vjmp – Page 289

Who Voted For the Maori Party in 2017 (And Who Didn’t)

The Maori Party made a number of strategic errors over the past decade, and by 2017 the total damage from them had become fatal

When the Maori Party made the decision to support a conservative Fifth National Government, many commentators believed that it would be the death of the party. Indeed, the Maori Party was destroyed at the 2017 General Election, when voters appeared to decide that supporting a conservative government had lowered Maori standards of living. This article looks at who stuck by them and who didn’t from 2014.

Let’s get the most obvious out of the way – there was an extremely strong correlation between voting Maori Party and being Maori. In 2014 this was 0.91, and by 2017 it was slightly weaker, at 0.89. This puts a figure on what we already knew – that the vast bulk of Maori Party voters are Maoris.

In this, and in most other regards, Maori Party voters were very similar to who they were in 2014.

One notable difference is that the Maori Party this year got a fair bit more support from Pacific Islanders. The correlation between being a Pacific Islander and voting Maori Party in 2017 had increased to 0.08 from 0.01 in 2014.

Of course, Pacific Islanders will very seldom be on the Maori Roll and therefore this increased support from them would not have helped the Maori Party win an electorate seat. Indeed, it could even be argued that broadening the Maori Party tent to include Pacific Islanders was one of the main causes of it losing so much support to the Labour Party in 2017.

Considering that the Maori Party won almost as many votes in 2017 (30,580) as it did in 2014 (31,849), it might be that the attempt to broaden their appeal to other ethnic groups, while partially successful, cost them just enough Maori support to mean that they did not win any Maori seats.

This suggestion is backed up by the observation that Maori Party voters were slightly less likely to be New Zealand born in 2017 when compared to 2014. The correlation between the two was 0.62 in 2014 and 0.58 in 2017. Furthermore, the correlation between voting for them and being born in the Pacific Islands became less negative, from -0.19 in 2014 to -0.12 in 2017.

If this is true then it speaks to the string of strategic errors that the Maori Party made. If they gambled their electoral future on public belief in some kind of pan-Polynesian sentiment, they lost everything.

This loss of support to Labour can be seen in microcosm in the education and training industry. The correlation between working in this industry and voting Maori Party fell from 0.38 to 0.34, while it rose in the case of Labour, from -0.01 to 0.15. This means that a person in this industry in 2017 was only slightly more likely to vote Maori Party they were to vote Labour, compared to much more likely in 2014.

It can also be seen with the occupation of community and personal services workers. The correlation between having this occupation and voting Maori Party was 0.64 in 2014, but 0.59 in 2017, whereas the correlations with voting Labour went in the opposite direction – from 0.20 in 2014 to 0.39 in 2017.

So it would seem that a reasonable number of Maori voters in people-focused jobs switched to the Labour Party, and that this was partially compensated for by an increase in Pacific Islander voters.

This article is an excerpt from the 2nd Edition of Understanding New Zealand, which Dan McGlashan and VJM Publishing will have ready for sale at the end of October 2017. This will contain statistics calculated according to the official final vote counts and will be freshly updated with data from the 2017 General Election.

Who Voted For the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party in 2017?

The Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party may have have won 3,000 fewer votes in the 2017 Election than the 2014 one, but they won more votes than the Conservative Party, four times as many votes as United Future and over half as many votes as the ACT Party. That’s quite a few considering the minimal campaign expenditure. So who voted for the ALCP in 2017, and how were they different to 2014?

The average ALCP voter was fairly hard done by in 2017, slightly worse than in 2014. The correlation between voting ALCP and median personal income was -0.48 in 2017, strengthening from -0.40 in 2014. Also, the correlations between voting ALCP and being in any income band below $50K were all more strongly positive in 2017 than 2014, and were all more strongly negative in 2017 than 2014 for all income bands above $70K.

Part of the reason for this is that many of the voters the ALCP lost from 2014 were the educated, middle-class white ones who ended up voting for TOP. Indeed, it can be seen that this year’s crop of ALCP voters were more poorly educated than last time. All of the correlations with having a university degree and voting ALCP were less strongly negative in 2014 than by 2017 (-0.46 had become -0.51 for a Bachelor’s degree, -0.42 had become -0.49 for an Honours degree, -0.46 had become -0.51 for a Master’s degree, and -0.38 had become -0.45 for a doctorate).

It would seem that the group of ALCP voters that left for TOP between 2014 and 2017 were mostly the same university educated young professionals or students that left the Greens for TOP between 2014 and 2017. This might be little more than 0.1% of voters in the case of shifting from the ALCP, but for a party that small losing them has a big effect.

