Kiwi Party enabling theft

If you want to conduct an easy bank robbery, contact the Kiwi Party and they’ll give you all the information you need. I am dead serious.

The Kiwi Party has decided to send letters to every person who signed the smacking petition. Family First has distanced themselves from the Kiwi Party as a result, and many people are rather upset because many of those signatures were collected by non-political groups, and even by opposing political parties such as the Family Party and ACT! For balance, read the Kiwi Party response to Family First here.

But I am not concerned too much about the addresses being used, except that it is a bit rude when those addresses were not collected by the Kiwi Party. I am more concerned that they are distributing dates of birth to anyone interested in helping out.

If you are interested in helping send these letters, the Kiwi Party will send you scanned copies of the signed referendum, containing full names, signatures, dates of birth and addresses. See a copy here that was sent to Andy Moore (details blanked).

With this information you can:

1. Go to the address and steal their mail (to obtain bank account numbers etc)
2. Learn to forge their signature
3. Go to the bank and use the date of birth and forged signature as ID
4. Withdraw all their money

I am not joking. My parents had over $5000 stolen in exactly this way a few years ago. This is very serious.

I write this not to encourage robbery, this method of stealing money is well understood by criminals so me posting it here won’t make much difference. I write this to expose how serious this massive breach of privacy is. I have refrained from directly attacking Kiwi until recently – we have been the object of abuse from them often, even to my face in debates, and I don’t want to sink into the mudslinging. But now they may be sending all the information that anyone needs to steal my money (as I signed the petition), to a random stranger. That disgusts me personally, and I must speak out personally, which I would do whether or not I was standing for another political party.

If you want to vote for a principled conservative party this election, there is only one real option – The Family Party.

Ad in The Press

If you get The Press, check out our ad on page A15.

Note there is a nasty formatting error as printed so it looks far less professional than it should, I am in the process of negotiating with The Press what to do about that at the moment. But it is there to look at.

Meet the Candidates meetings

Two “Meet the Candidates” meetings this week I will be attending:

• Wednesday 29 October, 7:30pm, Lincoln Community Centre, Lincoln
  Selwyn electorate
• Thursday 30 October, 7:30pm, Cracroft Community Centre, Old Stone House, Shalamar Drive
  Wigram electorate

Feel free to come along, it would be great to meet you.

On the campaign trail

Amy Adams, David Coates and myself had a productive time today talking to people at the Hororata Fair. Well I know I and Amy Adams did, Coates wasn’t wearing any badge (although he had a red tie) so was not recognisable as a candidate unless you already knew him, and I didn’t see him talking to too many people. Strong National heartland though so he can be expected to have little luck!

I was the only candidate that had taken the initiative to get prior approval to attend and advertise there from the organisers, and purchase a stall, which as it turned out was bang in the centre of the entire fair, so from nearly any position if you looked round my truck (with billboards) was plainly seen. I can only thank the organisers for selecting an excellent location for me.

I had a good response and talked to a lot of people, many of whom were interested in the party. Plenty of people are intending to vote National or Act too, which is encouraging as it all points towards a change of government – but this is to be expected in a rural area.

Hororata Fair

I will be at the “Hororata Country Spring Fair” on Monday, which is what they’re calling the St John’s Church Fair these days. If you want to meet me, keep an eye out for the truck with the billboards on the back – you can’t miss it!

St John’s Anglican Church, Hororata

9:30am – 2pm

Monday 27 October

Kiwi Party election chances

Ok, we all know the Kiwi Party hasn’t got a hope of gaining any seats this election. They need an electorate seat. They are pinning their hopes on Tauranga, which Baldock will never take in the current political climate.

I have found, when discussing this with Kiwi Party supporters (such as at Being Frank) and even with a Kiwi Party candidate at a “meet the candidates” meeting last night:

Even strong Kiwi Party supporters & candidates know they haven’t got a hope

Yet they are still pushing for party votes, and say “no vote is wasted if you are voting with your convictions”.

This is ridiculous. They know they won’t get in. They know any vote for them will not change the makeup of parliament. Yet they are still trying to take votes off other parties.

If someone is “voting with their convictions”, and likes Kiwi Party moral policy, they will probably also agree with the Family Party policy – and the Family Party actually has a chance of taking electorate seats (Mangere, East Coast Bays, Manukau East). Therefore these moral votes could be used by the Family Party, but will certainly be wasted on the Kiwi Party.

Alternatively these votes could have been used by National, to at least change the government (Kiwi have said they will not work with Labour so must want a change of government).

I have refrained from posting much on this issue up till now, as I don’t like to criticise our Christian brothers & sisters in Kiwi – I wish I was working alongside them rather than against them. But to have even a Kiwi Party candidate clearly understand voting for them would not do anything to change the government, yet still try and take votes we could use effectively, just tipped me over the edge.

If they know they don’t have a hope, they should encourage their supporters to vote for Family or National. Otherwise every bit of campaigning they do makes a Labour-led government MORE likely.

Long time no blog

It has been a few busy days since I was last on the blogs. I have been speaking, putting up billboards, doing up my campaign truck, and spending some much-needed time with my family. The campaign is going well and there is a lot of interest in the party.

I was in a great debate at Canterbury University last Thursday on tertiary policy, it went for 2 hours as the students were so interested and had so many questions. There was a lot of interest in our tertiary policy, especially taking GST off basic essentials and introducing achievement-based fees abatement (ie the higher your marks, the lower your fees) to encourage success rather than just handing everything over on a plate.

We now have a few billboards up around the place down here, I think we have the best billboards of any party, although the Green party has tried hard to have some half-decent ones too they just don’t come close to our own. National and Labour haven’t even tried to have attractive billboards.

