Just in. By 1080. A good effort by all. Congratulations Kris. Look forward to working with you in Parliament. More details soon
Just in. By 1080. A good effort by all. Congratulations Kris. Look forward to working with you in Parliament. More details soon
This entry was posted on Saturday, November 20th, 2010 at 8:41 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
FAAAAAAF
Thought I’d better add a bit about “parachuting” candidates in from outside the electorate.
Just about all of the Labour candidates for Mana this time around were from outside the electorate. The 69 SFWU local members who turned up for the selection chose the person who best identified with their concerns and issues, not where they resided at that time. That person happened to be Kris Fa’afoi.
While the previous Mana MP is now held up to be almost iconic in the area, she too “parachuted” in from Wainuiomata and the Labour MP prior to this also moved into the area after the selection.
I can remember the speech that Luamanavao Winnie Laban gave to a packed meeting when she was selected. She said that people say that she was not from Porirua and could not possibly reflect the concerns of the people of Mana. She dismissed this, saying that most previous Labour Prime Ministers (this was prior to Helen Clark) had faced the same criticism. Michael Joseph Savage had come from Australia, Peter Fraser had come from Scotland, Norman Kirk had been parachuted into Sydenham, Mike Moore had been moved from Auckland to Christchurch and Geoffrey Palmer had moved from Wellington to Christchurch.
The overwhelming majority of the local people present at the meeting gave her a round of applause and voted for her.
It is not about which part of the world a candidate comes from, it’s whether that person can empathise with and fight for the interests of the people in the electorate. I believe that Kris Fa’afoi can do this and so do the majority of the people in Mana who turned out to vote yesterday.
Winnie also had an iconic “Wellington” area name, this would have given her mana (no pun intended) and people would have known of her “pedigree” if not her personally.
@reid ‘try having some really good policies’ well that isn’t very helpful, policy obviously isn’t the problem because if it was people would still vote they would just vote for someone else. If policy is the reason why people aren’t voting then all parties must be lacking policy.
‘Labour’s sense of social responsibility seems largely to consist of giving lots of taxpayer money to large constituent rumps such as students’
This isn’t a very good point seeing as education is the lifeblood of any succesful economy.
@tracey That’s true and that’s the way it has always has been, philosophy is leisure. Whatever the problem is Labour needs to find out.
I think another thing that needs some serious thought is why no party ever seems to be able to survive longer than three terms, in NZ and abroad. What’s going on there? Why in 100 years has no Prime Minister ever been able to serve a longer term that Seddon did, be they left or right wing?
‘Labour came far too close to doing something that has never ever happened before in recent New Zealand electoral history – having an Opposition lose a seat in a by-election. No Government has won a seat off the opposition in the 59 by-elections since 1936.’
Man, what does that say. Is it possible that the entire democratic process runs off the idea that the grass is always greener on the other side!?
Labour’s ridiculous spending is why we are so indebted, which is why we are cutting spending (not nearly by enough though). So yeah, Labour did leave us with economic problems.
No not ahead of Cunliffe, after him. Cunliffe has to make a serious mistake to avoid leading Labour into 2014 and he’s too competent to do that.
However I don’t expect under Cunliffe, that Labour would win in 2014, so Cunliffe won’t ever be PM.
That’s my prediction, ever changing, as these things do.
Congratulations to Kris and the team.
No doubt there will be some analysis and work to do in the coming months.
Very well done for winning in the face of strong campaigning by the PM.
Btw, who is Parata?
So you want suggestions?
Make the first $15,000 everyone earns, tax-free.
This will send Treasury nuts.
This will also, overnight, add a third to beneficiary incomes since they have PAYE deducted like everyone else.
That’s the tax cut for which I’d be advocating, were I a Labour activist.
@reid no I wasn’t exactly asking for suggestions if you read the rest of my sentence
Good idea though it’s simular to what the liberal democrats want in Britain, they want to make the first tax bracket 0%.
I could also advocate for such a policy but only if the government had set up alternative ways to get revenue to make up for it so they can still pay for their large government expienditure which is what I will always advocate for. There are many ways for the government to earn revenue other than taking it from workers pockets and reducing their standard of living. That is the answer to good fiscal policy for Labours goals.
Umm… Gary Jones:
Are you serious? Hekia Parata was the National Party candidate. You know, the one that accompanied Key around the electorate smiling and waving at anything that moved – provided there were cameras in sight.
oh, so it wasn’t the PM running for the Mana seat then?
Gotta be impressed (rolls eyes again) at how fast the nats PR guys turned the loss into a ‘win’ – and whats with the media helping them spin it…someones got some have some hefty strings they are pulling. Between the news and the herald who needs billboards…just once I would like to see the media show some neutrality.
“There are many ways for the government to earn revenue other than taking it from workers pockets and reducing their standard of living.”
Dylan, apart from the fact when govt receives taxes, it’s not “earning” money it’s taking it, what other ways are there?
On second thoughts perhaps you mean ‘who is she… where does she come from? She’s a Nat list MP. Stood for Mana last time against Winnie Laban and lost to her by 2500 votes – and that’s after the specials had been counted. This stuff about Laban’s majority being 6000 plus is garbage. That was the Party vote in 2008. So Key’s claim that Parata had a victory is rubbish because you can’t make a comparison with the MMP 2008 vote and the FPP 2010 byelection vote.
Sorry, got it the wrong way round. Laban’s personal vote was plus 6000 but the party vote was 2500. Oh dear.
just checked out some pics and i see who you mean
i thought she was the PM’s secretary (at one stage, wondered if she was his wife, tagging along with him while he was campaigning)
“…This stuff about Laban’s majority being 6000 plus is garbage. That was the Party vote in 2008.”
According to the Electoral Commission’s website, Laban’s majority in 2008 was 6155, Faafoi’s was 1080.