This means that the ALCP had become a bit less white by 2017. The correlation between being a Kiwi of European descent and voting ALCP fell from -0.15 in 2014 to -0.23 in 2017, while the correlation between being a Pacific Islander and voting ALCP flattened out, from -0.10 in 2014 to -0.00 in 2017. It was even more strongly Maori in 2017 than in 2014: the correlation between being Maori and voting ALCP in the former was 0.91, compared to 0.89 in the latter.

Although there was still a significant correlation between voting ALCP in 2017 and having no religion (0.24), it was a fair bit weaker than the same correlation in 2014 (0.34). This is a fairly distinctive change and gives an idea of the sort of person who switched to the TOP party from 2014.

The ALCP also lost voters in the 30-49 age group. Here the correlation between being of this age group and voting ALCP became more strongly negative: from -0.39 in 2014 to -0.43 in 2017. The ALCP vote fell across the board but even more sharply in this age group than the others. In the 20-29 age group the vote held relatively firm, telling us that what was already a young voting cohort in 2014 got even younger.

All of this explains why there was a strong negative correlation of -0.70 between voting ALCP in 2017 and voting for National in 2017. The ALCP continued to get support from the young, the Maori and the poor – in other words, from those most acutely affected by cannabis prohibition, who are entirely different demographics to those who regularly vote National.

The high amount of Maori support was also reflected in the high correlations between voting ALCP and voting for other parties that have a high level of Maori support. The correlation between voting ALCP in 2017 and voting Maori Party in 2017 was 0.80; with voting MANA in 2017 it was 0.65; with voting Labour in 2017 it was 0.56 and with New Zealand First in 2017 it was 0.40.

Reflecting this, voting for the ALCP had strong negative correlations with voting for parties generally supported by wealthy or old white people. The correlation between voting ALCP in 2017 and voting Conservative in 2017 was -0.40, compared to -0.51 for voting United Future and -0.52 for voting ACT.

Fittingly for a banned substance with immense medicinal value, there are very strong correlations between voting ALCP in 2017 and being on the invalid’s benefit (0.79) and the unemployment benefit (0.82). These were both a little stronger than in 2014, which might suggest that the cannabis law reformers that switched to TOP were more likely to be employed white professionals primarily interested in recreational cannabis, whereas those who remained with the ALCP tended to be on sickness or invalid’s benefits and mostly interested in medicinal cannabis.

The World That Sober People Built

Sober minds built the atomic bomb that fell on Hiroshima; sober minds gave the orders to drop that bomb; sober minds followed those orders

“That person must have been on drugs” is a common response to observing all kinds of wacked-out behaviour, as if taking a psychoactive drug inevitably brings about false kinds of thinking – a cognitive bias this column has previously described as Sobriety Bias Syndrome. But if we look around the world that sober people built, and the moral values agreed upon by sober people, things really didn’t turn out that great.

It was pious and sober people who decided, a few thousand years ago, that mutilating the genitals of baby boys was a legitimate expression of God’s will. It was sober people who decided to adopt this tradition from the foreigners who practiced it, and people are sober when they argue for the “health benefits” of the mutilation.

George W. Bush, completely sober, decided that sending the firepower of the US military after Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was a great idea, even though it led directly to the deaths of over a million people. The US Congress, elected to represent the American people, also soberly decided that this was a great idea.

In the 1930s we created and watched “documentaries” such as Reefer Madness, which exhorted us to tell our children that smoking cannabis will turn them into murderers; a dozen years later, with god-fearing sobriety, we built nuclear weapons and dropped them on Japanese civilians, killing hundreds of thousands in one hit.

These are the actions of sober minds. So clearly a person doesn’t have to be intoxicated in order to do terrible things to someone else.

Far from it. In many ways, sobriety can be seen as a kind of virus. Its presence in a person’s mind tends to work to drive out periods of non-sobriety, usually because of egoistic religious delusions about achieving purity of thought. The sober mind tends to have thoughts repeating in it over and over again, and this repetition can lead to a powerful commitment to some ideas.

This is a fact long understood by television programmers, who appreciate how repeated exposure to a short, powerful stimulus is more likely to induce purchasing behaviour in a potential consumer than a single exposure to e.g. a lecture about the qualities of a product.

Because novel psychoactive experiences tend to destroy this conditioning by allowing the conditioned person to see things from new perspectives, if you want to get everyone marching in lockstep then these psychoactive experiences need to be either discouraged or made illegal.

Consequently, entirely sober people have decided, presumably using sober logic, that putting another human being in a cage is a fair punishment for being caught growing a medicinal plant without permission.

Maybe there’s an argument that too much sobriety makes an individual mean from a lack of levity, and a society dumb from a lack of questioning?

