Category: politics

Where Did the National Party Lose Their Majority?

Elections are won and lost by slim margins nowadays and subtle shifts have weakened National’s position compared to 2014

The drama may not be over, but we can eliminate one outcome even before negotiations begin: it is now clear that the National Party failed to get enough seats to govern alone or with support partners as suppliant as ACT, United Future and the Maori Party (the last two of whom were eliminated last night). If they are to govern, it must be with New Zealand First, which is a significant weakening of their position compared to the previous election. This article looks at where National lost support from 2014.

First of all, it’s apparent that the people who voted National last night were basically the same sort of person who always votes National. The correlation between voting National in 2017 and voting National in 2014 was 0.989. So the differences between the people who voted for them last night and who voted for them in 2014 are subtle.

The National Party did worse with white people this time around, although white people were still the overwhelming bulk of National voters. The correlation between being of European descent and voting National in 2017 was 0.51, down from 0.60 in 2014, balanced by an increase in the correlation between being Asian and voting National in 2017 (up to 0.17 from 0.09 in 2014) and between being a Pacific Islander and voting National in 2017 (up to -0.38 from -0.46 in 2014).

This is suggestive of a fairly large segment of both Asian and Pacific Islander people who have managed to rise above their previous economic situation. It also reflects the increase in correlation between working in wholesale trade and voting National in 2014 (0.19) compared to voting National in 2017 (0.26), because wholesale trade is itself an industry with a large proportion of Asian workers.

Because Asians and Pacific Islanders are more likely to be born overseas than Maoris and white people, this has led to a strengthening of the correlation between being born overseas and voting National, which was already moderately significant at 0.33 in 2014 but has since then increased to 0.39 in 2017.

South Islanders still support the National Party more than North Islanders, but the correlation between living on the South Island and voting National went down from 0.13 in 2014 to 0.07 in 2017. This is probably a reflection of the fact that National increased their support among recent immigrants at the expense of Kiwi-born voters, because a relatively higher proportion of recent immigrants live on the North Island.

The correlation between working in a particular industry and voting National in 2017 increased from 2014 in the case of manufacturing (up to -0.19 from -0.23), wholesale trade (up to 0.26 from 0.19) and transport, postal and warehousing (up to -0.47 from -0.51), and decreased from 2014 in the case of mining (down to -0.05 from 0.00), hospitality (down to -0.23 from -0.18), professional, scientific and technical services (down to 0.15 from 0.18), public administration and safety (down to -0.30 from -0.26), education and training (down to -0.31 from -0.27), healthcare and social assistance (down to -0.23 from -0.18) and recreation and arts services (down to -0.22 from -0.17).

This is perhaps interesting because it suggests that people are more likely to go from voting National to voting Labour if they have a social job, compared to being even more likely to vote National if they have a relatively unsocial job.

Related to this is that social occupations tended to leak support for National compared to unsocial ones. Although managers continued to strongly support National in 2017, as the correlation between working as a manager and voting National in 2017 was 0.52, this was weaker than with voting National in 2014, which was 0.56. A similar drop was seen in community and personal services workers, whose correlation with voting National in 2017 dropped to -0.58 from -0.53 in 2014.

Taken together, these correlations show that people whose jobs bring them into contact with the most people are the most likely to feel that the country needs a change in direction, perhaps suggesting that they have observed an increase in human misery to intolerable levels.

Some won’t be surprised to note that the correlation between living in a mortgaged house and voting National in 2017 increased to 0.05 from 0.01 in 2014 – perhaps an indication that people in this group are afraid of the market crashing and leaving them with negative equity. Tellingly, this group became much less willing to vote New Zealand First – the correlation between living in a mortgaged house and voting New Zealand First in 2017 dropped to 0.06 from 0.12 in 2014.

Taken together, those numbers suggest that a lot of people want the game of hot potato being played with house prices and immigrants to continue for a while yet.

Where the election seemed to be lost for National, at least in terms of their hopes of governing alone or with ACT only, is when the real elite class, despite still mostly supporting National, did so less overwhelmingly than in 2014.

The correlations between being in any of the four highest income brackets and voting National all weakened from 2014 to 2017. These were those earning $60-70K (down to 0.21 from 0.24), those earning $70-100K (down to 0.32 from 0.36), those earning $100-150K (down to 0.31 from 0.34) and those earning $150K+ (down to 0.31 from 0.35).

