Well, looks like NZ didn’t get my memo about voting Labour.
I don’t think a National government is going to be catastrophic for New Zealand. National have definitely moved towards the centre in their policies (or at least the policies they were willing to speak about), and any government would be silly to spend big bucks given the state of our economy. I am concerned about the potential sale of state-owned enterprises to raise a bit of cash. Hopefully New Zealanders will make enough of a fuss if they attempt to do this and not just think about lining their own pockets.
ACT being a coalition partner is more worrying. Given National’s almost-majority I can’t see that they’ll have too much power, although National may use ACT as an excuse to push through controversial policy. We’ll see what happens in the coming weeks.
As an expat, I give a big thumbs down to NZ media for completely failing to stream any live coverage. One News was the only outlet that bothered trying, and their stream was down whenever we tried to access it. You’d think that with huge numbers of people voting from overseas there’d be a bit of $ to be made from advertising directly to an international audience.
In fact, the best media coverage I found came from Scoop. There has been an awful lot of talk about the role of blogs and non-corporate journalists in disseminating political information this time ’round. I really wish people would stop saying “blogosphere”.
Anyway, I’m looking forward to the hour or two a day that has been freed up from my compulsive trawling through politics-related sites.
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