After all, the mass shooters making the front pages recently are definitely not smoking weed, taking ecstasy or tripping on mushrooms or LSD, and neither are the genital mutilators, military warhawks and brainwashers that are responsible for most of the world’s evil.

The truth is that the world needs a diversity of ideas if humans are to survive the challenges of coming years. Never mind a diversity of skin colour – such superficial qualities do not constitute real diversity. Real diversity is diversity of ideas, even outlandish ones, even crazy ones, because that is the kind of diversity that saves us from groupthink and prevents us from making the kind of error that arises from self-righteous conviction about one’s correctness.

To that end, sobriety is our enemy and getting wasted is our friend.

When Opening the Borders to Mass Immigration, The Effect on the Locals’ Quality of Life is Not Considered

The forces pushing for mass immigration in recent decades have been an alliance of both the left and the right, which is why the West has seen so much of it, despite that it often has clearly negative effects for the locals. Some people don’t seem to fully understand that, when agitating for mass immigration, the forces in favour of it have got no interest whatsoever in the effect of that immigration on the quality of life of the locals. This essay looks at why.

Western conservatives are not only terrified of being seen to oppose immigration lest they be confused with the racial conservatives who lost World War II, but they are more than happy to open the floodgates to mass immigration for economic reasons.

First among those economic reasons is that mass immigration destroys the existing bonds of solidarity among the native population, which works to divide and conquer them and make them ripe for wage exploitation. Western conservatives know that Westerners are too afraid to protest the importation of low-skilled workers from outside the country lest they be seen as racist, even when that same importation is undermining their labour power and thereby sharply lowering their quality of life.

It’s obviously much harder to start a union when much of the workforce doesn’t speak English, or if they’re here on temporary visas, or if they’re from a cultural tradition that has little idea of worker’s rights (which is most of them). So the wealthy know that by opening the floodgates to the whole world they can smash the sentiments that prevent workers from selling each other out as cheaply as possible.

Second among these economic reasons, but no less important, is that mass immigration drives up the value of investment property, which a large proportion of Western conservatives hold. In so far as the value of any given piece of land is a function of the amount of money willing to bid to own it, it’s mathematically obvious that opening the borders to all and sundry will remove previous restrictions on demand, thereby driving it up – alongside the price of the property.

After all, no-one is making more land, so the supply of land in New Zealand is a constant. By letting in a few extra million people, the wealthy can stimulate demand which pushes the price of that land up.

Which is great if you’re in the minority that already holds land, and terrible if you’re in the majority that doesn’t.

This reason, incidentally, is why the population will never be allowed to fall, and why it has not been allowed to fall in Western European countries where the birthrate has been below replacement level for a number of generations. Economic reasons mean that the rich will simply force their puppets in Parliament to maintain the price of their land holdings by opening the borders.

This is why the population of France has not decreased in several decades, despite that native French women have had a below replacement level birthrate for over a century now. The French elites would rather import foreigners to replace the missing locals than allow their property values to decline with a falling population – and the same is now true of Britain, Spain, Italy and Germany.

After all, if you’re in the top 1%, then it doesn’t matter if the average goes down as long as inequality rises by enough to compensate, because rising inequality will see the top 1% cream more and more of it. Selling your countrymen out for shekels might lower the standard of living of the nation, but it won’t lower yours (until enough other people do it of course, but the hope is that this point is never reached).

Western liberals, for their own reasons, are also more than happy to open the floodgates to mass immigration.

One reason is that these liberals do not generally live in the same neighbourhoods that are affected by mass immigration and the crime that comes with it. So the negative side of agitating for mass immigration is not considered to outweigh the positive side of virtue signalling one’s good will towards poor foreigners.

Another reason is that they are ideologically opposed to national bonds for the reasons that these are impediments to a global communist state. The sharper the lines are around who counts as a Kiwi and who doesn’t count as Kiwi, the more difficult it is to subsume New Zealand into the global communist consciousness.

None of this is to argue that immigration is a bad thing or that it should be stopped. But it’s clear that the National Party has lost control of the immigration system above and beyond the desire to keep wages low and house prices high. The wishes of the people who already live in New Zealand, and who have inherited a sense of guardianship over the land, is not respected and the effect of this immigration on their quality of life not considered.

Ultimately, the New Zealand immigration system needs to be run according to the philosophy that the New Zealand population as a whole are to be the beneficiaries of the fact that this is a nicer place to live than most of the rest of the world. Not right-wing special interests who want cheap labour for the sake of maximum profits or left-wing special interests who want the destruction of social coherency for the sake of maximum control.