They also weakened noticeably among holders of postgraduate degrees. Voters with an Honours degree had a correlation of 0.22 with voting National in 2014 but only one of 0.17 with voting National in 2017. Holders of Master’s degrees (down from 0.20 in 2014 to 0.17 in 2017) and doctorates (down from 0.20 to 2014 to 0.14 in 2017) followed the same pattern.

The cohort of National voters is also younger this year compared to 2014. The correlation between median age and voting National decreased to 0.77 in 2017 from 0.81 in 2014.

What all this tells us is that there were three major trends in play last night.

The first one is that Labour won votes off the Greens, New Zealand First and National. Labour won a huge number of Maori voters from New Zealand First and the Greens – the correlation between being Maori and voting Labour in 2014 was only 0.42, but in 2017 it was 0.58.

The second is that National won a lot of votes from people who were educated and young and Green-voting in 2014, but who grew up to be wealthy, middle-class and incentivised to vote with their wealth interests in 2017. The Greens dominated this segment of the population in 2014 and lost most of them by 2017, chiefly to TOP and to National.

The third is that National lost a lot of votes from the sort of person who is the real power elite of the country. Although the rich, the employers, the owners of freehold land, Anglicans and educated people all still preferred National to Labour, they were markedly less keen in 2017 than 2014. Many of these people switched to TOP, which is ironic because they now won’t be represented at all (at least not directly).

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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.

The Best Argument For Taking Thousands Of “Refugees”

If we let in a hundred of these a year, we’d soon forget about our petty differences

Ronald Reagan gave a very strange speech at the United Nations once. He spoke about how the nations of the world would settle their differences and come together if faced with an extraterrestrial threat. This is actually a reference to a law of human psychology, and this same law provides the best argument for increasing our refugee quota.

There no denying that social solidarity has steeply declined in New Zealand over the past 25 years. Ever since the Mother of all Budgets, as a consequence of which the rich and the poor learned to truly hate each other, we have seen a Labour Government open the borders to Pacific Island immigration, and then a National Government open the borders to Asian immigration.

After all this, New Zealand citizenship has been devalued so much that hardly anyone really feels like a Kiwi anymore, apart from in the most superficial ways.

There’s no longer any cultural value that defines us as unique among the cultures of the world. Some say we are “multicultural” but that’s just another way of saying that we have nothing in common with each other. Some say we have the All Blacks but for the majority of immigrants, who could just as happily have ended up in Australia, this is little more than a flag of convenience.

Seeing what’s happened in Europe in recent decades, however, gives us a clue as to how we can strengthen our national bonds.

For the vast majority of its history, the kings and tyrants who wished to unite Europe faced a particular problem. Europe is an extremely culturally diverse continent, and the vast majority of Europeans hate basically everyone else. So they have never been inclined to unite under the banner of “European” because they identify with their village above all and then their shire and maybe at a stretch with the idea of a nation.

The idea of a “European race” is really a New World idea, applied retrospectively by American, South American and British Empire thinkers to the old continent, to describe how it appeared in contrast to their own racially heterogenous societies. Europeans aren’t fond of it.

However, the rulers of the European Union know one thing about the fundamental laws of human psychology: nothing brings a disparate group of people together faster than a common enemy. To that end, the last twenty years of mass Muslim immigration has been a godsend.

It’s inevitable, given the tenets of the faith that they follow, that if large numbers of Muslims immigrate to a particular locale, they will end up clashing with the incumbents. There’s simply no way that an ideology that commands its followers to seek out non-believers and kill them can co-exist with its neighbours, any more peacefully than Nazism could.

So now, a curious phenomenon has arisen in Europe. Any two Europeans (or Western Europeans at least) can meet and share a common story of how much they hate Muslims. Every European now has a story about being robbed or beaten, or their car set on fire, or their girlfriends sexually harassed, by a Muslim.

This has led to bonds of intra-European solidarity first starting to appear all across the continent, and now – as more stories are shared – starting to strengthen. An astute observer of history can see the battle-lines being drawn already.

