Possible Coalitions After The NZ General Election On October 14th 2023

It’s looking likely that the 2023 New Zealand General Election will be a close-run affair. It’s also looking likely that we won’t know who the next ruling power/coalition of powers will be for several weeks, as we must wait for negotiations to conclude. This article looks at who the next ruling coalition might be.

1. National, ACT, New Zealand First

Seemingly the most likely coalition at time of writing. The received wisdom seems to be that it’s National’s election to lose. This wisdom is the result of National’s relatively high polling – between 36% and 38% recently – and the fact that Winston Peters has previously promised to not work with Labour again.

If National gets 38% of the vote, ACT 9% and NZF 7%, that would give them enough Parliamentary seats to form a by-election proof majority. As of today this seems like the most likely outcome. It would make Chris Luxon the Prime Minister, and could very well collapse quickly on account of squabbling between the nationalist Peters and the globalist David Seymour.

1a. National, New Zealand First with confidence and supply from ACT

This would be the reverse of the 2017 Canterbury Government, with National replacing Labour and ACT replacing the Greens. It appears to be the second-most likely election outcome at time of writing, following the assumption that Peters will keep to his promise of not working with Labour.

This is David Seymour’s nightmare option, even though it appears to be much more stable than outcome 1. If New Zealand First goes past ACT over the next week, and wins more seats on election night, it becomes highly likely. Chris Luxon might prefer this option instead of option 1 in order to avoid the mess of a three-way coalition.

1b. National, ACT

Chris Luxon and David Seymour’s preferred option. A coalition between National and ACT would allow them to go full capitalist without any kind of nationalist handbrake. They could cut as much welfare and import as much cheap labour as they wanted. They could put interest deductability back on landlords’ mortgages and scrap the Fair Pay Agreements.

It seems that many are switching to New Zealand First in the hope that Peters might moderate some of this push towards soulless capitalism. Those switching appear to be coming from both National and Labour. Many centrists appear to now believe that voting for Peters is the only way to prevent Luxon and Seymour from running riot.

2. Labour, Greens, Maori Party

The dreaded “Coalition of Chaos”. The thought of Labour, Greens and the Maori Party working together without the calming reason of Winston Peters evokes all sorts of Communist horrors. Fears of capital gains taxes and wealth taxes – or possibly even private land confiscation – haunt the nightmares of wealthy people the country over.

That’s not all. A Labour, Greens, Maori Party coalition would make co-governance a reality for New Zealand. This could raise racial tensions in New Zealand to American levels. Already we have the Groundswell protests, the Stop Co-Governance tour and a variety of protest parties running for election. A coalition with the Maori Party in it could cause a boilover.

2a. Labour, New Zealand First with confidence and supply from Greens and/or Maori Party

This option appears to be considered the third-most likely by election observers at time of writing. It’s what is likely to happen if Peters decides that he can’t trust the right-wing parties, which would rule out option 1. It’s likely that Labour and New Zealand First would both prefer this outcome to any other left-wing outcome.

It’s the property industry’s nightmare scenario. A repeat of 2017’s Canterbury Government would mean the property industry’s hope of tax deductions for mortgage interest on investments would be gone. It could even mean a mass house-building program, which would relieve the artificial scarcity of housing, destroying profits.

National voters would be outraged, again, if Peters went with Labour again. But just as they couldn’t do anything about it in 2017, they won’t be able to do anything about it if Labour gets 35 seats, the Greens 17 and New Zealand First 9 or more. That would be 61 seats, and that’s enough.

2b. Labour, Greens, Maori Party, New Zealand First

For all the talk about a National/ACT government vs. a National/ACT/NZF one, the 2023 General Election is far from a done deal. It seems to be assumed by the herd that this particular coalition choice is unworkable because Labour has plummeted in the polls and Peters has said that he won’t go into coalition with Labour.

2017 proved to all that elections are won by coalitions of 61 or more seats, not by the party with the most votes. National Party voters were livid in 2017 when Winston Peters chose to go into a coalition with the Labour Party. But Peters reasoned, understandably, that his heavily Maori and working-class white constituency would not be well served by a National government.

That same calculus applies in 2023. In fact, Chris Hipkins is so weak that Peters could even demand that he be the Prime Minister in such an arrangement, otherwise he would go with National. If Hipkins agreed, and National couldn’t match it, then this outcome becomes very likely. It might be a mess, but then again it might not.

3. National, Labour

The “Grand Coalition” has been written about before, and seems more likely with every day that passes. The Leaders’ Debates showed that there is very little difference between the two major parties. Many have asked, therefore: why don’t National and Labour just join forces, and keep the “extremists” in ACT and the Greens out?

