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Posted on 07/02/2002 9:34:11 PM PDT by shaggy eel
Some of you will know New Zealand has general elections on July 27 2002. Some of you have asked me to keep you up to date on anything significant. This thread is where I'll do that. It's a scrapbook of political eMAIL letters from New Zealand's right wing -Richard Prebble, leader of New Zealand's most right wing Party, ACT; Bill English, leader of centre right NATIONAL Party and a variety of newspaper excerpts. We have a bunch of leftists running the show at present and it's all downhill.
Kiwi voters offshore reading this - our best bet at this stage is giving our Party vote to ACT and our electorate vote to NATIONAL.
The guy that was arrested in Florida yesterday says he is a Zoolander.
The guy that was arrested in Florida yesterday says he is a Zoolander.
With the amount of time Billy-Jeff Klinton has spent south of the equator recently, he'll be trying the same line soon too. It's important to remember we're all God's children [LOL!]
Anyway, this stepson of satan caused a ruffle about a year ago on FR for five or so minutes when it was reported he was working as an aircraft mechanic or something else in the avionics line for Air New Zealand. If he's been arrested it would seem the FBI and all the other Agencies are doing their job, I guess. Brings a whole new aura to "trust your crew, they know what to do", don't it?
,,, as it turns out, ACT doesn't have a candidate for P/N. Their energy is being put into securing Party votes this time around. Their nationwide strategy is to encourage a vote for NATIONAL for electorate and ACT for Party vote.
The Campaign trail
On the campaign trail I am focussing on uncommitted and swinging voters. I find a high level of agreement with our policies like lower taxes for business and growth, self management for schools and standards in education, tougher sentencing, and settling Treaty Claims.
I see growing levels of concern about the teachers’ strike, Labour’s plan for higher taxes, health cuts and a slowing economy. About a quarter of Labour’s current support don’t actually agree with their policy, and they do agree with ours.
If you want sensible centre-right policy, then vote for it by voting National. You can’t get it by voting Labour. Helen Clark went early to try and capture National leaning voters before they inevitably lose confidence in a Left wing Government. National leaning people who vote Labour will wake up with a Government they can’t support.
Debates
What is clear from the two leaders debates (RNZ and TV3) is that Labour have nothing new to say – no specific undertakings and no new plans. I am enjoying the debates and I’m looking forward to the head-to-head debates with Clark late in the campaign. The next step is Meet the Press on “Sunday” on TV One tomorrow night.
Helping young people into employment
This week I was down in Nelson launching our welfare policy for under-20s, which is largely based on a scheme run by Waimea College. They have pulled together the school, polytech, community and employers into a “no-dole zone”.
The aim of the policy is that no young person should leave school without direction or support, or to go onto a benefit. We will abolish the DPB and unemployment benefit for people under-20, and replace it with a Youth Transition Programme. In return for a higher level of support, this policy will require a much higher level of commitment to getting into work or training.
A rescue package for our hospitals
Last week I talked about the financial scandal in our hospitals, which are facing deficits of over $300 million. This week National released our health policy which outlines our rescue plan to bail out District Health Boards.
As part of the policy we have committed to the National Hospital Plan, originally put in place by National, which guarantees that all existing hospitals will remain open. We’re also planning to improve mental health services and encourage public-private partnerships.
Another new tax from Labour
Labour has put our health system into a huge amount of debt, but a new specialised health tax is not the answer. Labour MP Rick Barker let this idea slip this week, forcing Michael Cullen to admit the Government is considering it.
Since taking office Labour has imposed $900 million of new taxes that weren’t on their pledge card. It’s very difficult to trust Labour over taxes, especially since the release of Labour’s 2010 Transport Strategy this week which proposes further increases in petrol tax.
Environment Policy
I am proud of our environment policy, the best National has produced in years. We’ll gradually sell-down Landcorp holdings to provide a $500 million Sustainability and Eco-Restoration Fund to invest in helping land users upgrade to best practices in sustainable land management. We’re also promoting new standards for landfills, recycling programmes, a Royal Commission on Freshwater quality and a review of 1080 use to protect people and the environment.
More squabbling on the Left
The Greens and Labour have continued squabbling this week, with the Greens flip-flopping over whether to support a Labour Government on confidence and supply. The Left has always been good at fighting – if you vote for them, that’s what you get.