If New Zealand lets in a large number of Muslim refugees, such as the 5,000 per year that the Greens and The Opportunities Party are proposing, then it’s only a matter of time until the first Truck of Peace attack kills a significant number of Kiwis. The terrorists, when they make their move, will not discriminate between types of Kiwi: we will all be infidel.

It is then that we all – Maori, Pakeha, Islander and Asian alike – will have, for the first time since World War Two, a mutual enemy. Therefore, it may be that the country needs mass Muslim immigration so that Kiwis – as the Europeans have been forced to do – can come together in mutual rejection of the hate ideology of Islam, as we once did against the hate ideology of Nazism.

However, this is also very close to the worst argument for taking in thousands of refugees.

Over a century ago, it was prophecised by high-ranking Freemason Albert Pike that World War Three would involve the mutual annihilation of Israel and the Muslim world, leaving the Christians in charge of the planet.

If one looks at the mass Muslim immigration that Western political leaders have pushed on us over the last twenty years, it’s possible that the West is being conditioned to hate Muslims with the intent of making Westerners psychologically ready to wipe them out if they should annihilate Israel. If this is the case, it might not matter what we do.

However, taking in a large number of Muslims may, in the short term, bring Kiwis of all races together in mutual rejection of infant genital mutilation, abuse of women, abuse of homosexuals, hatred of Jews and hatred of outsiders. We should keep in mind, however, that doing so is truly to play with fire.

VJMP Reads: Anders Breivik’s Manifesto XII

This reading carries on from here.

In this section (pages 949-1067), Breivik continues to evaluate strategies and tactics for terrorist acts. Chillingly, here he writes specifically about the benefits of targeting a party conference of social democrats, for the reason that security will probably be poor, as well as expounding on why this would be so excellent a propaganda move for the cultural conservatives.

This section continues the high detail discussion about how to best carry about a terror attack. Given the comprehensive nature of the rest of the document when it comes to listing Islamic crimes, one is left with the impression that an extreme amount of thought went into the planning for the massacre that Breivik did carry out.

The idea that the ends justify the means comes through very clearly in this section. On the subject of attacking a left-wing party gathering with a flamethrower, he writes that “A severely burned category A or B traitor will in reality become a living symbol of what awaits individuals guilty of trying to sell their own people into Islamic slavery.”

There is something grimly medieval about mutilating living people to let them serve as a reminder of what befalls traitors, and this section is much darker and more demented than the sections about history. One is reminded of the admonition not to lose one’s own humanity in the course of warfare.

Again the paranoid nature of the rest of the document shines through when Breivik writes, of the largest annual conference of Norwegian investigative journalists, “98% of them are considered quality category B traitor targets”. With a worldview like this, Breivik could justify killing almost anyone.

Unsettlingly for us at VJM Publishing, this explicitly includes us – “90%+ of [writers] support multiculturalism and usually portray their world view through their works.” So we would also be marked for death if Breivik had his way, as those who work in the arts and recreational services tend to have broadly leftist sympathies.

The descriptions of how to break out from being pinned down by Police forces during an operation read like Breivik is writing about a video game. One passage describes how a car can be stolen and driven through any cordon that the first wave of Police officers might set up. This gives the impression that Breivik must have spent countless hours in dark plotting and fantasising.

Reassuringly, Breivik is able to demonstrate a sense of moderation. On the subject of using nuclear weapons in terrorism he writes that this “would normally inflict too many civilian casualties and it is therefore hard to imagine how nuclear weapons could benefit our cause.”

Breivik emphasises in this section the need to keep “civilian” casualties at a minimum. By this, of course, he means people who are not leftists. One is further reminded of the paranoid and oppositional nature of the document. It is also grandiose, which comes through in passages such as the description of how to blow up a nuclear reactor for the sake of financial damage to the “mutilculturalist regime”.

An unappreciated irony, at least on Breivik’s part, is that the document repeatedly emphasises how important it is that any prospective “operative” avoid getting flagged by the domestic security and intelligence services, yet it is possession of this document itself, with its voluminous advice for how to carry out terror attacks, which is most likely to get a person flagged by said spooks.

In fact, given that Breivik actually did go on to carry out a mass shooting, possession of this document is possibly the biggest red flag one could raise to the security services. Instead of being titled “A European Declaration of Independence” it could just as well be titled “A European Declaration of War.”

