Let’s start with the Act Party. Strange things happen in politics sometimes. But you can’t get much stranger than Don Brash, former leader of the National Party who is no longer an MP and not a member of the Act Party demanding that Rodney Hide, current Parliamentary leader of the Act Party resign and give the leadership to him or else he will ‘destroy them‘. Out of this coup we have seen the undead zombies of Rogernomics arise with cries of “sell it, sell it, sell it all”.

Meanwhile in the land of the loony left we have the rise of the Mana Party. Rebel former Maori Party MP, Hone Harawira has broken every promise he has made to start this party which features such great minds as Sue Bradford, Matt McCarten and John Minto. The key policy planks of Mana seems to revolve “buy it, buy it, buy it all”. They want to nationalise all monopolies and duopolies and tax and tax and tax everyone into equal poverty.

The co-current leader of the Greens, Russel Norman, sums up the current situation pretty well: “…who wants to relive the battles of the 1980s and 1990s? We’re in 2011 for God’s sake. We need a progressive force that actually deals with where we are now, not tries to refight the 1980s and 1990s.”

That is exactly how I feel. At the moment the NZ National Party wants to step back in time and see MMP removed and replaced with essentially FPP on steroids. Both the extreme left and right parties want to return to the past as well… as for Labour… well where have they been for the last three years? Let alone now… who knows that they stand for or want?

Personally I wonder if the success in the revival of 80s politics is actually a result of the failure of my generation to stand for what they believe in. Political apathy amongst my peers is high. No one cares about politics because ultimately many of them feel that no matter what they do, nothing will change. We see National governments and we see Labour governments and essentially they do the same thing… talk, talk, talk, build a white elephant here and hey presto throw in a big sports tournament and we have another three years gone.

Wasted money on white elephants and sports tournaments are enough to get old people angry enough to go to the extremes to try and make a difference. But for many young people making a difference is a turn off. The world won’t change in the typing of a status message on Facebook so therefore it isn’t worthwhile doing.

As a result, we find ourselves where we are today, a generation of young people who are being neglected because politicians know we don’t care and therefore they don’t need to cater to our needs. They know they can simply hold a sports event every three years which will get us drunk enough to forget about our real needs. And unfortunately by the time we wake up from this hangover we will be bearing the consequences of this neglect for many years to come.

This is a positive result and hopefully one that will see much benefit come to Auckland. Now is the time for long term planning and investment in the city to bring it forward. Three years is both a short and a long time in politics. I don’t know how much Brown will achieve in only three years but lets hope in the long term he will deliver much needed forward thinking for Auckland.

Update 1: A earthquake happened and Bob Parker has been re-elected to the Christchurch Mayoralty. This result shows how quickly the media and natural events can change the fortunes and expected outcomes of people in politics.

Throughout this week there have been a number of protests and problems at the Villawood Immigration Detention Centre in Western Sydney. This week’s problems began with the suicide of a Fijian earlier this week before spreading to protests from Sri Lankans and then Chinese asylum seekers. However, in the past month there have been protests and problems at detention facilities in Darwin and asylum seekers have once again become a political football.

The Australian Government’s response these problems is both predictable and wrong. The SMH earlier this week reported:

Julia Gillard will send the Immigration Minister to East Timor in spite of a warning from the head of a government advisory group that incidents of self-harm at Villawood detention centre are beginning to spiral out of control.

The Prime Minister is forging ahead with the so-called ”East Timor solution” after speaking to her counterpart in that country, Xanana Gusmao, about building a regional processing centre for asylum seekers.

The problem of course with this is it does not solve any problem and only makes conditions for these people worse, by shifting them to a country that is not a signatory to declarations on treatment of refugees and the like and therefore creating more problems and treating these people even more like animals.

A few weeks ago another article in the SMH looked at the treatment of asylum seekers last time they were processed off-shore:

…everyone left on Manus and Nauru was gradually brought here.