Resource Management Act policy
I visited the Clearwater golf development in Christchurch this week and it’s an amazing place. Like many other developments though they’ve had huge problems and delays with the Resource Management Act. It’s a concern MPs hear all the time, no matter where you go in the country. That’s why we’ve committed to making some substantial changes to speed up development.
Monday, 8 July 2002
Tracking Polls
Last weekend in ACT's own tracking polls the party was at 12% in Auckland. As in every election, ACT's support began rising the moment the campaign started. The number of voters responding to ACT's direct mail campaign is phenomenal - the highest in the party's history.
More than 70,000 voters have now written back to ACT - that's over 3% of the electorate. Then there's the internet. ACT's website received a record 400,000 hits last week.
Issue-Based Campaign
ACT's decision to run an issue-based campaign, built around billboards to deliver the message, and the web to deliver the detail, is working. Focus group polling by ACT shows voters want politicians to address the issues - and voters want to know what parties' solutions are.
Richard Prebble in the TV debates has ignored what the commentators think is important. Instead, he has directed his message to ACT's fastest growing support group - women. And ACT's polling shows that they heard and liked what ACT has to say.
Labour in Trouble
Law and order is rising as an issue - the latest Colmar Brunton poll made it number one issue of concern. Labour's own focus group polling shows the party is seen as "soft" on crime, and as having ignored the Norm Withers referendum.
Labour made a quick decision to drop the original version of its Pledge Card promise number six, which was for "initiatives on youth crime", and replaced it with a promise to "get tough on crime". The only problem is, the electorate believes that is what Labour promised last election.
Overseas Vote
The number of overseas voters registering is up on last election, but still only a fraction of the 200,000-plus who are eligible. New voting regulations mean the overseas voters don't have to re-enrol. Everyone who registered a "party" vote last election will be eligible. Overseas voters can log on to ACT's website - www.act.org.nz - where they can "hot button" to register to vote.
Clark Upset
Helen Clark has told Labour's ad agency, Grey Advertising, that she wants her billboards "above wherever ACT has a billboard". Sorry Helen - ACT guessed you were going to go early and pre-booked the best 20 billboard sites available.
GE - Only a Media Issue
The attempt by the media - State TV in particular - to make GE the issue of the campaign, is not working. Voters believe the Royal Commission approach, proceed with adequate safeguards, to be correct. Few voters are changing their vote over the GE issue. Half of all Green voters do not support the party's GE ultimatum.
The Green vote is now a protest vote, an anti-establishment gesture. If the NBR poll last Friday is accurate and the Greens have fallen to 6.6%, then the Greens may not make the threshold. Jeanette Fitzsimons seems to have lost Coromandel. The Greens demographic - young voters - are the most likely to stay at home.
The Real Issues
The issues of real concern to voters are health, education, law and order, the economy and the Treaty.
Health
ACT's solution to waiting lists, is our "patient guarantee". ACT will instruct hospital boards to treat privately all patients waiting past the medically safe time. As private is nearly always cheaper, ACT's policy will, over the medium term, save money. (For details of ACT's health policy, see http://www.act.org.nz/healthlaunch .)
Education
ACT alone opposed the NCEA as political correctness gone mad. Teachers are overwhelmed with bureaucracy and pupils disenchanted because there are no meaningful marks. The answer is to restore exams, marks and standards.
The Le Pen Dilemma
Winston Peters' [NZ First Party] openly racist attacks on Asian immigration have created the Le Pen dilemma. Helen Clark, in last night's TV debate, refused to rule out a coalition with Mr Peters. That's political expediency. It's significant that Bill English declined to make such an offer. National has learned from two previous attempts to work with Mr Peters. He won't fix it, he'll wreck it.
Richard Prebble is the only political leader to have stood up to Mr Peters and condemned his Le Pen style campaign.
Electronic Blues
ACT is leading in e-politics, being the first party to live-stream its press conferences - at 10.30am every day -and its campaign opening. The events are being archived and can be accessed at www.act.org.nz.
But being first brings its own troubles. ACT live-streamed its first press conference from Parliament, and nothing happened. Technicians were called. The equipment was working, cables were connected - but still no picture.
Technicians followed the cable down to the basement and found the problem. A technician had mistakenly plugged in ACT's live feed to the Civil Defence network, which has its HQ at Parliament.
Secret Agenda
Labour's proposed health tax is a way around its promise not to increase income tax. Labour hasn't said anything about not increasing the health tax - just as it justified the petrol tax increase.