The Limits of Inclusiveness

Gay people are categorically unwelcome here

With news that Queensland Islamic authorities are urging their followers to vote “No” to same sex marriage, the levels of cognitive dissonance among many on the left are starting to become painful. It’s now undeniable that a grand coalition of everyone who isn’t a rich, straight white male is an untenable concept. This essay examines why.

For the past couple of decades, leftist groups across the world have looked for solidarity on the basis of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” This logic has inspired the “tolerant left” to make a show of solidarity towards any and all groups that had a grudge against the people running the world – commonly agreed to be rich, straight, white men.

This has led to the left adopting the idea of inclusiveness as a moral virtue. Any and all alliances with people who hated the Establishment had to be entertained. It didn’t matter if they were women, gay, black, Muslim or anything else, just as long as they wanted to overturn the status quo.

However, this grand political dream to remake the world in one’s image fell apart, as such schemes inevitably do, because it ran into inexorable silver laws of psychology.

It can be stated as a psychological rule that, the larger and more diverse any given group, the weaker the bonds of solidarity that hold it together will be, and the smaller and more pure any given group, the stronger those bonds of solidarity will be.

This is obviously true if we look at the extremes. At one far extreme we could consider the nuclear family to be the smallest group with the strongest solidarity. Parents are often ready to kill if that is necessary to protect their offspring, and “brother” is used as a gesture of common bonds in all kinds of ideological movements, so it’s easy to see how this small, extremely exclusive group has the highest solidarity.

The reason why you can’t just let a random person into your family and have them considered one of you is because this would increase the degree of diversity of the group to the point where such extremely strong bonds of solidarity are no longer tenable because the necessary level of trust isn’t there.

The obvious reason for this is because the already existing members of the family have next to nothing in common with a random person, so there’s no special reason to trust them.

At the the other far extreme we could consider the human species to be the largest group with the weakest solidarity. Indeed, we can see here that people generally don’t care at all if they hear that someone on the other side of the world died, unless that person had something in common with them, such as a native language or racial origin.

Further evidence for this can be observed if we place the nation states along a line with a familial level of solidarity (highly discriminating and strong) at one end and a universal level of solidarity (undiscriminating and weak) at the other.

Here it can be seen that the nations that cast the net of citizenship over an extremely broad set of different people (USA, Brazil, South Africa, Russia) have the lowest levels of solidarity, measured by the unwillingness of the wealthy to contribute to the communal welfare in the form of taxes, and by the willingness with which the poor use lethal violence on other citizens.

It can also be seen that the nations that cast this net more exclusively, such as only over a small, homogenous ethnic group (Scandinavia, Japan, Germany, South Korea, Canada), have the highest levels of solidarity, measured by an egalitarian culture and low levels of interpersonal violence.

Fitting this trend, countries with moderate levels of diversity (Argentina, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Chile) are in the middle.

There’s no escaping this silver law: the more inclusive the group, the weaker the bonds of solidarity, and the less inclusive the group, the stronger the bonds of solidarity.

The idea of trying to include as many people in the wider group as possible is essentially a feminine idea, and this is why it is generally associated with the left. It’s a form of horizontalisation that seeks to remove all distinctions from people in order to homogenise us into an easily malleable ball of putty.

However, we can now see the limitations of it. The motivation behind this idea is ostensibly to avoid making people feel bad on account of being excluded, but the flipside of it is that no-one ever feels good on account of being included.

This has led to a situation where Muslim immigrants, considered by the trend-setters among the left to be allies on account of a mutual Christian enemy, will vote against the rights of other leftist allies if those allies are homosexuals. It is a tremendous irony that these religious fundamentalists, allowed into the country because of a desire to display the virtue of tolerance, do not share the belief in the value of that tolerance, and so are now acting to maintain intolerance towards groups they consider outsiders.

With the recent wave of immigration having made our societies much more diverse, we have correspondingly lost much of the solidarity that used to provide us with a sense of society and community. The net has been cast so wide, thanks to a fanatical ideology that believes it can erase all human uniqueness, that it cannot keep hold of what it covers.

In other words, the inevitable consequence of trying to treat everyone like your brother is that your brother can no longer count on a brotherly level of exclusive solidarity from you, and will have to settle for much less. People who believe that inclusiveness is necessarily a virtue might therefore want to be careful what they wish for.