Some rotted on the islands for more than five years; some went mad waiting; but in the end, the largest single group of people fed through the Pacific solution ended up where they were always heading: Australia.

It’s a unique ambition: no other country on earth has managed its refugees this way.

This is what happened last time: Australia spent about a billion dollars processing 1637 boat people on Manus and Nauru. (Do the maths: it’s a horrifying $600,000 per head.)

The the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, tight-lipped and diplomatic, is understood to be appalled by the prospect of going through all this again. The closing of the Nauru camp a few years ago was welcomed by a UNHCR spokeswoman as ”the end of a difficult chapter in Australia’s treatment of refugees and asylum seekers”.

Now it’s on again, backed by both government and the opposition. For those of a Machiavellian turn of mind, failing to find anywhere to resettle the refugees we process in some offshore dependency is frankly all to the good. The detour to Nauru was never, in itself, much of a deterrent to people smugglers. What helped kill the trade was leaving refugees to rot there for years.

We can stop the boats. That’s the ambition of both sides of politics. And it isn’t hard if we are willing to be cruel. We can order the navy to force them back to Indonesia – operations the navy loathes – or send their human cargoes off to island prisons for indefinite detention.

Those strategies work. But they leave a humane country facing a hard question: how brutal are we willing to be?

Earlier this week The Gruen Transfer had the subject of their “The Pitch” segment to be on so called “Boat People”, it is a good watch and really hammers home just how bad Australia treats people who are not from the west.

Updates will be added to the post as the results come in.

My commentary will be from a Kiwi’s perspective with the focus primarily on New South Wales but also a bit of Queensland and Victoria.

Stay Tuned for more.

5.20pm update – Seven News have exit polls by Roy Morgan. First seat Herbet near Townsville is showing a swing to Labor however exit polls are not accurate and with a sample of only 300 people the result is within the margin of error (which 7 News failed to tell the viewers).

5.30pm – Seven News have their second exit poll. Lindsay to go Liberal with a 15% swing. Again massive swing and most likely because the sample size is so small.

5.40pm – Third exit poll. La Trobe, in Melbourne’s South East. ALP to win with 5% swing.

7pm – 7 News is reporting that the swing is going against Labor but instead of going to Liberal it is going towards the Greens. Still very early days with only around 1% of the votes counted.

7.30pm – It looks like The Greens may pick up their first ever House of Representatives seat by winning the electorate of Melbourne. (This is an early prediction). Predictions also showing ALP have lost two seats nationally, and LNP have gained two, so neck and neck.

8pm – With 3 million votes counted nationally on two party preferred LNP is leading 50.5% to 49.5%, so neck and neck, ALP may lose 13 seats on latest predictions. Election is very much too close to call. Sydney may also go Greens, and possibly Denison in Tasmania. Result may not be known tonight.

8.30pm – Greens have almost definitely won Melbourne. Candidate just gave a victory speech. Nationally with a little over 5 million votes ALP is now leading 50.3% to 49.7%.

9pm – A few victory speeches over the last half hour, but still too close to call in many seats.

9.30pm – Still heading for a hung parliament.

9.50pm – Greens have 12% in the Senate. Looks like 9 senators in the new Parliament. “We are seeing the birth of a new political movement” – Bob Brown, Greens Leader. “It is time we moved to proportional representation”

10pm – 7 News is calling it currently at 73 seats each, below the 76 needed to govern. With 3 independents + 1 Green.

10.15pm – Can a government be formed? Labor + Greens will not be enough to govern without two independents on current predictions.

11.15pm – Gillard takes the stage (before Abbott), “Too close to call”, “Every vote must be counted”

11.30pm – Channel 7′s panel is saying Labor lost the plot when they failed to have a backbone and pass the ETS in March or go to a Double D Election over the issue.

12am – Abbott has addressed the Liberal Party faithful. At end of the night hung parliament with 72 seats Labor, 71 seats LNP declared.

