Saturday 30 July 2005

ACT autopsied on 'Agenda'

Rodney Hide's appearance on 'Agenda' this morning prompted a dissection of the ACT Party's prospects, and as always these days the dissection turned into an autopsy. (Transcript here when it's ready.)

What all the commentators seemed to agree on is that ACT are gone unless they can find a King Hit, and Rodney's mission to "Stop-Winston" is just not it. Those voters are not theirs.

Which reminded me of my public spirited advice to ACT Party supporters back at the start of June:
If you're going down anyway -- as you are -- why not use the public platform you've got, eschew compromise and scandal-mongering, and start saying what you really believe? Or at least say what you say you really believe? What have you got to lose that the polls are saying you haven't already? If not now, when?

Here's five things you could try saying that at the moment you're too scared too ...
Read on here.

2 comments:

Blair said...

You miss the point of the exercise. ACT is never going to win on a policy based campaign because its branding has been stolen by National (shame about that but too late to change things now). The goal now is not to compete with NZ First for votes - you are correct that their voters are not ours - but win over National (and some Labour) voters who loathe Peters as much as we do and want to stop him.

Peter Cresswell said...

Blair, all that the Nats have stolen is the pissweak, bed-wetting end of your policy spectrum. But there isn't a shit show of National adopting the five points I suggest (which is what gives you your point of difference) and there is a great chance of these five points making the right kind of ruckus for the right kind of freedom-based principles.

If you do go down, then at least you go down promoting the principles you claim to stand for, rather than going down with just another 'attack the opposition' exercise -- which is all a 'Stop Winston' campaign amounts to. Clear desperation.

This for example from RH: "Oh we've gotta stop Mr Peters getting anywhere near a position of responsibility in New Zealand, we've had experience of that before it was chaos, held the country up to ransom." Actually, what it did was give us nearly ten weeks of no government, a great sense of peace, and an NBR headline saying 'The Libertarianz were Right.' :-)

Time to harden up then and show that you do have the courage of your convictions, and show also, just for one election, that your party principles actually do mean something. (They were after all written by a libertarian, and theyve' been betrayed by ACT ever since he wrote them. :-) )