediction I had anticipated that Morgan would not fall into the same trap as Craig and Dotcom had and actually run a political campaign seeking to worm his way into the voters’ minds with some clever and relevant means to tap into the fumes of discord that were rising from the political morass that FukYoo politics had created in NZ.

But I was wrong and to save space in this post I will sum up Moragn, and the approximately two million dollars he spent on the party and campaigning, as coming up with little more than his face on billboards, one failed legal challenge and the lingering stench in the publics mind that if elected his first act in parliament would be to enact some sort of rabid PC jihad on all felines in Aotearoa**.

Morgan talked big when he launched TOP in November 2016 and had some nice policy ideas buried away in the background but for all his comparison to Donald Trump, Morgan failed to live up to his hype, as at least Trump got elected, and all Morgan could do was flail around and squabble with party members, politicians and the public via twitter.

The key failing of this absurdly quixotic*** quest were simply Morgan deciding that he was to be the face of the party (which was the most obvious flag that this was little more than a vanity project for Morgan’s brittle ego) and not spending enough money to get ones political brand out in an already saturated marketplace (because two million dollars does not buy as much brand awareness as one might expect when you’re spending it all on creepy billboards and torpedoing your own polling by acting like a douche).

If I had the money to enter politics I might consider a run at parliament but the simple fact is I do not have the doubloons to buy myself a political party or indulge in the clearly obvious fantasy that Morgan was labouring under; that he was some sort of kiwi philosopher king writ large and come to save NZ with his unique brand of straight talking, common sense that only he could dispense.

The 2.4% TOP got in the polls is impressive per se for a first time out political party but when compared to what the Internet and Conservative parties polled in previous elections*4 it’s no big deal and clearly not any more resonant with the average voter than what Kim Dotcom or Colin Craig was peddling.

Going down with the waka

And from one wally called Morgan and a failed political party to another (albeit one that previously made it into parliament); this time Tuku Morgan, who recently quit his role as president of the Maori Party and was the architect of the parties disastrous campaign strategy in the recent election.

What was so disastrous about this strategy you ask?

Well for starters, it appeared to be completely divorced from the political reality of the Maori Party in 2017, polling well below the 5% threshold (often so close to zero as to be irrelevant) and being totally reliant on a single seat (all the others being won back by Labour in previous elections since 2005 when the party held all seven).

The kernel of Tuku's strategy was simple: get the Maori King (of who Morgan was an advisor to) to bad mouth the Labour Party in the run up to the election as a means to drum up support and arrest the hideous fall in seats and vote share*5 from their peak in 2005 when they swept all Maori seats in the wake of the foreshore & seabed issue.

So the Kings message was “screw Labour…” and nothing more which really was not the best way to endorse your own party and certainly not from an individual who, while royalty, seemed to have no real relevance to Maori in general and at best seemed to be an easily manipulated figurehead. And as I noted at the time royalty taking sides in politics is a dicey issue because if your side does not get in your out in the cold and that’s exactly what happened.

Labour now has all the Maori seats, Maori candidates and MPs and in the simple move of raising the minimum wage shortly after taking power did more for Maori, who are more affected by having to work in low paid occupations than others, in that single act than anything the Maori Party did in its nine years in the government.

Tuku Morgan should have known that the key to success in Maori politics was getting and retaining those seven Maori seats, as they conferred the political weight in parliament to make them an attractive coalition partner, and that what gave the party those seats in the first place was the wellspring of discontent that the foreshore & seabed issue had tapped into in 2005 and not the petty backbiting of a mostly irrelevant individual towards the one party which was the traditional resting place of the Maori voter.

And he should have known that if the party was to retain those seats it had to deliver meaningful change to Maori and not just political spin and empty promises which is why by the time 2017 rolled around the party had lost all but one seat and polled so low as to not count at all.

To be fair to Morgan though, by the time he came up with this bat-brained idea the party was already in dire straits under the leadership of Te Ururoa Flavell and Marama Fox and was fatally weakened from the get go when Pita Sharples and Tariana Turia made the fateful choice to go with National in 2008.

But the party could have gone out in a better fashion than it did or even made a fighting stand if there had been an idea better suited than the extremely low budget wrestling smack talk employed by Morgan, via the Maori King, to try and make Maori care about the Maori party.