Family Party billboard West Melton

The Labour sense of humour

I had an interesting exchange today when I tried to sign up to the newsletter of my commie opponent in Selwyn, David Coates. On his website you can sign up for the Selwyn Standard, a newsletter for “members, supporters and friends of Labour in Selwyn” As I am quite happy to be his friend, I figured I may as well get his newsletter, but it wasn’t as easy as it sounds!

Upon emailing his agent to sign up, I received this response:

I am afraid that the Selwyn Standard newsletter is only for supporters and members of Labour in Selwyn. If you require information about David or the campaign, please feel free to contact him directly or check the website for updates.

Oh, so I can’t be a friend? How disappointing! My reply:

I wasn’t expecting that response. There must be a hidden agenda I’m not supposed to find out about!

But maybe Labour staff lack a sense of humour:

I think it is quite reasonable that as an opposing candidate you are not privy to where and when we plan to carry out campaign activities, what help our campaign might require from supporters or other matters of a sensitive nature, just as you would not expect to be allowed to attend our committee meetings or read our internal documents.

To which I could only say:

I was speaking in jest about secret agendas, your MPs are continually joking about them in the house and I presumed the humour would not be lost on someone interested in current politics.

I expect it will be an interesting campaign, but possibly not as amusing as I was hoping. It would be extremely easy for anyone to give false details and obtain their newsletter, so if they are offering a sign-up link for it on his website they can hardly consider it secure. Stooping to the level of Trevor Mallard and obtaining other parties internal documents like this is a bit low however, especially for a candidate for a Christian party. I have decided to set a better example, this election is about “trust” after all. But if anyone else receiving the newsletter finds anything in it I may be interested in, feel free to pass it on!

The arrogance of Labour (and National)

I had a very interesting time at Cafe Conversations on Sunday. This was a “meet the candidates” meeting in Christchurch East, but not all of us candidates were standing in that electorate. Candidates there were:

• Lianne Dalziel – Labour (current Christchurch East MP)
• Aaron Gilmore – National
• Mojo Mathers – Green
• Dr John Pickering – United Future
• Matthew Gardiner – ACT
• Nick McIlraith (I think, lots of names to remember though) – Democrats for Social Credit
• Myself – Family Party

Lianne Dalziel seemed a nice woman but came across as extremely arrogant in one question. We were asked how our party would deal with “powerful self-interest lobby groups”. Ms Dalziel launched into a spiel about the Exclusive Brethren, and went on about how we needed state funding of political parties to ensure parties didn’t have to listen to such groups. Hang on a minute – did she really say that? Do they want state funding so they don’t have to listen to lobby groups like Family First, Federated Farmers, Greenpeace, even Unions? Can you get more arrogant, a politician wanting state funding so they don’t have to listen to the will of the people?

I said we would listen to what they had to say, as they know the needs of those they are representing better than we do, and would weigh it up against Christian principles and the level of apparant public support for the group. The National candidate (Aaron Gilmore) agreed with me. I really don’t see how any other view could be anything but arrogant. We must get rid of Labour this election.

However, Aaron Gilmore did himself no favours on the issue of National funding Herceptin for 12 months. The audience immediately saw through this for what it really is – state interference in Pharmac and politicians deciding which people get health treatment and which don’t (Pharmac has limited resources to allocate) – and he was seriously booed. I was quite surprised at this, because National is obviously taking this position as an emotive issue to buy votes, not scare people away. He then accused everyone who didn’t want Herceptin to be funded for 12 months of being in favour of letting women die – at which point he was shouted down by the entire room and Dr John Pickering (United Future, a medical researcher) stormed across the room and nearly came to blows with him! Matthew Gardiner (ACT) put it best when he said something like “you can’t accuse everyone who disagrees with you of wanting to kill puppies”. Whatever the merit of funding herceptin for 12 months may be, Mr Gilmore needs to rethink how he promotes it!

Dr Pickering (UF) came across as a very likeable man, with very wishywashy policies. I already knew Mojo Mathers (Green) previously, and she came across as very sincere, it is unfortunate that she supports a load of nutty Green policies, otherwise she’d make a good MP. She is profoundly deaf and does an excellent job of speaking to a crowd for someone with that disability. Matthew Gardiner (ACT) came across as a sensible guy who was prepared to listen to the point of view of others.

The Democrats for Social Credit candidate (I think his name was Nick McIlraith) didn’t really come across at all. No-one could understand what he was talking about. Instead of answering the questions he would launch into a long-winded spiel about the evils of the money system which lost everyone after 5 seconds. I felt rather sorry for the guy, as far as I could gather he thought we would be better off under hard-line communism, and I would have been interested to know why he thought communism was such a good idea, but he didn’t manage to convey this at all. Very confusing. People aren’t interested in the money system, they want to know how policies will actually affect them, and he didn’t answer this for any question at all.

After some initial scepticism from some of the audience about my stance on global warming, I got some excellent applause for our environmental policy – once I had explained that the ETS would actually do absolutely nothing for the environment yet cost an arm and a leg to do that, points that Ms Dalziel and Mrs Mathers had conveniently neglected to mention when they had spoken just before me. There also seemed to be support for funding following the child, based on the amount of nodding heads. I also got a great response when I was unable to give a straight answer to a question (that we have no policy on yet) and bluntly said so while pointing out that no-one else had given a straight answer either because we were all politicians!

I had some good discussions with people who had come along afterwards, it was a great afternoon. The food and drink looked and smelt great but I spent so long talking I missed it… My 3-month-old son James was very happy, squealing away down the back, until Sarah had to take him out and walk up and down the road with him because he was so happy he couldn’t contain himself!

November 8 Election

The election will be held on the 8th of November. Helen Clark spouted a load of waffle about how great they had been for families, and how terrible and untrustworthy National are, but eventually got to the point. Parliament will be dissolved on October 3.

No surprises.