Good News from National
National has told the Letter that its polling in the constituencies is holding up well. National doesn't believe it will lose any of its constituency seats and is optimistic it will gain some - Coromandel, Wairarapa and Northcote.
In Coromandel, Jeanette Fitzsimons in unpopular with farmers and business. In Northcote, Labour's Ann Hartley has also lost support. In Wairarapa, Labour's Georgina Beyer, who has neglected her electorate duties in favour of doing BBC interviews, is regarded as the worst constituency MP in Parliament.
Under MMP it is possible for a party to gain or lose constituency seats, independently of the party vote. If ACT wins more party MPs and National gains more constituencies, the centre-right could end up with a much better result than polls are predicting.
Paintergate
We have obtained the police report into Paintergate. You be the judge. See www.act.org.nz/paintergate.
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I'm putting my money on ACT.
WEDNESDAY, 10 JULY 2002
T O P S T O R Y [www.stuff.co.nz] Clark lands in the cactus
By ANDREA FOX
Prime Minister Helen Clark's election billboards were made in Australia.
Labour Party president Mike Williams confirmed yesterday that Cactus Imaging, a Sydney company, was producing billboards for the party.
Auckland company Omnigraphics, which produced Miss Clark's airbrushed, vinyl billboards for the last election, is upset that the job went to Australia and disputes Mr Williams's claim that Cactus Imaging is a New Zealand-owned company.
"The ownership is a smokescreen. The company pays wages to Australians, and tax in Australia. If the Labour Party doesn't bother to figure that out when it gives a $30,000 job to Australia . . . it's scandalous," Omnigraphics managing director Chris Ralph said.
Mr Williams said that under the Closer Economic Relations agreement, New Zealand and Australia were a common market. Cactus boss Warwick Spicer said he and senior executives of the company were New Zealanders. Cactus employed 60 people and had shifted to Sydney more than six years ago for market growth. It had one sales representative in Auckland.
He would not say how much Labour's contract was worth. About 30 billboards had been produced.
Mr Spicer said that in any case, Omnigraphics was a South African-owned company. Cactus and Omnigraphics were the only companies with the sophisticated technology to produce the billboards.
But Mr Ralph said Omnigraphics NZ was 56 percent owned by himself and two other Kiwis. It employed 25 people, all its production was for New Zealand, and it paid wages and taxes to New Zealand. It was 44 percent owned by South Africans.
Australian company records say Cactus Imaging Pty is an Australian private company. New Zealand records show Cactus Imaging's sole shareholder and director is John Lowther, an Auckland accountant.
A furious Helen Clark rejected allegations yesterday that her Government covered up the accidental planting of genetically modified sweetcorn.
The allegations, by researcher Nicky Hager, threaten to scuttle Labour's dream of governing alone and could provide a huge boost to the Green Party.
In a new book, Seeds of Distrust, Mr Hager says that up to 30,000 genetically modified corn plants were grown in Gisborne, Hawke's Bay and Marlborough two years ago despite the Government knowing they came from a contaminated seed consignment.
But Miss Clark slammed the allegations as "untrue" and "sickening" at a hastily called press conference in Auckland last night. "Extensive testing could not find any evidence of GM present in those plants," she said.
The seed arrived in New Zealand in October 2000 as part of a 5.6-tonne consignment supplied by Novartis Seeds, now a part of Syngenta.
It went to Heinz Wattie, Cedenco Foods and Talley's for planting and to Timaru distributor Seed Production. But, after almost half had been sown, a batch of seeds tested positive for genetic modification.
Mr Hager says the Government began preparing to have the plants pulled up, but, after consulting the industry, officials advised ministers there was no need for action.
Research Science and Technology Minister Pete Hodgson said yesterday that was because eight further tests on the seeds in Australia were either negative or indeterminate.
But Mr Hager said it was because the companies convinced officials to introduce a threshold for genetically modified content below which the shipment fell.
In support of his claims, he reproduced a memo from Environmental Risk Management Authority deputy chairman Oliver Sutherland and member Lindie Nelson, complaining that the authority had been sidelined and expressing concerns about the Government's actions.
"We have agonised over the risks of very small pollen escapes and how we could prevent these. It is ironic to find that Cabinet and officials are taking a less cautious approach to a release decision."
However, Dr Sutherland told the Royal Commission on Genetic Modification later that the reaction to the discovery of possible seed contamination had been "swift" and "rigorous".
Political tension was heightened yesterday by Green Party criticism of the Government's actions and the fact that Green list candidate Craig Potton published the Hager book.
