Now that the election is over and the direction of the next government is clear, it is time for 08wire to go to sleep. As we said in our closing vid, we congratulate NUFACT on their victory, we wish them well for the next three years, and express our hope that their government does not stretch beyond the mandate it was given.

We’ve really enjoyed our campaign here, despite the disappointing final result, and we’re glad that you took some time to stop by over the last few months. But it has come time for the other demands on our time to enjoy some priority.

If you don’t give a blog your all, it will inevitably die a slow and pitiful death. We’d rather kill this one quickly. This is our last post. We’ll leave everything up, both here and on YouTube, for another week or so.

We’ve especially enjoyed swapping nit-pickery with I/S, attempting to befriend Frog and become his/her etiquette guru, annoying a bunch of Olympic-crazed Slovenians, hitching a ride with the good folks at The Standard, inventing excuses to blow things up on YouTube, sparring with (and even praising!) David Farrar on a range of issues¹, and all the while being steadfastly ignored by Whaleoil. We will miss all that, and also miss the interaction with great commenters including (but not limited to) Tim Ellis, Anita, T-Rex, and Chris from nevermind.

Keep strong, and keep smiling.

1. We also want to thank David Farrar for his kind words about leftie activists yesterday morning.

Labour, the Progressives, and the Greens have all said they want to work with each other in a Team LPG government after the election. At the end of the campaign, we need to ask: is this possible government worthy of your support?

We think that it is.

The Team LPG parties have, individually and collectively, had a near-monopoly on good ideas in New Zealand over the last decade. Saving for our collective future, recognizing the unique needs of Kiwi families, taking the challenge of climate change seriously, taking early childhood education seriously, and recognizing the economic value of cheaper healthcare are all great ideas that have come out of the New Zealand centre-left and left.

Those ideas, along with opposition to unjust wars in the Middle East and support for students to be able to eat dinner without also eating their financial future, now find broad support across the New Zealand political spectrum. That is how we can say, without appearing overly partisan, that they have all proven to be “good ideas.”

There are plenty of other ideas put into practice since 1999 that are, in our partisan opinion, also laudable. They include the newly welcoming attitude of society to previously marginalized groups like prostitutes and gay or lesbian couples, new protections for our children against violence, new rewards for our hard working low-waged workers, and some of the new electoral reforms. But we recognize that those ideas don’t now have broad support, so we won’t elevate them into the category of unambiguously good ideas.

What was the cost of implementing those good ideas? The left did increase taxes to fund its promises and to rejuvenate dilapidated state services. But those tax increases and increases in bureaucracy were not large. New Zealand retains one of the lowest top tax rates in the developed world, does not have a large government sector by developed world standards, and has fewer bureaucrats per person that Australia. Despite the small increase in state intervention since 1999, we are still the third freeest economy in the world¹.

The left’s management of the economy has for nine years struck a fine balance between the need to keep people free from government and the need to keep people free from adversity. We have tried to increase both human capital and physical capital. And the results have been impressive. Unemployment came down, and economic growth went up².

If elected tomorrow, Team LPG promises steady-as-she-goes leadership in the economic realm, along with attacking the problems associated with fossil fuel use and environmental degradation with renewed vigour.

But what of our opponents?

They have had a near-monopoly on ignoring good ideas for the past decade. Every time the left has implemented a good idea, they complained that these ideas would cause all kinds of disaster. But the disasters didn’t come, and eventually National was convinced by the rising tide of public opinion to change its mind, time after time. Scarily, ACT has yet to be convinced.

How can we be confident that a group of people so hopeless at recognizing a good idea when they see one for ten years will all of a sudden become good at producing them?

If elected, they would no longer have the left to show them the way, and without that we fear the whole country would lose its way.

They are lead by a smart guy, and a guy who means well. Unlike some others, 08wire’s question about John Key has not been whether he is deceiving the public, but rather whether he himself is the victim of deception from more malevolent, more doctrinaire, and less flexible members of his caucus.

