When I buy jeans I don’t buy Levis. I buy jeans that fit, cost half the price and last longer. I don’t know what make they are but I do know which shop sells them.
I’m a Vegemite afficionado. When an Auckland hotel serves me up something else with “-mite” in its name, it’s almost enough to dissuade me from staying there.
An election is not just about hopes. It is also about fears. This one is no exception.
Fear is what last week’s excitement over genetic modification (GM) was mainly about. Among voters who don’t go into all the ins and outs it is an issue of fear and the Greens are playing it for all their worth.
Look at me!
Richard Prebble stands outside the walls of Mt Eden prison to promise “zero tolerance” of crims. Winston Peters next day says Prebble should have been inside.
Pansy Wong bungies off the Sky Tower in Auckland to dramatise her campaign for Auckland Central and the Chinese vote.
Helen Clark poses with hammer in hand as a billboard is erected in Richarson Road. Bill English goes boxing. Jim Anderton “sings” Pokarekareana.
Do you draw up a household balance sheet? Not likely. But chances are it is subconsciously influencing your vote on 27 July.
The state of household finances is the lens through which most voters see and judge “the economy”. Whether across the nation household finances are getting better or worse or are beset by uncertainty is a big election decider.
A spectre stalks the mainstream parties this election: American gangster capitalists.
They aren’t a factor for July 27. But beyond election day will the political consensus for the free economy hold?
During the dotcom craze anything went and anything was believed. There was a “new economy”. A philosopher’s stone had been found.
Late in the week the election was called National party planners pulled apart Bill English’s whistle stop tour of 54 towns in 35 days. There was no longer time to go helicoptering all over the countryside.
The regional blitz had come a bit late in any case. English himself is on his own cognisance a slow burner. Now he doesn’t have time to burn in slowly, as Helen Clark did during six years as Opposition leader, touring the provinces a day or two a week, laying down a midden of local publicity and connections.
Jim Anderton is right: our national anthem is a dirge and Pokare sounds heaps better. Air New Zealand understood its powerful nationalistic appeal when it made it its ad theme song.
Anderton sang Pokare when launching his third new party on Saturday, to make a point about the uniqueness of this country’s cultural mix. It is not a theme I have heard much of before from him.
If there is one thing that will bring Helen Clark down eventually it is hubris.
The Oxford Dictionary defines hubris as presumption, pride, excessive self-confidence. In simple parlance it means: too big for one’s boots.
Calling a snap election — and let’s be clear, that is what this election is — is an act of the Sovereign. Under our archaic constitution the monarch decides when to dissolve Parliament and so when you vote.
The teachers have a point: education is underfunded and good teachers are underpaid. But they are not supposed to be making this point before the government gets re-elected.
The government is frozen in the headlights while it shuffles towards election day. After the headlights, however, comes the big red bus.
The Greens want to genetically modify Parliament. That’s why there’s so much fuss about them.
They want to transplant an ecology gene into our two-legged wallet-and-welfare body politic.
The Greens acknowledge that traditional selective breeding of new generations of members of the old “grey” parties has had an effect. Labour is ratifying the Kyoto protocol and doing a raft of green things.