No party vote in those figures, according to the website.
Anne, the party vote majority was 2500, the personal vote majority was 6155. Think you have them round the wrong way.
Sir Gerard Wall from Blenheim, Graham Kelly from Khandallah, Winnie Laban from Wainuiomata, and now Kris Faafoi from Kilbirnie. All the best of Porirua.
“Btw, who is Parata?” A piranah with a righty bitey ata !
Hi Anne, I missed ya!
!
No Reid, Anne’s quite right.
This is what I and one or two others like Phil Quin have been arguing for 6 weeks now. The MSM and (naturally) the Right-leaning blogosphere have got it completely wrong. The benchmark for this By-Election is NOT Laban’s 6100 Candidate-Vote majority (even less the 7000 figure being thrown about with wild abandon by some poor souls),the TRUE BENCHMARK is the 2008 PARTY-VOTE.
Labour won that by a mere 2500 votes over National in Mana (2008). So, taking into account the lower turnout (68.5 % of the 2008 Mana turnout), the TRUE BENCHMARK – the majority one should expect for Fa’afoi all things being equal – is 1700. Not 6100, not 7000, but 1700.
Although it’s difficult to predict, I suspect Fa’afoi’s majority will creep up to about 1200 or a little more after special-votes are counted. Not quite the SHOCK DISASTER that many would have us believe.
Which brings me to a spot of shameless self-promotion. 2 weeks ago (reiterated again on Friday, the day before the By-Election) I predicted on Quin’s Irredeemable blog that Fa’afoi would win by 1200 votes. Also got the Green (Logie) vote right and the % margin between Fa’afoi and Parata right. And once the special-votes are counted, I’m expecting my predictions for Fa’afoi and Parata’s raw number of votes to be very close: I predicted: Fa’afoi 11,100……Parata 9900.
My mistake, however, was to over-estimate Matt McCarten’s vote. 2 weeks ago, I said 1400, and unfortunately on Friday I upped it to 1800. Bad, bad mistake. But generally, I’m feeling pretty damn satisfied with my predictions. As I said on ‘The Standard’, perhaps, without knowing it, I’ve become a forceful and ruthless campaign strategist with an almost effortless midas touch when it comes to the deeply cynical dark arts of electoral calculation.
Then again, perhaps not.
Clare – Willie Jackson and John Tamihere ‘entertained’ at a fundraiser for Parata a couple of weeks ago. Further, on their 12 November show they spent time telling the audience not to vote for Kris but instead to vote for Parata or McCarten.
Why is the benchmark the party vote when this election was always fundamentally about who was their local MP?
This is why what happened, happened.
@reid the government can invest in buisness and get revenue through SOEs thought you would already know that…
I think the fact that Red Alert has a two line post on the result and not a single MP has thus far commented, once, explains everything we need to know about how the party feels about this result…
If Carter releases his list of 17 this week, things will get very, very interesting for Goff…
@Jeremy yeah I too am suprised at how short the post is.
@Dylan @Jeremy the psot is short because it was breaking news. Myself and my colleagues are tired and had many other things to do today. I expect there’ll be more posts. Keep commenting, We are listneing. But I am going to bed
I think you answered your own question there – yes this was fundamentally about the local MP. With Laban gone, the numbers who gave her personal support had to be discounted in favour of the Labour baseline (the party vote).
“yes this was fundamentally about the local MP”
So why Viper, when there was a much more locally popular candidate who was ready able and willing to replace Laban, did Phil instead select Faafoi, who turned out to be a bit of a fizzer, to put it mildly?
I really have no idea what the selection panel discussed nor why Fa’afoi finally won out in the selection against the other Labour nominees.
You describe Kris as a fizzer even though he won, not sure where exactly this leaves Parata then in your estimations since she lost, garnering fewer votes this time around too.
hahaha seems the Labour MPs are being stubborn as always
Excuse my economic ignorance, but how does cutting spending while borrowing $250m each week improve things?
Doesn’t it just rearrange the deck chairs on the titanic?
NZ Herald this morning “From three senior figures has come the suggestions that Kris Faafoi winning 47 per cent of the candidate vote on Saturday was a better result than the 43.9 per cent party vote that the party got in 2008, when Winnie Laban stood.
That is like comparing raisins and sheep droppings.
There seems to be a lot on here that want to believe in the sheep droppings.
Anyone that believes that Labour are happy with this is dreaming. (or high on sheep droppings)
Anyone that believes that the nats have really made this a marginal seat is dreaming. (or high on sheep droppings).
The outcome of the election was never going to change the government. Posturing that somehow Labour are in trouble because they didn’t romp a win is misleading at best. If it were all tied up and winning Mana would have got rid of this government, I’d have expected a much more resounding victory, and much harder work for the right’s spin doctors.
Of course, the right wing rumour mongers won’t be here to compare results when it really matters after the 2011 poll as they’ll be too busy licking their wounds and preparing for another decade in opposition, but history (and the net archives) will stand testament to their blind, willful ignorance.
Al1ens – So do you think labour should be happy with this result?
No complacency about this one please! To say that 47% is more than the Labour vote overall at the last election – it says nothing at all. The Mana seat would be relied on to produce many more Labour votes than this, to give Labour a chance in the next election.
A game breaker is needed, and removing GST from fruit and vegetables is not what I am looking for.
@Jeremy – Nah, I think the MPs were all partying over the awesome victory that was Faafoi’s
!!!!!
Post / p*** up , er, post / p*** up? Mmmm I wonder which I would choose?
Goff is great, happy about the victory and ready to be working with his new chamber colleague
!
Reid – Faafoi won. And now he’ll be fine
FAAF
I _ W 
N !!!!!!!
@Viper – excellent points!
Hi Dylan!
!