Those people, such as Lockwood Smith, Murray McCully, Bill English, and Maurice Williamson, have shown themselves time and again to be unreconstructed adherents to outdated and discredited philosophies, and we are not convinced that John Key has the force of character to overcome their influence.

The stated policy difference between the two possible governments is large in some areas, but not in others. For us, the principle difference between the two sides is that the left has been the side of constructive, forward thinking ideas in recent years, while the right has been reduced to playing the twin tunes of “me, too” and “Chicken Little.”

More recently, they have added a third tune – “we are just like Barack Obama.” We’re sure that will be news to Obama, who favours the Kyoto protocol that Nick Smith wanted out of, who opposes the war in Iraq that National supported, and who, unlike National, believes in increasing taxes on the wealthy to pay for deeper tax cuts for the poor. Both Obama and National talk about change, but they are very different kinds of change.

Why would we throw out the people who have the good ideas, replacing them with the people who ignore the good ideas?

For the future of our families, our long term financial future, and our planet, give two ticks to a Team LPG party tomorrow.

We are the side with the good ideas. And ideas count.

1. Source: Cato Institute
2. Our total growth since 1999 is higher than over the previous nine years, and higher than Australia’s over the same period

Five new polls have come out in the last 24 hours, four of which are in our sample of pollsters. The story in three polls is remarkably consistent. They all suggest that National will be able to form a government tomorrow night, without having to negotiate with the Maori Party. But the Roy Morgan poll suggests a far closer race, with Team LPG and NUFACT evenly mached and the Maori party in the “monarch maker” position.

But the National-friendly polls also suggest that any non-Maori Party government National may form will have a slim majority, only one seat over the minimum required to govern. If these results come to pass tomorrow, then it would spell the end of nine years of more progressive governance in New Zealand, but it will also provide real hope that a National-lead administration may only last one term.

Feeding these results into our poll of polls, we see everything converge. Our poll of polls also suggests a narrow victory for NUFACT come tomorrow. We, of course, fervently hope to be wrong about that, and that the combination of Helen and the team’s final day of campaigning today, along with a superior ground game tomorrow, can transform this election into a bidding war for the Maori Party’s support. Some  have estimated that a good turnout operation can be worth as much as two or three points on election day, and in the last two elections Labour’s ground game outperformed National’s. Whether that short-run trend holds up tomorrow is beyond my (Rob’s) capacity to guess.

Our poll of polls also suggests a shift in intra-Team LPG power away from Labour and towards the Greens. I am a Labour supporter so I would rather that some of those votes came to Labour tomorrow, but if my favourite party was going to lose any support this election, I would be least sad, by a long way, if it went to the Greens.

One thing we haven’t been able to examine is electorate-level stuff, mainly because the few polls that exist at the electorate level are so sporadic and have such tiny sample sizes. The 08wire team will be watching the Maori seats closely, because if the Maori Party pulls off a sweep or near-sweep, then equations may start to change in a hurry. We’re also pulling for Labour victories in traditionally Labour-friendly electorates for some of our fresh brood of candidates, some of whom have highly vulnerable list positions – we’re talking about (among others) Clare Curran in Dunedin South, Chris Hipkins in Rimutaka, Iain Lees-Galoway in Palmerston North, and Grant Robertson in Wellington Central. Other new Labour faces, including Jacinda Ardern and Phil Twyford, appear to be fairly safe in their list positions, and we hope to be celebrating their entry to parliament whatever the overall results.

So, there you have our final prediction, which is remarkably similar to David Farrar’s, despite our intermittent debates about the sample and the methods.

David will be hoping we’re both right, I’m pulling for us to be both wrong.

I didn’t see the final Clark / Key debate (I was busy watching Star Wars flashbacks on CNN), and TVNZ haven’t put it online yet. Bastards! But the insta-commentators at the Herald seemed to give it, unanimously, to Clark by a nose. Good for the left but not a game-changer seems like the consensus.

That ends the formal engagement between the large parties in a campaign that failed to deliver any game-changing blows in either direction. Partly, of course, the long-planned lolly scramble got nixed by the ill winds of global recession. Also, however, the mildly see-saw nature of the campaign shows that, at the leader level at least, it has been a reasonably even match.

