liberation

Key to Victory – John Boscawen on Act's 2008 campaign

The changing political identity of the Act Party is the core focus of MP John Boscawen in writing about his party’s 2008 election campaign. Most notably, the leader was ‘repositioned’, the party’s oppositional style was dropped, friendships were sought with other minor parties, and controversial positions on Maori and the Treaty were abandoned. And although this sounds like Act were turning into ‘National-lite’, the party then campaigned on the basis that National was becoming ‘Labour-lite’. This is all discussed in the short and concise chapter by John Boscawen in the new post-election book Key to Victory: The New Zealand General Election of 2008 edited by Stephen Levine and Nigel S. Roberts. [Read more below]

Key to Victory – Catherine Delahunty on the Greens' 2008 campaign

The New Zealand post-election books that are published by Victoria University of Wellington always contain chapters written by political party members – usually MPs – and are often a bit hit and miss. When they’re good, the writer will give invaluable insights into how their party ran their campaign, what they were trying to achieve, what went well and what didn’t, etc. Unfortunately, often the party participant isn’t really up to the challenge, and this is certainly the case with Catherine Delahunty’s chapter on the Greens’ campaign. It’s hard to get much out of her chapter in the new post-election book Key to Victory: The New Zealand General Election of 2008 edited by Stephen Levine and Nigel S. Roberts. [Read more below]

Anzac antidote

As some sort of counter to all the nationalist nonsense that pervaded New Zealand over the weekend, there were three excellent opinion pieces published by this country’s leading leftwingers, which I’m linking to. Matt McCarten’s Herald on Sunday column was entitled We’re still hanging on to the Empire’s coat tails and argued that New Zealand is still heavily committed to waging wars against innocent citizens and nations around the world, including against the people of Afghanistan. Our political leaders are thus hypocritical when they spout ‘the solemn message that we must not forget the fruitlessness of war’ while do exactly the opposite and continue to blindly follow the lead of Britain the US in places like Vietnam and Afghanistan. He points out that ‘We rightly got bloody noses from the Turkish conscripts who were defending their lands’ in Gallipoli in 1915. Chris Trotter blogged an excerpt from his No Left Turn book, that explains that New Zealand sent our troops to kill and die, not for freedom and democracy, ‘but to strengthen the sword-arm of one of the most brutal autocracies on the face of the planet’. Furthermore, ‘ANZACs slaughtered tens of thousands of young Turks so that the British and their French allies could carve up the territories of the Ottoman Empire between them – an act of diplomatic depravity which continues to generate death and despair across the Middle East to this very day’ – see, The Blood of Its Sons. And finally, John Minto writes, Why I won’t be wearing a red poppy, explaining that ‘it's deeply disrespectful’ to those that died to pretend that the World War I ‘deaths were for some greater good’. Instead it was ‘mindless, jingoistic madness which led a generation of young New Zealanders to be decimated on the far side of the world’.

Key to Victory – Grant Robertson on Labour's 2008 campaign

Did the Labour Party lose the 2008 election simply due to a ‘benign dismissal’ by a public that wanted to give the other political team a go at running things? Labour MP Grant Robertson thinks so. Robertson, who is a former adviser to Helen Clark and now the MP for Wellington Central, writes about the reasons for Labour’s defeat in his chapter on the Labour campaign in the new post-election book Key to Victory: The New Zealand General Election of 2008 edited by Stephen Levine and Nigel S. Roberts. This blog post briefly relays Robertson’s intelligent, but well-spun chapter, noting a few flaws. [Read more below]

Key to victory – Joyce on National's 2008 campaign

The National Party’s election campaign of 2008 was notable for its relatively non-aggressive attitude to Labour, as well as its boring political advertising. Unlike in 2005 when National posed itself in starkly different terms to Labour via its iwi/Kiwi style contrast billboards, in the next election it decided to play down differences, remove humour from its ads, and to lay off criticising Labour. Campaign manager, Steven Joyce, explains why in his chapter on the National campaign in the new post-election book Key to Victory: The New Zealand General Election of 2008 edited by Stephen Levine and Nigel S. Roberts. The blog post briefly relays Joyce’s insights into the National campaign. [Read more below]

Key to Victory – The impact of the EFA

Throughout the Helen Clark Labour Government’s third term in office, issues of political finance were particularly controversial, culminating with the Electoral Finance Act 2007 (EFA) being widely debated as either a cure or poison for fair elections. But just how much impact did the now-defunct EFA have on the actual 2008 general election campaign? This blog post below is a highly abridged version of the chapter that I wrote entitled ‘The impact of the Electoral Finance Act’ in the new post-election book Key to Victory: The New Zealand General Election of 2008 (edited by Stephen Levine and Nigel S. Roberts). [Read more below]

Key to Victory – The future of minor parties

Under MMP we supposedly have a multi-party system – with a plethora of minor parties giving colour and life to political debate. But the reality is that this image is more of a mirage. Our minor parties are the weakest they’ve been for decades, and it’s not clear that any of the them have an assured future in Parliament. These are the issues examined by Jennifer Curtin and Raymond Miller in their excellent chapter entitled ‘New Zealand’s party system: a multi-party mirage?’ in the new post-election book Key to Victory: The New Zealand General Election of 2008 (edited by Stephen Levine and Nigel S. Roberts). This blog post highlights some of the most interesting points made by Curtin and Miller, including the suggestion of a more limited future for the smaller parties. [Read more below]

Key to Victory – International coverage of the 2008 election

It’s always interesting to see how the rest of the world views New Zealand politics and elections. Sometimes the international media political reports contain gross distortions and various ‘lost in translation’ elements, and other times the media reports and analysis benefits from its distance and its ability to put our politics into a wider context. Therefore it’s fortunate that German journalist and scholar Aljoscha Kertesz has gathered together ‘almost 300 media reports appearing in foreign media’ about the New Zealand general election of 2008 and analysed them, noting some of the examples and trends in his chapter entitled ‘2008: The International media and the election’ in the new post-election book Key to Victory: The New Zealand General Election of 2008 (edited by Stephen Levine and Nigel S. Roberts). This blog post highlights some of the most interesting points and examples made in this unusual but very welcome chapter. In particular, it highlights the characterisation of the 2008 context as seemingly both ‘lackluster’ and ‘ugly’ [Read more below]

Key to Victory – Colin James on the 2008 election

Why was Labour turfed out of office in 2008? Colin James puts down the Government’s electoral decline to Labour’s ‘failure of political management’ in areas such as the Electoral Finance Act and the so-called anti-smacking bill, as well as generally being punished for pushing a heavy socially liberal agenda. Labour also lost the electoral fight to show that it was the toughest on law and order. James says that the victorious National Party got there due to John Key’s ‘bland leading the bland’ strategy, which now results in a managerial ‘government by MBA’. James writes about these issue and others in a chapter entitled ‘2008: The last baby-boomer election’ in the new post-election book Key to Victory: The New Zealand General Election of 2008 (edited by Stephen Levine and Nigel S. Roberts). This blog post highlights some of the salient points made in this chapter. [Read more below]