RODNEY HIDE: Glorious

I should not pick on Stuff’s political editor Henry Cooke, but then he’s so target-rich. One day I hope to report that he has something right.

(You may recall I earlier drew attention to his plan that Labour and National should ask the Governor-General to call another election should the government rely on an overhang. He appears to have dropped that idea.)

www.brashandmitchell.com/post/rodney-hide-henry-cooke-wants-a-do-over-if-you-vote-wrong

On election night he posted the above. Just 0.85 percent wasted vote. The wasted vote for him was the vote for parties that did not make it to Parliament. Their vote was “wasted”. He studiously ignored the 29.21 percent of the party vote for National that was wasted.

Democracy relies on voters being informed. Historically that was the role of the free press. Sadly, we are well past that point.

It was critical information that party voting National was very likely a wasted vote. Our legacy media did not explain this. They still have not explained it, as the above post confirms.

Cooke’s exact position was that explaining to voters that their votes would be wasted would be “gaming the system”. He attacked the very people spending their own money and putting their own hours in to inform people of exactly how their vote was going to work.

You might think that the legacy media don’t see it as their job to worry about voters wasting their vote. If only that were so. The great ACT party had to endure election after election with the TV, radio and papers anxious to ensure that voters didn’t waste their vote by voting ACT.

In election week 2005, Helen Bain wrote in the Sunday Star-Times a column headed “Just stunned? No, ACT is definitely dead,” and said there was little left “but to administer the last rites and turn off the life support.” Colin Espiner in The Press declared “ACT is dead and buried.” Two days before polling day, John Armstrong’s Herald wrap listed ACT’s Epsom polls among the campaign’s “biggest slices of baloney.” They were so worried potential ACT voters might waste their vote.

Of course, that was not gaming the system. That was reporting.

There was no similar concern that National Party voters were throwing their votes away. And they had no concern that a vote for the Opportunity Party might be a wasted vote.

Let us just state it plainly: the lefty legacy media game every election. They want to be the only ones able to do it. They hate and resent any competition.

Well, RCR gave it to them this election. And I love the result.

I love it when voters give the smarty pants in the media-government-lobby industrial complex the two-vote salute. First in Epsom. And now throughout the country.

Rodney Hide is a former Minister and ACT Party leader