As we’ve pointed out during the campaign, there has been an amateurishness about the right’s campaign, particularly at lower levels, but Key himself seems to have been (only somewhat) immune from it. Indeed, his own personal strategy has a slickness about it that it is sometimes hard to see through. Not super hard to see through, of course, as the good folk over at The Standard have been consistently showing us. As a tribute to them, today’s video in our 08wire Final Countdown Explod-A-Palooza shows you the many places where the rabbit went into the hat.

Now make with the final polls you evil poll-tease hold-out media outlets!

If you go around saying that thing X is evil and nobody should do it, the last thing you should do is have your people do thing X. And even if they do that, the last thing you should do is go out and defend them for it. And even if you do that, the last thing you should do is run a stupid defense that directly undermines your claimed expertise.

Poor Stephen Franks. He did all of those things wrong, defending the people caught ripping down posters in Wellington in recent days. The posters say stuff like “Don’t Vote for Prejudice,” and Stephen’s first defense was that ripping them down in OK because they were part of “a despicable smear campaign.” Memo to Stephen: The concept of free speech that you were so vigorously defending when some kids were screwing with your posters demands that you tolerate speech acts even when you do not like what they say. That’s pretty basic stuff.

Stephen’s second defence was that the posters were up illegally and his people therefore had a right to tear them down. Um, no. Unless the posters were up on Stephen’s own property or property belonging to the people who tore the posters down, the police are the only people who should be judging these kinds of complaints. Memo to Stephen: Even mild forms of vigilante justice are still vigilante justice, and aren’t appropriate. Again, basic stuff.

Isn’t Stephen Franks being sold as a fancy lawyer guy who knows the law inside and out? Oops.

What an amateur.

The Herald reports that Peter Dunne could well be Speaker if NUFACT wins. If Dunne is the Speaker, then he isn’t in Cabinet. That would mean that only National and ACT would be in the Cabinet. Here is what Peter said about two weeks ago about a National-ACT government:

A backward step to the policies of 1984 will see soaring mortgage interest rates; health and education services privatised; most State assets flogged off to the highest (usually overseas) bidder; welfare services savagely slashed; and the triumph of corporate greed over public good.

Peter wanted to tame this beast by being in coalition with it. That was, ahem, ambitious for a guy with one seat. But it is even more ambitious to say you can do that when your one seat is the Speaker’s chair. In fact it is plain silly.

If you needed any more proof that this election campaign is degenerating into day one of a pro-am golf tournament, three silly stories over the past 24 hours should have provided it for you.

ACT supporter complains about own leader

Oops! Rodney expresses outrage about the EFA ruling against his silly jacket, and wonders why anyone would want to restrict his freedom of speech so. Turns out it was his own man Andy Moore. Top going, Mr Moore! You’ve successfully shown how so much of the right’s yelpings against the EFA are empty partisan stunts. Still, Hide and Moore are in good company, David Farrar’s stunt backfired as well.

“Prime Minister to be” hides from Winston Peters

“All hat” was the description the media put on John Key’s Cowardly Cowboy routine all over Tauranga to avoid, horror of horrors, potentially having to talk with Winston Peters. That is how much confidence John has in his ability to deal with a minor party leader who is in trouble. Look out for John on the international stage - he sure sounds like a tough guy! Picture this:

[Scene: a party at the UN]

Kevin Rudd: Where’s John Key? I want to talk with him about evil NZ apples.
MFAT staffer: He heard you wanted to ask that, so he’s hiding in a cupboard until you go home.

Bill English caught out again.

You’ve seen the comments. Bill clearly wishes he was in charge of a country with a big red button because maybe then somebody will listen to him. But he isn’t, and it looks like that gives him button envy.

Remember this secret tape was captured in August, around the same time that John Key was saying he was so much like Obama. So if John is like Obama and Bill doesn’t like Obama, it follows that Bill doesn’t like John. Oops. And yet another piece of the United Front crumbles away…

What a bunch of amateurs.