Saturday, October 08, 2005

Evans Jones comments on the New Zealand election: "Slagging off the Greens is partly a strategy favoured both by the National Party (and its Exclusive Brethren supporters) and by Dunne to try and push the Greens below 5 per cent in the polls. The aim is to stop their ideas from becoming respectable, because if this happened a Labour-Greens coalition would be in power permanently.... The possibility of a Green breakthrough into something more like the political mainstream is the fundamental ‘watch-this-space’ instability of New Zealand politics."

"The secret fear of Dunne, the Nationals and the ACT is that Green ideas will catch on and the Greens will go up to 10%. So they are painted into a corner in which wind, public transport and so on are slagged off at every possible opportunity. This is a potentially self-defeating streagy. But so far it has worked."

"If Labour had any clues they would start slowly putting greater distance between themselves and the National Party on environmental / wind / public transport, etc policies, and equally subtly let the Greens take the credit.... Labour would then have a clear majority with the Greens and other leftish parties, and so it will be even more dependent on them than it is now."

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