Well, it’s eight weeks out from our general election which as you may have heard will be held on September 19th. Hoardings are starting to go up everywhere and Queenstown is no different, well except that the only hoardings up down this way are for that woman in red and her Labour cohort Jon Mitchell and a few for The Opportunities Party hopeful Joel Rowlands.
Of course, you can ignore Mr Rowlands. He’s a well-meaning rock band drummer who is a bit of a greenie, seems to like the weed and, although a nice enough guy, is just a naive ideologue, so he’s perfect really for ToP. The selfie below from Rowland’s Facebook page sums up his chances pretty succinctly.
Another well-meaning hopeful candidate for the area is Vicky Hoskins/Bonham who is standing for NZ Outdoors Party. I know Vicky and she is a lovely lady: another greenie who when running for local council or somesuch last election rated ‘climate change’ as the biggest concern facing the country at the time. Like Rowlands, she won’t get anywhere near getting in either, but I do know people who intend to vote for NZ Outdoors Party as a protest vote due to their work around the travesty that was the new firearms legislation.
Strange though, a protest vote to Act might be better for them to get their point across. Another wasted vote I guess. The way I figure it, if the party hasn’t even bothered to update their website with your details, there’s probably not much point in bothering standing.
Speaking of Act, Basil Walker, who comes in so far down their list that he doesn’t even have a number against his name, may or may not be standing in the electorate. The ODT on 23rd June states he’s in but the local paper, The Mountain Scene on July 16th says he’s out, so who knows? He is trying to out-manoeuvre Winston Peters by buying the Tiwai Aluminium Smelter so all power to him. But to be honest it’s not even worth a phone call to find out if he’s still standing as the only Act Party chap actually trying to win his seat is their boss David Seymour.
The Labour chap Jon Mitchell is best classed as boring. At least he lives in Queenstown and, like Walker, has been involved in local issues for a long time. He will no doubt run a distant, and I mean very distant, second to whoever replaces Hamish Walker as the National candidate.
The problem for all these people is that Clutha-Southland is a dyed in the wool blue electorate. As the boss said to me the other day when discussing this issue…
National could stand a goat and it would still get voted in
He’s probably not wrong. Hamish Walker received 14,354 more votes than last election’s second place getter, some unknown woman from Labour.
Of course Walker won’t be there this year because he thought Boag was a master strategist and he screwed his career up. So to save National the bother of going through the whole rigmarole of selecting a new candidate, I present you with GOAT.
GOAT will be the an amazing MP for the Clutha-Southland region. He knows farming, lives rurally, doesn’t give a fat rats about climate change, is not a vegetarian, doesn’t smoke dope, and perhaps most importantly, he has no idea how to operate a voice recorder or even send an email to untrustworthy media hacks.
Clearly GOAT is the MP that Clutha-Southland needs. Vote GOAT. He’ll be Genuinely Stoked.
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