And if vanity was the downfall of Gareth Morgan and TOP it’s not too difficult to see that Tuku Morgan may not have been the best choice for the role of party president or campaign strategist as Morgan political credentials remain solely an $89 pair of boxer shorts and rhorting the public weal so it’s hard to imagine what else other than his own vanity was prompting him to think that his plan was going to work when every shred of reality would have been saying “Kahore, kahore, kahore!”

National’s imaginary friend

And last but not least in this caravan of, what my staff-sergeant would have politely referred to as, “s**t rushing to the brain” ideas, is the recent news that the National Party is looking to form a new conservative party.

Of course they denied it but after I ran this past my well placed National party contact, T, the response I got was more than enough for me to believe this rumour has some truth to it.

I do acknowledge the sheer science fiction scale to the idea that National clone itself as a means to pad out the illusion that it’s the only party of any substance on the right side of the political line after the coalition of NZ First, Labour and the Greens has made living under a coalition seem like a harmonious possibility and thereby politically and ideologically isolating National.

However what I did get from T was more than enough to indicate that while saner minds might have prevailed at obvious lunacy of the mainline suggestion, one particular comment from him (which I shan’t repeat here) was more than enough to make me think that National is no longer keen on supporting political misanthrope ACT and, with its previous “coalition partners” (Peter Dunne and the Maori Party) out of parliament, it may be feeling a bit lonesome out there in right (wing) field.

And while ACT is nothing more than a political welfare scheme for Seymour, National has to take the blame for creating the god-forsaken, Ann-Randian, one man sewer that ACT has become by their continual gifting of Epsom to ACT as the means to foster the illusion that there is something more right-wing (and all that such a term entails) than National out there in New Zealand.

So while national cloning itself is off the cards I would not be surprised if national sought to clone ACT, which could then be gifted Epsom and thus maintain the illusion that there is something further right of National in NZ politics while simultaneously getting risk of pesky (and uncontrollable) ACT.

However given the obvious rifts that do exists within the party (think: whoever keeps leaking documents and information to Nicky Hagar or to the media (ie the Todd Barclay scandal) and the fact that there is nothing inherently monolithic about right wing politics and it would be prudent for the party to figure out how to keep those issues contained rather than have them spill out in public.

The problem is that splitting the vote base is not the way to do this as creating a satellite party has all sorts of risks. The first (as noted in the media) is that the public may see it as nothing more than a front for National and as such have no faith in its independence while the second is that there is no guarantee that once you spilt the vote base that the other party will remain controllable (think how the Tea-Party antics in the US have hurt the Republicans).

So what to do?

My guess is this issue will simmer away in National until someone feels strong enough to challenge Bill English for the leadership and what will predicate that will be any significant drop in Nationals polling, which at this time, is not an issue but those numbers can’t hold forever given the fickle nature of the average NZ voter and with national in opposition it is only a matter of time before something gives.

So until that time I give Bill & the B Team a pass on this one but the fact that somewhere in National this idea got floated is enough to put them in the same category as TOP and the Maori party in this post under the “what were they thinking!?” moniker.

So who is the most contaminated?

The easy answer to that question is the Maori party, who pissed away the opportunity given to them by the seven seats they once had in parliament and who as per my old KP post Many waka, one star to guide them shows that the biggest problem in Maori politics is the Maori politicians themselves.

TOPs abysmal outcome in the election really only hurt Gareth Morgan and with the party now all but dead expect the 2.4% that voted for TOP to head back to Labour (based on all TOP voters I have met, all seem to be disgruntled Labour) while National can be forgiven for indulging in some off-the-wall thinking, post-election, but the real test for them is that they still need a solution to their obvious problems, that of needing to rejuvenate the party (but more on that in another post soon).

For all three parties, the brave, post election face they had been putting on has finally melted away in the extreme left/center radiation being given off by the coalition government and exposed what lies beneath.

*-No, ACT does not count in this sense as; a) they held onto their seat but more importantly b) they were losers to begin with in the more realistic sense of being purely in parliament at the behest of National.

**-something he doubled down on post-election when the PMs cat died and he decided that it would be the right time to make further comment on it.

***-yes I know it’s probably redundant using absurd as an adjective to quixotic but if the shoes fits…

*4-The Internet Party polled 1.42% in the 2014 election while the Conservatives polled 2.65% and 3.97% in 2011 and 2014 respectively

*5-In 2005 2.12% and 7 seats; 2008 2.39 and 4 seats; 2011 1.43% and 3 seats; 2014 1.32% and 1 seat and 2017 1.2% and zero seats!