ACT will not be going into formal coalition with National. This is because ACT does not want to risk losing its independence from National and wants to be able to vote against the many aspects of National policy with which it disagrees. Instead, it will gain one or ministers outside Cabinet and negotiate some policy compromises with the National Party. The near-absence of formal coalition agreements from New Zealand politics now seems to have become cemented. The 2005-2008 Progressive Party-Labour coalition may have been the last we will see. But why not have a formal coalition agreement? Germany, on whose...
New Zealand must be the only country in the world which has a government coalition partner (the Progressive Party) with absolutely no popular support. From the 1000 voters polled in the latest Herald-DigiPoll, not one named the Progressives as the preferred recipient of their party vote. Please don’t get me wrong: this certainly isn’t intended as a criticism of Jim Anderton’s party per se. ACT itself had just 0.4% – “translated” (as Guyon Espiner would say), this means just 4 voters of the thousand polled selected ACT. Noting this, the post I could write now is that Douglas’s return is...