NZ elections

[Bill Cochrane]

A small plug for the people here doing the NZ election survey . On their
website http://www2.waikato.ac.nz/politics/nzes/nzes99.htm you can see
regular updates on the polling - they're doing this nightly at the moment-
from their nice little charts you can see a pretty mixed picture  with the
Alliance heading steadily upward toward 10%, Labour falling toward 35%,
National rising toward 35% and ACT and NZ first on about 6%. The Greens ,
who use to be part of the alliance are about 2.5% (down from around 5%).
Adding up the numbers the Labour/Alliance is at 45% and holding while
National /ACT is 40% and rising.
The whole thing is getting pretty close and hard to call but with some
decent tactical voting - ie labour gets peoples votes in the seats while the
alliance gets the party vote- we should see a centre left alliance/labour
govt. Interestingly the greens while performing woefully in the polls could
be central to the outcome as while they are below the 5% cut of for list
seats they may well win an electoral seat (coromandel for those with maps),
a traditional national seat giving us a couple more leftish seats.
Less pleasing however is the showing by NZ first (centre-right-fuckwit)
which despite their complicity in the debacle of the last election might end
up holding the balance of power again. As Clarke has basically said that
Peters (leader NZ First) can go and fuck himself if he expects any serious
say in a government lead by her we could either end up with a minority
Labour/Alliance govt or a National/NZ first coalition or ........ACT (yuk)
Cheers Bill