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its Not Over

Entry 226, on 2005-09-19 at 14:14:51 (Rating 3, Politics)

In my last blog entry I lamented the inevitable end to the political entertainment being provided by the election campaign. Well, the election is complete, but the closeness of the result means the entertainment is far from over. In fact, the election isn't really complete at all, because the special votes need to be counted and could possibly make a difference.

And after that we will have the circus of coalition and support discussions which should provide further interest to the suitably interested observer. Winston Peters has disappeared, the Maori Party are acting smug and even threatening to talk to National (they will never team up with the Nats), Don Brash still thinks he can win (that's really unlikely) - so it all looks good for more fun in the near future.

Its highly unlikely that the Nats can form the next government, which is good, but the reason they can't is really amusing and ironic. The first thing that made National a real political threat was Don Brash's famous speech against what he saw as special privileges given to Maoris. Since then there have been more announcements and policies which could be interpreted as being anti-Maori, a major one being abolishing the Maori seats.

Well, guess who Don would need to team up with to help him create a National lead government? That's right, the Maori Party, who are only there because of the Maori seats. Well, I wonder if they will be keen to team up with Don. No, I don't think so. So National has shot itself in the foot rather nicely. And it couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of people!

I made a prediction of the result of the election in my last blog, so let's see how close I was. I'll put my prediction in brackets next to the real result. Labour 41 (41), National 40 (44), Greens 5 (5), Jim 1 (1), Maori 4 (4), NZ First 6 (5), United Future 3 (I forgot them!), ACT 2 (0).

So I was quite accurate, apart from forgetting about United Future, and assuming (along with many others, including Keith Locke, who will now have to run naked through the streets of Epsom because of a bet against Rodney Hide winning there) that ACT would fail completely. And I was right about the overhang. Clever politics there: party vote Labour, electorate vote Maori. This ensured extra seats for the center-left block.

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