Citing the Christian ethos of feeding the hungry, housing the homeless and clothing the naked, just as long as they’ve got the appropriate documentation, Abbott said anyone who had fled a war zone or escaped from a torture chamber without travel papers could jolly well pelt themselves with their own eggs (which no doubt would come from ducks, knowing how weird these foreigners are).

So funny yet it would not surprise me if Abbott actually said something along these lines.

Sources say Abbott had initially insisted that boat arrivals must hold Australian passports. However, it was soon realised that the only people processed under this scheme would be Australian citizens returning from holidays aboard cruise ships and those are the last sort of characters we want to encourage into the country.

Rumours that the Prime Minister is planning to keep out undesirables by processing cruise-ship passengers offshore – to ascertain whether any of them had danced to the chicken dance, giggled while ordering cocktails with rude names or played bingo while on the high seas – could not be confirmed.

The full article is here.

The federal government is hiding controversial plans to force ISPs to store internet activity of all Australian internet users – regardless of whether they have been suspected of wrongdoing – for law-enforcement agencies to access.

The next thing they will try is for everyone in the country to wear a GPS tracker so we always know where people walk, drive, train or cycle so that we can fine them when they jaywalk or fail to indicate.

As every day goes by it seems the Rudd government is becoming more and more successful at achieving the impossible – losing the next election. For me being a computer geek all it means is that I am much more aware of my actions online and wherever possible I am using encryption for data transfer. It is not an argument about having nothing to hide and therefore needing no privacy. It is a matter that the government wants to data mine our every single action, watch our every single step and monitor every little thing we do in our lives.

I have no issue with sharing my browsing habits with people who I opt to share it with; more often than not I opt into anonymous data sharing of software usage. However, this is not what the government intends, what the government intends is complete mind control of its population. This is not censorship, censorship is a public list of banned material and the reason why they are banned which is debatable in court, this is well beyond censorship and amounts of thought control. The government is not telling you what is blocked, why it is blocked, or any way of being able to appeal sites being blocked. All in all it is a very scary idea that you would expect from a mad dictator not a democratically elected government.

Loading up the Labour party website it is clearly obvious they are lacking any distinction. All they are is attack the attack National party, and this is a terrible approach to take as a National is so popular in the polls and there is no clear reason why anyone would want to vote for Labour. In fact their website seems to advertise National more than they advertise themselves, the word National is much larger than the words Labour and the only image I see is of John Key!

As part of this rebuilding they need to clear out the old guard. Some of the MPs have dug themselves such big holes they need to go now, others have just been around for far too long and have this terrible odour about them.

A much better line up of Labour would be:
David Cunliffe – Leader
David Parker – Deputy Leader
Maryan Street
Darren Hughes
Clayton Cosgrove
Ruth Dyson
Charles Chauvel
Annette King
Nanaia Mahuta
Lianne Dalziel
Winnie Laban
Moana Mackey
Steve Chadwick
Sue Moroney
Jacinda Ardern
Ross Robertson
Mita Ririnui
Lynne Pillay
Clare Curran
Kelvin Davis
Chris Hipkins
Raymond Huo
Ashraf Choudhary
Darien Fenton
Su’a William Sio
Carol Beaumont
Damien O’Connor
Brendon Burns
Iain Lees-Galloway
Stuart Nash
Dr Rajen Prasad
Grant Robertson
Carmel Sepuloni
Phil Twyford
David Shearer

Gone:
Phil Goff
Parekura Horomia
Chris Carter
Shane Jones
Trevor Mallard
Pete Hodgson
Rick Barker
George Hawkins

The key adjustments are:

The personal income tax rate changes from 1 October 2010 are:

• Up to $14K – tax rate goes from 12.5% to 10.5%
• $14K to $48K – tax rate goes from 21.0% to 17.5%
• $48K to $70K – tax rate goes from 33.0% to 30.0%
• $70K+ – tax rate goes from 38.0% to 33.0%

GST will rise to 15% and company tax will drop to 28%.

