Greens welcome Winston on board

Green Co-Leader Dr Russel Norman today welcomed Winston Peters’ decision to join the Green Party, saying it will help the Greens to broaden their voter support base.

“Over four percent of voters at the last election voted for New Zealand First,” Dr Norman said. “I am confident that a large proportion of those voters will now give their support to the Greens. It is an unexpected and very real bonus for us, and may finally give us the chance to break through 10%.

“The Greens have never managed to appeal to the redneck vote,” said Dr Norman. “David Garrett has proven with ACT just how electorally valuable having a drunken bigot among the senior ranks of a political party can be. Winston will now be able to perform a similar role for us.”

The Greens are also considering changing their Constitution so Peters can succeed Jeanette Fitzsimons as Co-Leader when she steps down at the Party’s Annual General Meeting on Queen’s Birthday weekend.

“Having two male Co-Leaders would help dispel the perception that we are too pro-feminist. We’re never going to get the blokes’ votes with that image,” Dr Norman said.

“Of course Winston would be Co-Leader outside Parliament like I was when I was first elected. But he has immense expertise in fundraising and managing electoral donations and already has a strong relationship with the media, so working as Co-Leader outside Parliament should be easier for him than it was for me.”

 

Vote for me – the caption contest

Well, it’s certainly got attention! The NZ Herald is now running a caption contest for its wonderful photo of Jeanette with three pregnant Green Party supporters.

There are a few puerile and downright nasty captions on their website.

Let’s get some strong Green ones there too >>

[Comments off on this post - captions to the NZ Herald]

 

Now we have got 2 six-foot leaders

Frog talked yesterday about Green Party Co-Leader, big six-foot Norm. Now it seems that Jeanette Fitzsimons has found a way to get a bit of equity on the height issue:

Otago Daily Times, 22 Oct 2008

 

All publicity is good publicity

I just spent a bit of the morning handing out leaflets in Kilbirnie where I met a man who proved the maxim that all publicity is indeed good publicity.  It turns out he is probably voting Green for two reasons.

The first is he saw a new story about political party leaders’ pets.  John Key had a cat and so on and so on.  But Jeanette Fitzsimons had a cow.  And he thought that was fairly impressive.

The second was that he had heard that Jeanette Fitzsimons had slept with Tim Shadbolt, and she was a good looking woman.  Then and now.

I thanked him for his vote.

 

Showering with Jeanette

The punters are running feral over at Kiwiblog, inspired by Jeanette’s appearance on Close Up last night defending the proposed energy efficient home hot water standard. Most are trotting out the tired old “nanny state” line and falsely claiming the Greens are wanting to ban high pressure shower heads.

And someone called Brad got so excited about it that he’s come to g.blog and posted a comment (naming his bathroom with capital letters) in the g.blog rules thread, because he couldn’t find anywhere else appropriate.

So I thought I’d give Brad a thread to comment on, and clear a few matters up.

First, this is not a ban on anything. No-one will be forced to change their shower head. The standard will apply only to new buildings and to major renovations. The proposal is for new homes to have more energy efficient hot water systems. An efficient hot water system will save homeowners money by lowering power and gas bills.

Second, there a several ways in which the standard will be able to be met, including:

• installing low flow shower heads
• insulating/lagging water pipes to minimize heat loss
• minimizing the distance between the hot water source and the outlet
• installing a solar water heating system

But instead of doing some research and finding out about it, the Kiwiblog commenters and Brad just resort to the tired old “nanny state” / “it’s a ban” routine that they inevitably use to attack the Greens. I’m surprised they didn’t come up with a high pressure energy inefficient shower head being necessary for effective child discipline too.

 

Well said, Jeanette!

Jeanette Fitzsimons blogged this morning on frogblog about the preoccupation of the media with what Winston Peters may have said and done.

The tragedy is that this is what passes for news, when we ought to be debating what is happening to our economy with rising prices for food, petrol, power and mortgages at the same time as economic contraction and loss of jobs? Shouldn’t we be debating the causes of this, and linking them with peak oil, resource limits and climate change? Most of all, shouldn’t we be debating what to do about it?

It’s not just the MSM – over on Key wee-blog David Farrar has devoted an extraordinary 34 separate threads in the past week to various aspects of Peters’ alleged behaviour, and what others have said and done in response to it.

Now, I’m not suggesting the allegations against Peters are not serious. They are. But they are being investigated by both the Serious Fraud Office and Parliament’s Privileges Committee, and all will come out in due course.

In a week when we saw Labour announce its Emissions Trading Scheme will go ahead and National announce it would be supporting tolls on roads, I would have thought both the MSM and bloggers might have been giving these issues some more attention.

Will the Government’s ETS be effective in reducing greenhouse emissions? Are the transport and agriculture sectors being brought into it too slow or too fast? Will people on low income be adequately protected against emitters passing on the cost of their emissions?

What roads will is National proposing to toll? Whose policy is the real one – Maurice Williamson’s or Bill English’s? How much will the toll charges be? What will the revenue be applied to – public transport infrastructure, or just more and more roads?

These are the real questions people should be asking in deciding how to cast their votes in an election that is less only 10 weeks away? Peters’ credibility is already close to zero – so let’s focus on the policies.

 

Mini McCarthy

Check out Trevor Loudon’s latest investigative work where this time he aims even higher: Jeanette Fitzsimons.  He sets out with the ambitious goal of proving she is a communist.  But after taking  well over 1000 words to make his case he manages to prove that she attended two conferences of suspected socialists about 13 or 14 years ago at which she argued the importance of the environment and that they needed to become Green.

Good work Trev, that’s another secret communist plot exposed. (But wait, isn’t the Emissions Trading Scheme is a capitalist market response rather than a communist one, to an environmental problem?)

Thanks for the photo: Infinite Jeff at Flickr