Comments on: Outlaw pages – Honeymoons and Party Games

By: Kirk MacGibbon

Kirk MacGibbon — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 04:28:03 +0000

I guess one man’s ideological baggage is another mans principles, but that’s by the by. And I’m not sure many in NZ except maybe the Princes St branch of the Labour party ever viewed the events you mention as a class struggle, so much as one of nation-building and independence. As for the use of the word Tory, it would be news to David Cameron that the word is an anachronism for a conservative party. But to be honest my use of it is driven by the simple fact that it is several letters shorter than ‘national’. And I don’t have Russell Brown as a Facebook friend, but I do respect him and his work. i don’t think anyone quite does ’sardonic’ like he does. I suspect I might be a little too erratic for him though. And on that note you’ve reminded me that I always wanted to write something about ‘meritocracy’…

By: Clint Flick

Clint Flick — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 09:48:48 +0000

Yeah, now you either have Russell Brown as a friend on Facebook, or you don’t.

By: Paul Hellyer

Paul Hellyer — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 08:29:16 +0000

One of the reasons John Key is popular is that he doesn’t carry the ideological baggage of the the 1970’s and 80’s in a way that Helen Clark did. For those that lived through those times, it seemed like some sort of class struggle: 1951 was either a “lockout” or a “strike” and how you saw that event determined your place on the left/right spectrum. Same with Vietnam. And so on. Somehow we moved on from that simplistic dichotomy of the world, a Cold War world. Somewhere in the 90’s most of us moved beyond that, we no longer referred to “Granny Herald”, or used the anachronistic word “Tory”. And we moved to a much more pragmatic, self-confident, diverse view of the world and our place as New Zealanders in it. Well, most of us anyway.