This is brilliant to watch. A shame there’s so little information and it’s so important, however.
I really wish they’d behave like adults and get on with their jobs, however
Yes. The Great Negotiator, handler of many mergers and acquisitions, isn’t off to a great start.
And we all know what ‘mergers and acquisitions’ are really like! If he thinks he’s doing a hostile takeover this won’t go well at all
And as it turns out the only ‘merger & acquisition’ he can name is the attempted coup he tried on Virgin when CEO of AirNZ that failed so spectacularly AirNZ sold their entire stake.
Which is kind of a worry. I’m getting a big “lies on his CV” vibe from him now.
Oh i’ve had that from very early on. Even in yesterdays articles summing up the state of negotiations there were things like he’d said in the morning that he was keeping the National Party Board and Caucus up to date on things. But then later in the day explained that someone else was talking to the board and he was only talking to the specific caucus members when something he was negotiating that was in their purview came up. Very much not what you would call a straight shooter.
Argh one of those. We’ve all worked with someone like that, how on earth did he get voted in? I guess not being Labour was enough.
Hang on… National has 48 seats, Act has 11. That’s 59/122. NZF has 8 and the balance of power.
So NAct needs NZF to form a majority government.
Why areLabour (34), Greens (15), and TPM (6); for a total of 55. Why are they not also courting NZF and just sitting on their thumbs waiting?NZF said they wouldn’t work with Labor and Labor said they wouldn’t work with NZF. The voters would feel justifiably betrayed if they ignored those promises. And I see no reason why the left coalition would work together any better. Can you imagine NZF and TPM agreeing on anything?
I don’t understand why the parties play the game of ruling in or out. Surely it’s better to pretend they will work with any other party, it puts them in a much stronger negotiating position.
Talk about cutting your nose off to spite your face…
That is a question I have been asking too
I think on the basis of this electoral result it just wouldn’t be tenable, setting aside that they all said they wouldn’t do it. NAct could try to get Te Pati Maori, but they already know what happens when you go into coalition with them and won’t want to repeat the same mistake.
There are only two possibilities here. Luxon somehow manages to form a coalition which will presumably fall apart sometime before the next election is scheduled, or will be a shambles throughout. Or he doesn’t and we have a new election that may, or may not change the parliamentary balance.
I’m pretty sure NZF said they wouldn’t work with Labour (not that their word is worth anything). I’d guess Winnie is also reminding National and Act they could run to Labour if they wanted to get more out of the coalition.
Plus, Labour are not popular right now. Winding their way back into power would probably damage their reputation longer term.
The best thing for Labour to do at the moment, in my view, is spend a term in opposition figuring out what they want to be as a party. They’ve strayed a long way from being the party of the working class, in my view.
Both Labour and NZ first have ruled out working with each other.
He also points out that, although Peters cannot leverage the threat of supporting Labour instead, “he’s demonstrating his power over his larger coalition partners, making them come to him. He is the most important person in the country, the absolute centre of attention. And he will go on like this: he always does.”
Politics these days is Winston’s retirement hobby, like how some people are into chess or golf or internet trolling.
Underestimating Winston’s ability to derive maximum enjoyment from the situation is such a rookie mistake.
Green Party should be in there offering National an alternative to Winnie’s madness and trying to get Act as far away from power as possible… but they won’t
There is no world in which the Green Party should go into coalition with this version of the National Party. There are far too many completely opposite policy desires and doing so would destroy the party, as it nearly did to Te Pati Maori.
I was thinking about this some more. Realistically the most logical policy wise coalition would be for National to ditch the remaining right-right wing elements that haven’t already gone to Act, and “Labour” to ditch whatever remains of their left wing elements and form a grand coalition of the centre-right.
Apart from their enduring antagonism towards each other, those two lumps of the parties are actually not particularly distinguishable on the really big economic issues; and it would only really be if the National religious fundamentalists could hold their nose for some of the more liberal social issues.
But you don’t hear calls for National & Labour to form a coalition like you do National-Greens because everybody knows it’d trash both parties support. But the same thing applies to National-Green the commentariat just chooses to pretend it doesn’t, maybe they’re trolling I dunno?