This is more likely to happen the more difficult post-election negotiations are. If Peters holds the balance of power again, some will be worried about a repeat of 1996, when negotiations took several weeks. If NZ Loyal or TOP manage to win any seats, those negotiations will be even harder. Difficulties will make Luxon and Hipkins look at each other and see potential alllies.

4. National, Greens

This possibility is certainly unlikely. But if National wins 36% and the Greens win 13%, Luxon might decide that working with the Greens – and chucking them a few bones – could be more stable than a coalition where Peters and Seymour were expected to work together.

This outcome is probably the “Suicide Coalition” from the Greens’ point of view. Throwing their support behind a right-wing government would cause many of their members to abandon the party. Many, if not most, of their voters would be outraged to see Green MPs help the National Party back into power. Hence, this is one of the least likely outcomes.

5. A coalition with/without New Zealand Loyal or TOP

If an outsider party such as New Zealand Loyal or TOP won any seats, all the above calculations go out the window. Even three seats would be enough to have a good chance of holding the balance of power and therefore being able to force some concessions.

If New Zealand Loyal won the balance of power, the grand coalition will truly be on the cards, especially if New Zealand First wins a lot of seats. It’s unclear whether NZ Loyal, who appear to be alternative centrist, have a preferred coalition partner out of National or Labour. In all likelihood, they will expect to sit outside of government for at least their first term.

If TOP won the balance of power, however, it could be different. Understanding New Zealand 3 revealed the extent to which TOP voters are similar to Greens voters, and those TOP voters would surely be as outraged as the Greens ones to see their party support a right-wing government. A coalition of Labour, TOP, Greens and/or New Zealand First might be possible to keep the Maori Party out.

6. No coalition, new election

Luxon has threatened to take New Zealand back to the polls if he doesn’t get what he wants on October 14. In other words, if negotiations between National, ACT and New Zealand First don’t produce a workable coalition, then we might need to vote again, in the hope that the new vote tallies do produce such a coalition.

This can be comfortably said to be an empty threat, for several reasons. The first is that it would damage market confidence in New Zealand’s stability. The second is that the voters are likely to punish whoever they blame for having to vote again, and Luxon won’t want that to be him. Much more likely that a grand coalition forms in such an instance.

In summary, the 2023 New Zealand General Election appears in foresight to have a greater variety of realistic outcomes than any previous election. A great number of people will be dismayed and appalled by the results.

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Xu Xiaodong’s Cautionary Tale, Or What A Social Credit System Could Mean For New Zealand

Xu Xiaodong is a Chinese MMA fighter and wind-up merchant who has gained fame for making fools out of bullshit artists. This has made him a target for the ire of the CCP, who have punished him through use of the Chinese social credit system. Xu’s example provides a cautionary tale about what might be coming the way of New Zealand dissidents.

In particular, Xu has made a fool out out of several supposed martial artists, who claimed to be teaching useful martial skills but who were really just fraudsters. He has challenged several of them to bouts, which he invariably wins within 30 seconds.

This has upset the CCP because they consider the promotion of kung fu and tai chi to be in China’s cultural interests, and therefore that Xu’s actions are harming those interests by making people take kung fu and tai chi less seriously. Xu echoes the master morality of preferring the painful truth to the comfortable lie, in contrast to the slave morality of the CCP.

The most egregious thing about the CCP’s actions here is that Xu is revealing and destroying falsehood. He isn’t telling lies or making outrageous moral pronouncements. He isn’t going around saying that the CCP are evil and should be overthrown. He’s just telling the truth about the ineffective nature of certain traditional martial arts.

Xu Xiaodong is of the same spirit as the men who said that the Earth rotates around the Sun, and who were persecuted for it.

Simply for exposing the truth, Xu is suffering social credit penalties that have a significant impact on his life. One story holds that Xu had to travel for 36 hours without rest to get to the location of one of his fights, because he had been banned from planes and trains. He has also been forbidden from renting rooms in certain hotels.

If New Zealand ever introduces a central bank digital currency (a.k.a. a CBDC), they will have a similar power to suppress dissenters.

The Chinese system already allows the CCP to, for example, switch off a person’s ability to buy alcohol. A New Zealand social credit system based on a CBDC could easily achieve the same ends. Criticise the Government? No alcohol, tobacco or flights for you. No renting a room outside of your delegated containment zone.

A CBDC-based social credit system in New Zealand would also mean that, in the case of a repeat of last year’s Parliament Lawn protests, the New Zealand Government could simply shut off the bank accounts of anyone observed protesting. They could also pre-empt protests from starting by blocking known protesters from accessing the transport necessary to take them to Wellington.

It could mean that the people running alternative media channels like CounterSpin and VJM Publishing could be prevented from owning property, as is currently the case in China for people with the lowest ratings. We could even be prevented from legally accessing the Internet.