Miss Clark accused the Greens of stooping to National's level of running a "dirty" election campaign.
"I'm sickened at the way in which these allegations have been levelled at me personally and at the Government and its officials in general," she said.
Green co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons said neither she nor the party knew of the book till she was advised by a radio producer to listen to an interview with Mr Hager.
"I listened to it as I drove to Auckland and I just felt sick," Miss Clark said.
She said Green support for the allegations made her even more determined not to have them as a coalition partner after the election.
"It's very hard to rebuild trust with this sort of thing."
National Party leader Bill English said he found it "unbelievable" that Labour had not taken advice from the authority.
Cedenco, Heinz Wattie and Talley's said their sweetcorn did not contain GM material.
Looks like ya got some relatives in New York as well : Crossbow Eel, member since 2002-06-29
The Labour Party has spearheaded the first ever ‘phoney’ election in New Zealand’s 150 years of parliamentary history. It is phoney, not only because the campaign is being manipulated by a political agenda, but also because of the false war being orchestrated between Labour and the Greens.
At a time when seventeen year olds are shooting policemen when the lives of mothers and babies are being put at risk by health funding cuts, when teachers’ strikes are disrupting our children’s education, and when our standard of living is falling to third world status, we are being told that the only election issue is genetic engineering.
By calling a snap election without the mandate of a national crisis to politicise the country, Helen Clark has denied voters their right to set the election agenda. In our two other snap elections, in 1951 and 1984, the country had been crippled by widespread strikes and a massive financial crisis. Voters were polarised – they either supported the actions of the Prime Minister or they didn’t. In 1951, Sid Holland won a second term with over 50% of the vote, and in 1984, Rob Muldoon led National to a crushing defeat.
So far this 2002 election campaign has been hijacked by Labour and the Greens. First it was the debate over whether Labour could govern alone. Yet what voters were never told was that we haven’t had a majority government in New Zealand for over 50 years, and that no country with an MMP voting system has ever had a majority government elected. The call by Labour to vote for them to keep out the Greens was just political spin designed to increase their party vote so they would have maximum power in a Labour-Green coalition.
The false war orchestrated by Labour and the Greens over GE has hijacked the election agenda. Using a strategy that smells of collusion, they have grabbed the headlines night after night, keeping the real issues of concern to the New Zealand voter off the radar screen. There is now a real risk that unless a widespread public backlash is unleashed, we will all wake up the day after the election and realise that the issues of major importance to the future of our country, were not considered to be important enough to have been instrumental in determining a new government.
There is also a growing suspicion that GE is being thrust down our throats by Labour and the Greens to keep the spotlight off their real agendas, because if those agendas came under close scrutiny, there is a strong belief that many supporters would run a mile.
For example, at a time when the government’s own review of taxation - the McLeod Report - concluded that tax levels in New Zealand were too high to allow the economy to grow, and that lower taxes should be a priority, Labour has secret plans to introduce a plethora of new taxes: capital gains tax, a health tax, a doubling of the petrol tax, a carbon tax and a livestock “flatulence” tax, a fishing tax, a return of death duties and an extension of preferential tax rates for Maori.
The Greens secret agenda is to honour the earlier version of the Treaty of Waitangi, which presumably confers Maori ownership to all land in New Zealand. As a party that does not believe in private property rights, in punishment for crime, in one law for all, or in free trade, the damage to New Zealand’s future that could be inflicted by a three-year term of a Labour-Green coalition, is immense and frightening.
With two weeks to go before the election, anything can happen. Remember how Labour was assured of winning the Australian federal election – and then the Tampa sailed onto the horizon and John Howard sailed back into power. Maybe sweetcorn will be to the New Zealand election what the Tampa was to the Aussies - a turning point.
I believe that New Zealand deserves and needs a government with an absolute commitment to turn around our flagging fortunes and stop our slide into third world status. To now have Puerto Rico ahead of us in the prosperity stakes with Uruguay about to overtake us, is an absolute indictment of the poor way New in which Zealand has been governed in the past.
The ACT party has a plan to turn the situation around. If you too want a prosperous future for New Zealand, help us to win back the election agenda from Labour and the Greens - and punish them at the polls for their manipulation. If you give your party vote to ACT on Saturday week, you will be making the economy a central election issue, as well as zero tolerance to crime, better pay for good teachers, and using the private sector to reduce hospital waiting lists … the real issues of concern to New Zealanders.
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