New Zealand By-elections (next event: Botany [before 8th December 2018])

[Fubart Solman]

I just checked Wikipedia again; in addition to Simmons, there's a number of late entrants who will likely get a total of 5% between themselves.

[Fubart Solman]

I'm guessing that we'll have results by this time tomorrow.

I'd be shocked and awed if Ardern lost. I'm more interested in seeing how TOP and the People's Party do.

[Fubart Solman]

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http://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/24-02-2017/the-nailbiter-in-mt-albert-or-why-the-by-election-on-saturday-is-more-important-than-you-think/

[Fubart Solman]

Polls close at 7 PM NZST. That's in just under 20 minutes. http://www.electionresults.govt.nz/

Edit: With 45 minutes of counting, we're at 29% reporting. Ardern is at 77% and Genter is at 12%. Simmons is down in third at 4.25%.

[Fubart Solman]

Calling it for Jacinda Ardern. She's at 75-80% with 90% or so reporting.

[Fubart Solman]

Jacinda Ardern gets 10,000 votes with 100% reporting. Yes, exactly 10,000 votes out of 12,971 (that's 77.1%).

[Mazda]

Since the change in leadership in the National Party, a few of the old guard have sought more gainful means of employment - Bill English himself took early retirement, and former 'Minister of Everything' Steven Joyce followed close on his heels, having never been in Opposition before. Both of these were List MPs, but today, former Health Minister Jonathan Coleman resigned to take up a CEO position with a private health provider.

Coleman was loathed by much of the left for his conduct in the Health portfolio, which included neglecting mental health, contracting meals out to nefarious and incompetent private companies and describing the idea of providing free gender reassignment surgery as "nutty".

In any case, this prompts a by-election in the Northcote electorate just months after the general election. The electorate is on the genteel North Shore, but went Labour twice under Helen Clark and has a historic working class history around Hillcrest, Beachaven and the Chelsea sugar factory. However, since those days, that community has been replaced to a large extent with people who commute into the CBD, and the profile of the seat is very much a case of two-parent families of educated professionals who have no use for public transport and moan about traffic on the Harbour Bridge. There is also a high population of Asian people (in an NZ context, this means East Asian), who are also very much in the National camp at the moment.

So it's very much National's to lose - Coleman didn't have a huge personal vote, but the National party vote has been consistently around 50% for the last four elections. For Labour to win would require a strong local candidate, a bad National candidate, and NZ First and the Greens to stand aside.

However, as Northcote Labour are notoriously Odd, the first of these is easier said than done.

[Sestak]

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http://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/24-02-2017/the-nailbiter-in-mt-albert-or-why-the-by-election-on-saturday-is-more-important-than-you-think/

This is hilarious in hindsight.

[Fubart Solman]

A potentially competitive by-election? Whoa! Count me in!

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http://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/24-02-2017/the-nailbiter-in-mt-albert-or-why-the-by-election-on-saturday-is-more-important-than-you-think/

This is hilarious in hindsight.

Yeah, back in the day when Jacinda was just a lowly list MP trying to get an electorate of her own. It's been a whirlwind of a year for her. Winning a by-election, becoming leader of Labour, increasing Labour's vote share by a huge amount, (eventually) forming a government, and she's going to have a kid in a few months.

[Mazda]

A potentially competitive by-election? Whoa! Count me in!

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http://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/24-02-2017/the-nailbiter-in-mt-albert-or-why-the-by-election-on-saturday-is-more-important-than-you-think/

This is hilarious in hindsight.

Yeah, back in the day when Jacinda was just a lowly list MP trying to get an electorate of her own. It's been a whirlwind of a year for her. Winning a by-election, becoming leader of Labour, increasing Labour's vote share by a huge amount, (eventually) forming a government, and she's going to have a kid in a few months.

A lowly List MP? She was the inevitable next leader of the party and a highly-ranked member of the Shadow Cabinet. And in the same term, Bill English (Finance then PM) and Andrew Little (LotO then Random Dude) were List MPs, so the electorate seat was really just a nice-to-have.

Although, yes, the rapidity of the leadership change and poll bounce was nerve-jangling.

[Fubart Solman]

Northcote's by-election is this Saturday (NZ time)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northcote_by-election,_2018

[Mazda]

Thanks for reminding me of this thread! I've been in the electorate every weekend (last Sunday I thought I might escape, but ended up being magnetically pulled to a public meeting for the Democrats for Social Credit, at which I was one of twelve attendees).

The hoarding war is fairly even between National and Labour (neither of them look good - National's because of Bidois' stupid face, ours because of the weird size and the random orange-white-teal colour scheme), with Greens present on a fair number of private sites as well as Council sites. ACT cover most of the Council sites, as do the Democrats - but the latter only have tiny, awful ones, so they needn't have bothered. Naturally, judging anything from hoarding coverage is a fool's errand anyway. Particularly as there are a ton of civic-minded people who have agreed to have both National and Labour signs on their fences. I've even seen one National-Green fence.

Despite the half-hearted attempts from both sides to turn it into a referendum on Jacinda, and from the Greens to make it about poverty or something, it does seem that the main issue is the traffic down Onewa Road. I do not give a toss about this, tbh. Whenever I've been down that road, it hasn't seemed too bad, and whatever problems that exist at the moment mainly come from the fact that they're digging up most of the surrounding streets for various reasons. The traffic issue will basically resolve itself when the orange cones migrate to some other suburb. However, this hasn't stopped ACT's Stephen Berry from losing both of his voters by proposing a new motorway harbour crossing through Northcote's beloved green parks and, er, cemetery.