New Zealand is already getting close to a situation where a Kiwi cannot hold a government office unless they parrot known lies about the Treaty of Waitangi being a partnership agreement. A social credit system in New Zealand would mean that you have to agree with the Government, even when it’s wrong, or face a penalty.

Imagine not being allowed to take domestic flights because you disagreed with co-governance, or the mass importation of cheap labour, or cannabis prohibition, or any one of the numerous evils that the New Zealand Government inflicts upon its long-suffering people.

The control freaks that forced the Covid mandates on us would love nothing more than to have another go. We already know that they’re planning a CBDC that central governments could use as a social credit system to silence dissenters. Some likely proposals are based on carbon credits, such that each person is allocated a set number of credits per set time period and can lose credits for displeasing the Government.

There are two major ways that freedom-lovers can fight against this.

The first is to raise awareness that it is happening. It’s not schizophrenia to say that powerful ruling-class interests are conspiring to strip rights and freedoms away form the masses. Ruling classes have always done that, all throughout history. The CBDC is just another step towards a Chinese-style social credit system. Make people aware of this.

The second is to explore alternative economies. Sometimes (but not always) this includes criminal ones. The black market has always existed to meet the needs of those who have been ostracised by tyrants. As entheogen users could tell you today, it still does. In any case, people can practice barter or trade for silver bullion without needing to become criminal.

What the case of Xu Xiaodong teaches us is that the tyrannical impulse on the part of the world’s ruling classes never goes away – it simply takes new forms depending on the technology available to it. The Covid mandates showed that the will to totalitarianism still exists among our ruling class. Letting them control us through a social credit system is the last thing the New Zealand nation needs.

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A Grand Coalition Might Happen After The 2023 New Zealand General Election

A recent Horizon Poll found that combined support for Labournational has now fallen to less than 61%, the lowest ever. Never before have Kiwis had less confidence in the two biggest parties. The electoral ramifications of this fall in support are major.

The mathematics of building a ruling coalition are simple, but are becoming more complex. According to the Horizon poll, Labour and the Greens together would win 61 seats with almost 40% of the vote. National and ACT together would win only 54 seats, with the Maori Party taking five. This would mean that Labour and the Greens could govern by themselves.

Complicating matters is the unprecedented level of support for the parties currently outside Parliament.

New Zealand First polled at 4.8%, which means that they are on the verge of overcoming the 5% threshold. They have been rising rapidly since 12 months ago, when they were polling around 2-3%. In fact, if one removes the undecided voters from the Horizon poll, New Zealand First gets 5.3% of the remainder.

Should New Zealand First poll over 5% in the general election in October, they will win at least seven seats. Assuming they don’t go with Labour again – New Zealand First Leader Winston Peters having ruled this out – they will probably go with National, which would give the National-ACT-NZF coalition 58 seats.

Labour and Greens, in such a scenario, would have 57 seats, and would therefore need The Maori Party’s five in order to govern.

There are more complications in the form of The Opportunities Party (TOP) and DemocracyNZ. TOP polled at 2.8% in the Horizon poll, which means they’re closer to the 5% threshold than not. Almost as many of the polled voters supported “Another party”, which means that DemocracyNZ could be close to 2% support as well.

If either TOP or DemocracyNZ scored over 5% in the general election, forming a 61-seat coalition would become much more complicated.

Labour doesn’t really want to work with The Maori Party, for the obvious reason that The Maori Party are insane. A Labour-Greens-Maori Party coalition would be a nightmare of infighting. The unreasonableness of people like Rawiri Waititi would make stability impossible.

However, National doesn’t really want to work with New Zealand First either. New Zealand First may have fallen out with Labour, but that doesn’t make them great friends with National. New Zealand First are still primarily nationalist, which puts them in direct conflict with National’s globalist plunderer mindset. Peters and ACT Leader David Seymour are well known to despise each other.

This raises a possibility that some dare not whisper: Labour and National might go with each other.

A Labour and National grand coalition would send a shockwave through the New Zealand political scene. All Kiwis have been conditioned to see Labour and National as implacable enemies and two opposite poles of the political spectrum. For them to team up would force a mass change of perspective on New Zealand.

However, there is precedent for it, if not from New Zealand. Germany’s Angela Merkel was thrice involved in a grand coalition between her conservative CDU party and the social democratic SPD. In all three instances, the primary stated reason for this was keeping “extremists” out of power.

Labournational could easily make a similar justification, claiming that New Zealand First and The Maori Party were both ethnonationalist extremists. If they did, they’d have the full support of the globalist media, who would be more than happy to demonise anyone suspicious of globalism.