If you really wanted to make radical changes to the system this is what I would do:

Taxation:

• Flat tax rate – equal for both individuals and businesses
• No GST
• Capital Gains Tax
• No Working for Families or middle class welfare

Transport:

• Build and upgrade highways but introduce tolls on most major roads
• Encourage people onto public transport by building more railways and introducing light rail into busy bus corridors. Make fares much cheaper than driving until a critical mass is achieved and slowly phase out the subsidies once things are paying for themselves.

Education:

• Free public education until the age of 25 including university or polytech study
• Universal Student Allowance to everyone in full time study in public post secondary education living away from home
• No funding to private schools – if parents want to send their children there they can pay for it entirely
• Increase funding for Research

Healthcare:

• Free doctors visits and hospitals
• Remove ACC
• Introduce Private Health Insurance for accidents with various options around cover but ensure everyone is eligible to be covered

State Owned Enterprises:

• Sell all SOEs operating in a commercial environment such as TVNZ, and Air New Zealand.
• Other SOEs do not pay tax as overheads in giving money to an SOE and then taxing it back is just silly.

Defense:

• Focus on Search and Rescue and Peace Keeping
• Increase funding for equipment to ensure state of the art equipment is used

Like Australia, the United States, and many other countries the UK has traditionally had two major political parties, the left leaning Labour Party, and the right leaning Conservatives. For a few parliamentary terms the Labour Party will rule and once the voters get sick of them the Conservatives will rule until the cycle reverses. The way in which these governments are elected comes down to local electorates rather than voting for the party you want to win you vote for your local MP. The party that has the most number of electorate MPs elected will get to govern. This is different from NZ politics where under MMP you have two votes one for your local MP and one for the party you wish to govern with the parliament being made up with a mixture of local MPs and party list MPs.

Now the reason a mini revolution has occurred in England is because for the first time Nick Clegg, the leader of the Social Democrats a small minority party, has been included in two televised leaders debates alongside the leaders of the both the Conservative and Labour parties. And in both of these debates Clegg has won. This has seen the Social Democrats rocket up the polls on the popular vote to a position where they are beating Labour and in some poles even leading the Conservatives. This has also thrown the May 6 election wide open with the real possibility of a hung parliament.

The biggest problem with all this analysis though is it may amount to nothing all because of the way FPP operates. The NZ Herald puts it this way:

The really surprising thing about the Nick Clegg surge is that almost nothing has changed.

That may seem an odd thing to say after 10 days in which Labour has been forced into third place in the opinion polls and the Liberal Democrats have broken through for the first time since the formation of the Social Democratic Party nearly three decades ago.

But the way votes translate into seats means that, unless the Lib Dems get up to 36 or 37 per cent of the vote, they remain the third party in seats.

And while Clegg’s party remains the third party in the House of Commons, the outcome of the election is decided by the gap between the Conservatives and Labour.

The shape of politics will be transformed on May 6. That may be the beginning of the end for the Labour Party. And yet the outcome of the election remains surprisingly unchanged.

The reason is that Clegg’s surge has been uncannily even-handed in its effect on the other two parties. The Conservatives have fallen 4.5 points in the polls, on average, since the first debate, and the Labour drop has been the same.

The gap between the two is therefore unchanged, at about 6.5 points, which suggests the Tories would be the largest party in a hung parliament – which is where the country was before the Cleggshell was dropped on this campaign.

The voters are likely to end up, therefore, with David Cameron as prime minister, leader of a minority Conservative government.

All of this screams out that the who democratic process of FPP is wrong, for a party to be able to gain the most number of popular votes and not govern is wrong, for a party to be able to govern on only 30% support is wrong. And focusing on New Zealand for a second this is the exact reason why we should not move back towards FPP or change away from MPP. It is often argued that MMP gives small parties too much power, but I would rather have good, cross party support for well written laws than be ruled by a minority forcing their sole thoughts on the nation.

This morning the Green Party posted a good video about the problems with the UK election to their blog: