Tag Archives: Peter Shirtcliffe

Conservative Party of New Zealand

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15

I’m 8/19ths conservative, according to Colin Craig’s Conservative Test, on the website of the Conservative Party of New Zealand that was launched today. This might come as a surprise to some readers, which is fair enough. The questions asked in the quiz are quite poorly-written, complex, contradictory, question-begging, and the colour-coding on the answers marks it out pretty clearly as a polemic exercise; but I simply answered them at face value. There was a brief but pretty worthwhile discussion on twitter about the meanings embedded in the questions, but I decided to just answer them naively: to pick a side based on gut response.

That said, I think I probably am more conservative than many of my liberal brethren. Although I disagree very strongly with old-fashioned (‘paleo’) conservatives on many, if not most, policy and philosophical topics, I generally find them easier to understand than either libertarians or neoconservatives, for one major reason: they still believe in society, and especially in its central role in civic and political life. I can have a reasoned debate with someone who accepts that there is such a thing as society — and that it has a meaningful role to play in government, and vice-versa. It’s much harder to do so with those who (like Thatcher) simply deny its existence, or those who (like Norquist) having grudgingly admitted that society is not simply a figment of the collective socialist imagination, would prefer to drown it in the bathtub.

Several years ago, Anita addressed the place of the Christian right in a progressive society, and her words are similarly applicable to conservatism in general:

Perhaps the role of the Christian Right is a necessary one; it does not prevent change but it slows it and makes sure there’s enough discussion that the more conservative members of our society don’t get left behind and alienated from a society that moves too quickly and doesn’t take the time to persuade them and bring them along.

While I campaign for more liberal and progressive progress, I’m not sure I would be willing to pay the price of a divided antagonistic society. Perhaps I should thank the Christian Right for slowing us down enough that we can move together as a community.

Anita’s argument is very dear to me. I want the sort of society I want, of course, but I don’t want a society where whoever holds 51% of the power at present can enact swift, revolutionary changes that alienate the other 49% — or at least that they cannot do so with impunity. This is at root a very conservative view, although not in the polemic sense of that word. So, although I disagree of most of what it stands for, inasmuch as New Zealand conservatives are presently served pretty poorly, I think a conservative party could be a useful addition to the political canon.

I expect Colin Craig’s endeavour will fail, however. His quiz, as noted, does not suggest that very deep philosophical or political consideration has been given to the issues at hand. His previous forays into politics have been reactionary and underwhelming, and so expensive as to be unsustainable even in the medium term. It’s way too close to the election to make a meaningful impact. Also suggesting a slapdash approach, the iconography and branding of the Conservative Party (based on its website) is terrible:

The blue they’ve chosen is a middling sort of shade, neither ACT’s teal or National’s royal blue, similar to the shade I criticised previously when used in anti-MMP ads by Peter Shirtcliffe. There’s no good reason not to have chosen a deep flag-coloured navy blue here. The typefaces, far from being the solid, dependable sort we expect, are incongruous — one is cartoonish, the other is frightfully modern. If there was ever a decent time to deploy a newspaper font, this was surely it. In this regard, however, the effort isn’t quite as bad as Reform NZ, whose designers, in their wisdom, chose a font very similar to that used by LOLcat images. Even his New Zealand flag is cartoonish — the opposite of the dignified, patriotic image they should be pitching for. They could have done a lot worse than emulating the masthead of Trevor Loudon’s old blog, which was one of the most striking in NZ — though now replaced by a dull white banner (the image at right salvaged from google image thumbnails).

There is also the perverse ideological incentive noted by Cactus Kate, that he seeks to disrupt ACT’s success in Epsom and thereby puts at risk the re-election of the Key government; if this happens, Labour’s proposed capital gains tax will likely be enacted, which would substantially disadvantage both himself personally (as a property investor) and many of his voters.

But in the final analysis, the biggest obstacle to the Conservative Party’s success is conservatism itself. By definition, conservative voters are reluctant to switch their support from one political vehicle to another. They require very good reasons to switch, and there is nothing to indicate that the Conservative Party will provide them.

L

MMP in NZ is really safe

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4

As I’ve said before, Peter Shirtcliffe’s campaign to scupper MMP (again) is probably a blessing in disguise for the electoral status quo in New Zealand. If any further evidence were required, the following should suffice for now:

The speech bubbles are blank because Peter is running a caption competition to find a punchline. Demonstrating piercing insight into his relevance to NZ politics, he has chosen the Kiwiblog Right for these words of inspiration. Personally, I think that leaving them blank perfectly captures the character of this campaign: inchoate, futile, tone-deaf irrelevance.

Hopefully he won’t be too disheartened by the far-from-enthusiastic response of Farrar’s captive authoritarians.

L

MMP in NZ is safe

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11

shirtcliffe ad
Evidence:

  • It has been found to work pretty well and all parliamentary parties except ACT support it.
  • The UK election is about to remind people how perverse FPP is.
  • Peter Shirtcliffe is spamming people in order to gain support for his anti-MMP campaign.
  • His google ad campaign looks like this ====>

Seriously. That’s him. A ranting white middle-aged elderly patrician of the sort New Zealand’s governments were almost exclusively composed before the change in electoral system — and on a soap-box, for goodness’ sake. A starker warning of what’s in store should the electoral system change is hard to envisage. Also: it’s visually busy and garish. The blue is neither National-party royal blue, nor ACT-party aqua-blue, nor flag-Navy; it’s nothing. The message is over-long and confused (campaign for an effective referendum? Don’t you mean to campaign against the electoral system? No? Ok then.) And the cartoon …

Thanks, Peter, you’re doing your country a great service.

(Thanks to Lyndon Hood in the comments to Russell’s thread linked above for the pic.)

[This line inserted to fill whitespace].

L

Winner does not take all

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9

Peter Shirtcliffe is furious (audio), and well he might be, because the government’s plans for electoral reform are eminently sensible, subject to wide bipartisan support, and most critically, not at all hasty. This is electoral reform done right: for change, a majority of voters must reject the status quo system outright at two consecutive general elections, with plenty of time for reflection, consultation and campaigning before each.

Shirtcliffe’s proposal for a one-off vote on which electoral system to use at the 2011 election makes only one concession from his holy grail of government decisiveness: he thinks it should be preferential. His scheme aims to deliver that grail to his beloved National party wholesale and for good, by springing fundamental constitutional change upon the NZ electorate with less than two years’ notice and discussion, with no societal safety net, no cooling-off period, no opportunity for reflection. It would turn the time between now and the 2011 general election into an all-out propaganda war for the future of democracy in New Zealand, a war in which the National government and its allies hold all the strategic ground: unprecedented popular support and an opposition at its nadir; confused and rebranding environmental and social justice movements; the recent memory of an unpopular and dysfunctional government which represented all that people thought was wrong with MMP; a political environment in which many people will simply vote for what That Nice Man John Key recommends; and an anti-MMP lobby which is practiced, prepared and very well-resourced. Shirtcliffe’s careful circumspection — refusal to express opinions on such matters as what system should be adopted, and how campaign funding should be managed — and flattery of the plebiscite (“we’ve got an intelligent electorate out there”) seeks to hide this behind a high-handed neutrality of purpose, masking the fact that the process he advocates yields his own cause very great advantages.

Shirtcliffe’s decisiveness imperative insists that the winner must take all, in elections and in constitutional reform as in heavyweight boxing: a few ceremonial minutes in an enclosed space which determine who is the winner and who is the loser, and all that happens in between bouts is meaningless hype. It is not a democratic model, it is not a consultative model, it is not a model which gives adequate consideration to the views and opinions of the electorate at large; far from respecting electors as intelligent and capable actors, it reduces politics for the individual voter to a single, somewhat inconvenient event which happens once every three years, or in the case of something as important as changing the electoral system, once every generation or so if we’re very fortunate. Fortunately for New Zealand, and indeed to the great credit of the National party, he has been denied. The proposed framework should yield a legitimate and durable result, and one which should be supported even by those whose preferred option is not selected.

There’s much which could go awry yet, but this framework is as good as we could hope for. Idiot/Savant’s assertion that “if we want to protect MMP, its not enough simply to vote for no change in 2011 – we also have to chuck out National, just to be on the safe side” seems a little overwrought — National under Key has taken to MMP like a duck to water, learning to play both ends against the middle in a way the Clark government never did. And although there have been some recent cat-herding problems to do with keeping errant ministers in line, and around the rugby world cup, I can’t see a desire to return to the bad old days of one party rule. I do think National will campaign hard for SM as an it’s-the-same-really-only-better option, and this provides Labour and the Greens a good opportunity to differentiate itself — by pushing for MMP-as-it-is-now, or MMP-with-some-changes; although it must be said Labour aren’t behaving much like MMP-aware political actors these days. A larger threat from the National party, I believe, is the possibility of rolling the abolition of Māori seats into the new electoral system, or choosing to support an electoral system in a second referendum which (they may claim) renders the seats obsolete. This will be a strong wedge, and will enable National to frame the debate in terms beneficial to its own interests.

I await the further propagandisation of electoral systems with interest. Meanwhile, I/S’s conclusion is unarguable: “we need to make it clear to both parties: our democracy is non-negotiable.” And I’m still interested in peoples’ responses to the question: what kind of electoral system do we actually want?

L