A grand coalition in which Chris Hipkins was the external face (dealing with the media and public) and Chris Luxon was the internal face (dealing with management), would make a lot of sense. It would mean the personable Hipkins could keep public sentiments under control, while the unpopular Luxon kept the grand coalition itself under control.

There are two major reasons why a grand coalition might not happen.

The first is pragmatic: a grand coalition would enable a party like New Zealand First to become the main opposition. If they did, they would mostly criticise the globalist establishment, which would see support for Labournational fall even further. It makes more sense for Labournational to trade opposition status between Labour and National, and thereby minimise the influence of the minor parties.

The second is more sinister: both Labour and National want to keep up the illusion that the voters actually have some choice. This is best achieved by them taking turns at ruling. If they would combine, people would realise – when nothing changed – that parliamentary democracy is just a massive scam. Their wealth and privilege depends on keeping up the charade that Kiwis have a say in their own governance.

One thing is certain: a grand coalition would make clear that it’s them against us.

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Orwell’s Three Blocs: A 2023 Perspective

In the (supposedly) fantasy world of George Orwell’s 1984, geopolitical life is divided into three major blocs.

The only one we see in the story world is Oceania, home of protagonist Winston Smith. This consists of Britain, the Americas, Southern Africa, Australia and Oceania. This bloc is always at peace with one of the two other blocs, and always at war with the other.

The other two blocs are Eurasia, which roughly means Europe plus all of Russia and parts of Central Asia, and Eastasia, which roughly means China, Japan, Korea and parts of South East Asia.

Inbetween each of the blocs is a contested zone that is essentially no-man’s land. In the story world of 1984 there is one such zone between Oceania and Eurasia, and one such zone between Oceania and Eastasia (there are others, but only the ones referring to Oceania are mentioned in the book).

1984 was published in 1949, almost three-quarters of a century ago. It has proven incredibly prescient, because if one looks around the world today it appears very similar to the then-future world described by Orwell.

Oceania is today’s Anglo-Judaic Empire, i.e. Britain and most of the former British Empire. Unlike in 1984, the Oceania equivalent today includes Japan and Korea.

Eurasia is today’s Russia. In 1984, Eurasia is Russia plus a conquered Europe. In today’s world, of course, Russia has shown little ability to conquer Europe. Perhaps they have the will, but the ability is another thing.

Eastasia is today’s China plus North Korea. In 1984, Eastasia included Japan, South Korea and some of South East Asia. At the moment, those areas are Oceanian territory. But if the Chinese waged a lightning war at some point in the future, they could conceivably take them over.

Already one combat zone is active on the border between Oceania and Eurasia (The European Union is effectively territory held by Oceania for now), in Ukraine. This zone might drift westward such that Oceania gets pushed back to the British Isles. If it did, it would be exactly like Orwell’s prediction.

Even if Orwell’s prediction wasn’t geographically accurate, it’s still temporally accurate. In 1984, it turns out that wars are supposed to go on forever, specifically because this wastes resources, because if resources are not wasted then people have time to think about their situation and that leads them to rebel against the government.

On the Oceania/Eurasia border in today’s world, Russia and Ukraine also seem to be fighting such a forever war. Even though Western countries are spending tens of billions on arming Ukraine, the front lines move very little. Both sides have been fighting over one town, Bakhmut, for seven months straight. So little has happened in 15 months, it’s easy to imagine the two might still be at war in 15 years.

Many are predicting that we will soon see a second combat zone, in South East Asia. China has been ramping up military activity in the South China Sea in recent years, and an American Air Force General named Michael Minihan has predicted that America will be at war with China within two years. A forever war in the South China Sea could easily begin soon.

This has complications for us, seeing as we are a de facto (if not de jure) American ally, and this makes us a potential target from China’s perspective. Being part of Oceania, we’re someone that Eastasia might bomb if we get drawn into conflict against each other.

The third combat zone appears to be be Iran and the Middle East. This one has also been brewing for a while, with John McCain and Hillary Clinton both cheerleading for bombing Iran to protect Israel. Iran’s development of nuclear weapons technology is a clear existential threat to their sworn enemies Israel, and both countries lie in the disputed area between the three blocs.

Other potential combat zones in the near future are India vs. China (in the Himalayas) or Ethiopia vs. Egypt and Sudan (over the Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam). If some or all of these other combat zones became as hot as the ongoing War in Ukraine, our world would look extremely similar to Orwell’s prediction.

It’s necessary to note that Orwell didn’t really predict these things – he knew about them from what other members of the ruling class said to him, because it’s been a ruling class plan for a very long time. Going all the way back to Babylon, the ruling class has always dreamed of a system where they could divide and conquer the masses to such an extent that it was impossible to overthrow them.

This explains why Orwell was able to predict so accurately the world of 2023, with its three major blocs and an equatorial disputed zone.

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