Because it's a by-election, there's been a lot of focus on the personalities of the candidates. Dan Bidois (National) has the better narrative, having flunked out of high school, taken a butcher's apprenticeship and ended up at Harvard, but he generally just seems to be a boyishly enthusiastic cookie-cutter Nat - and I've heard quite a lot of complaints on the doorstep about his recent move to the electorate. He is also heavily involved in the Wesleyan Church, a sect which split off from the Methodists because the latter thought gays were tolerable. Shanan Halbert (Labour), meanwhile, is seen to be weak, which is largely, but not entirely, a homophobia thing, but it has been drilled into me over the years that I probably shouldn't volubly accuse people of flagrant bigotry while door knocking. The #stronglocalvoice thing is working in the 'local' element, though.

In terms of actual data, the National internal poll had us 8% behind and our internal had us 2% behind. Which is all complete rubbish, but suffice to say that it's reasonably close. The advance vote data is interesting, though - so far, it's been consistently about double the advance vote turnout of the GE, and most of the highest increases are in places where we tend to do quite well. There's a few possible explanations:
- turnout is higher because of idk Simon Wilson doing a campaign diary in the Herald - wtf no, it's a by-election.
- Labour voters are turning out in droves because we've got a genuine chance at winning - Coleman's long dominance would have put a dampener on lefty turnout, to be sure, but you would have expected that these people would have turned out to give a party vote to Jacinda, if anything.
- Labour voters are turning out in droves because we're doorknocking them to death - the campaign is actually less active than Mount Roskill, I'd say, and I can believe the rumours that National are throwing the kitchen sink at this one.
- National voters in Labour areas are turning out due to desparation, having gleaned a very negative picture from general feeling in their own suburbs - there may be some truth in this.
- Turnout isn't actually higher, it's just that usually-on-the-day voters were getting it out the way before Queen's Birthday - probably explains the bulk of it.

So it would be nice to win (apart from the fact that Shanan would be an MP), but my feeling is that we'll just run it fairly close and improve our vote. I would have said that the Green vote would decline heavily, but Rebekah Jaung is a pleasant and articulate young woman who will get quite a lot of the (large) Asian vote. The main two candidates are Maori and Shanan is openly gay.

[Mazda]

Dan Bidois (National) - 10,147
Shanan Halbert (Labour) - 8,785
Rebekah Jaung (Green) - 579
Stephen Berry (ACT) - 157
Kym Koloni (Ind/One Nation) - 95
Jeff Lye (Cannabis) - 76
Tricia Cheel (Democrats for Social Credit) - 30
Liam Walsh (Not A Party) - 5

I saw a Kym Koloni leaflet in a letterbox on election day, randomly.

[Fubart Solman]

Got too busy working out in the yard yesterday and missed this. Thanks for keeping up with it. It's nice to have someone from NZ sharing that.

[Mazda]

We seem to be having these on the regular now.

I don't want to get too in-depth, but essentially, the National Party has spent this week setting fire to itself. The central figure is Opposition Chief Whip (well, until the start of the week) Jami-Lee Ross, who has been accused by Simon Bridges of leaking, and by the rest of the country as a bully and a sexual harasser. In return, he has accused Bridges of corrupt practices around donations and of making up sexual harassment accusations. Oh, and also it's diffused into this whole argument about the influence that the Chinese Communist Party has over the National Party. And this is without going into the drama about Bridges privately referring to one of his MPs as "f***** useless". The MP in question (who, to be fair, is quite useless), publicly backed Bridges and basically admitted that he had a point, but hilariously, her mum then came out and told Bridges to "go suck eggs".

So it's been a fun week for NZ Politics, but the main upshot is that Jami-Lee Ross has resigned his seat and is re-contesting as an Independent. There seemed to be some local support for him, but then the harassment accusations came out and that died down considerably. The National candidate will definitely win (my money's on Katrina Bungard, a local board member in the area, being selected - she was one of Ross' victims), but there might be some entertainment on offer. The only other candidate yet announced (at this very early stage) is Eliot Ikilei of the tiny New Conservative party and Labour are discussing whether to stand a candidate or just gaze at the chaos in horrified bemusement.

[Mazda]

Well, not quite that regularly, it seems: Jami-Lee Ross now says that he can't stand in a by-election while National are flinging dirt at him, in an interview in which he flung yet more dirt at the National Party.

He's therefore not handing in his resignation from Parliament and wants to continue throwing dirt with the benefit of a parliamentary salary and a platform from which to fling. It's unclear whether he'll genuinely get to stay until the election, though, as there's a good chance that National will get him kicked out under the anti-defection law they voted against a couple of weeks ago. He could also be convicted of a crime holding a 2-year sentence.

[Fubart Solman]

This whole thing is hilarious. Have you seen any good comprehensive articles on this? I missed the first few days of the Ross Revolt.

That would be really hilarious if Bridges used the Waka-Jumping bill against Ross. I don’t really like the idea of using it against electorate MPs though.

[Mazda]

This whole thing is hilarious. Have you seen any good comprehensive articles on this? I missed the first few days of the Ross Revolt.

That would be really hilarious if Bridges used the Waka-Jumping bill against Ross. I don’t really like the idea of using it against electorate MPs though.

This is a comprehensive list of everything that's happened, while https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/20-10-2018/the-uniquely-damaging-betrayals-of-jami-lee-ross/ is less comprehensive but is at least basically up-to-date. Newsroom have /url] [url=been]https://www.newsroom.co.nz/@politics/2018/10/16/279660/zhang-yikun-and-the-alleged-100k-donation https://www.newsroom.co.nz/2018/10/19/284377/death-by-1000-cuts-working-for-jami-lee-ross.

The latest news is that Jami-Lee was sectioned yesterday with help from the police, and this sets in train a process by which he can be ejected from Parliament without invoking Waka-jumping. It isn't clear whether the Nats organised his sectioning or not, but to be fair, he's probably been under a fair amount of stress this week.