Winners will always be grinners
He’s got a beautiful smile has Winston Peters. So many teeth. Like the Cheshire cat from Alice in Wonderland – he can vacate his blustering and baffling political persona at the drop of a mad hat, leaving only his beautiful smile to fill the electoral air.
After last Saturdays general election there’s an entire country of Alice’s with questions to ask. But the Cheshire cat has vacated the room. Gone fishing. He won’t be back until the 380,000 special votes are in.
Give him another week from then to negotiate. In the meantime, go interview his floating smile, or your keyboard.
For 40 years Winston Peters has been the Cheshire cat in a Beehive Wonderland. For 40 years he’s been telling reporters they are crazy. He appears and disappears, forms governments and departs, wins electorate seats and loses them, only to reappear somewhere else, sometime else. The forever loyal Alice keeps giving him her vote.
As Wikipedia says of Lewis Carroll’s’ Cat, he ‘‘appears and disappears at will and engages Alice in amusing but sometimes perplexing conversations, raising philosophical points that annoy or baffle.’’ Such is politics in New Zealand when Winston Peters is in the house.
There are times when Winston smiles, breaking in and out of his ‘keeping them honest’ political character, that you’d swear he’s laughing at us.
That beautiful smile breaks across his ruggedly handsome face, and in between the many deep lines ‘I CAN NOT BELIEVE HOWLONG I’VE GOTTENAWAY WITH THIS SHTICK’ is written in capitals all over his face. If his eyes weren’t already closed from smiling, I’m sure he’d be giving a wink.
As quickly as the smile comes, it disappears, the difficult questions disarmed. The invisible ink writing on his face disappears, as the belligerent political warrior re-enters the room.
Who exactly is Winston keeping honest? Other politicians? Reporters and journalists and broadcasters and whatever else the media call themselves these days? Voters? Himself?
Last week’s election was one out of the box, jack. Everything seemed to happen and in the end, nothing seemed to happen.
Voter turnout was up on last time, but only just – 78.8 per cent versus 2014’s 77.9 per cent. So much for ‘Jacindamania’ increasing turnout. Still it’s a lot better than 2011’s turnout of 69.57 per cent. Perhaps voter engagement in democracy is on the way up?
Everyone seems to be a winner this time. Except the Maori Party. And Act. And The Internet Party, who got a total of 464 votes.
TOP got 48,000 votes which seems like it should get you a voice in parliament. They got 4 times more party votes than Act. Perhaps Gareth Morgan was the biggest loser.
Not including the 380,000 special votes that should be counted by next Saturday (which is a significant 15 per cent of the total vote), 999,000 New Zealanders voted for the National party, give or take a couple of hundred. 777,000 voted for the Labour party. 163,000 voted for NZ First and 127,000 voted for the Greens.
The thing Winston Peters has to work out is whether a vote for his party was a vote for political change or political status quo. Perhaps he should consult his speeches from the past three years?
Everyone was a winner and a loser in Nelson. Nick Smith won the candidate vote, but with 5000 fewer votes than last election. Rachel Boyack won the party vote for Labour but got 2000 less votes than the 2014 Labour candidate. Matt Lawrey got 5000 more candidate votes, but the party vote for the Greens went down.
As a result, you can spin the numbers in any number of ways. 15,000 Nelsonians voted for Nick Smith. Still, 20,000 Nelsonians voted against him. But yet again, Nick Smith is the biggest winner.
You can go onto the Electoral Commission website and look up voting specifics for the Nelson electorate. They are fascinating for anyone wishing to drown themselves in numbers.
At my local polling booth, the place my kids go to school, just one person voted for the Outdoors Party. Handy stuff to know, I guess.
There were 6500 advance votes from the Bridge Street polling station – with only 400 votes between Smith, Boyack and Lawrey.
If you combine the two Nelson South polling stations of Victory School and Nelson Intermediate, you can see Rachel Boyack got twice as many votes as Matt Lawrey, and almost three times as many as Nick Smith. Of the party vote from those two stations, 800 people voted for Labour compared to 220 for National and just 100 for the Greens.
Throughout the Nelson electorate 17,500 people voted for Labour and the Greens, while 14,700 voted for National.
What does that tell us about the $135 million Southern Link? Your guess is as good as mine.
Someone should ask Winston that question. It appears the Cheshire cat that got the electoral cream is once again holding all the political answers.