Government announces plan to grow Auckland housing bubble

The key initiative in yesterday’s budget is a plan to grow Auckland’s housing bubble. Auckland’s housing bubble is projected to take over from dairy farming as the fastest-growing sector of the New Zealand economy.

Consider a typical Mangere housewife. For years she struggled to raise her children when money was tight. Now that the children have left home, and she and her husband have finally paid off the mortgage, wouldn’t it be nice if their house was suddenly worth a million dollars? This is the brighter future the government’s budget offers. The average house in Mangere isn’t yet worth a million dollars, but it will be within a few years. The time is not far off when all Aucklanders will live in multi-million-dollar houses, or in converted garages or garden sheds out the back of multi-million-dollar houses.

The minister of Finance explained it like this. “Until recently, people thought Auckland house-price inflation could not easily be turned into an exportable commodity. They were wrong. When foreign landlords buy Auckland houses, New Zealanders get the money, and because the houses are still in New Zealand, New Zealanders get to rent and live in the houses. But when the bubble finally bursts, foreign investors will make the losses.”

“But isn’t it racist to take advantage of foreigners like that?”

“Not if some of them are Australians It’s not racist to take advantage of Australians”

When asked if the developers who are being given access to government land will be building affordable houses, the Minister of Housing replied “they’ll be at prices that investors with access to 1% mortgage rates from foreign banks can afford”

“But what about average New Zealanders?”

“Well, John Key’s an average New Zealander, and he could afford one”

“You know what I mean, Dr Smith. What about the Aucklanders who can’t afford houses in Auckland at the moment?”

“Many people think the government doesn’t care about the children living in converted garden sheds in South Auckland, but nothing could be further from the truth. We won’t let the bubble burst until foreign investors have paid to build enough McMansions for all of them”

“but will the foreign investors actually rent to those families?”

“When the bubble bursts, the banks will sell the houses for whatever they can get for them”

“what? Sell to poor people living in garages in South Auckland?”

“No, of course not. They’ll sell them to retired dairy farmers who will rent them to those people”

Government to Close Dunedin

Late last night the New Zealand Government announced it will be closing the city of Dunedin. With hindsight, people should perhaps have seen this coming when the decision was made to close the Dunedin hospital kitchen, and provide hospital meals and meals-on-wheels for the Otago area from a kitchen in Auckland. However, it was not until Dunedin was left off the itinerary for the government’s climate change targets consultation (which included smaller centres such as Gisborne, Rotorua and Invercargill), that the somewhat dim-witted denizens of Dunedin finally clicked to what was being planned.

Today, Tertiary Education Minister Steven Joyce revealed that Otago University is to be closed. He explained the university is no longer necessary, as the government has signed a new contract for Lincoln University to provide distance-learning for people in Otago and Southland via a Skype link-up to church halls in Balclutha, Ohai and St Bathans.

Prime Minister John Key said he understood that Dunedin had been a traditional homeland for Pakeha people for some time, but that did not make living there a legitimate lifestyle choice. The decision to close Dunedin will be announced in due course through all major New Zealand newspoapers, except the Otago Daily Times.

With Auckland house prices rising so fast that only people on high incomes can afford to buy into even the cheapest suburbs, floodwaters closing arterial roads in Wellington, and the middle of Christchurch continuing to resemble a massive petanque court, and now the closure of Dunedin, Poseur magazine is warning Hamilton residents not to get too smug about their city’s fortunes, because they alone are doomed never to be hip.

New Zealand First’s Succession Plan

Last time I met a New Zealand First MP, I decided to ask him about New Zealand First’s succession plan. He replied “why would we need a succession plan? Winston Peters isn’t going anywhere”

“Well, Winston Peters is not as young as he used to be”

“What do you mean ‘Winston Peters is not as young as he used to be’? Winston Peters is exactly as young as he was the day he founded New Zealand First”. The New Zealand First MP paused to rip off his rubber mask, revealing that he was in fact Winston Peters. Not for the first time, I wondered if perhaps all New Zealand First MPs are actually Winston Peters. He continued “what are you suggesting? That I’ve somehow been gradually changing my age while nobody was looking? That is not how New Zealand First works. It is how the Labour Party work – Labour won’t tell you this, but the reality is that Helen Clark aged by nearly a decade in the nine years she was Prime Minister. Winston Peters isn’t going to do that”.

All political parties have their own ways of dealing with their MPs growing old and retiring. The Green Party, for example, is 100% renewable. National MPs have a different sort of life-cycle, because most of them are in fact companies (except for Judith Collins, who is a limited-liability joint venture with Cameron Slater). I was interested to know what New Zealand First’s approach was. I bought a bottle of whisky, and sat down for a drinking session with Winston Peters. I pointed out to him that he founded New Zealand First in 1992, and it was now 2015 – a gap of 23 years. So how could he not be 23 years older now that he was then? He replied “Just because 23 years has passed, doesn’t mean I have aged by 23 years, young lady. You need to read some Einstein, and some Lord Byron.”

“but how does that work? And what’s Lord Byron got to do with the space-time continuum?”

“Oh, you and your insolent questions, young lady!”

It was clear I would need to get him a bit drunker before he loosened up. I did, and ten minutes later, he started talking:

“late one night in 1986, I got a knock at my door. It was a man in a suit and white shirt, carrying a little black book. With hindsight I would say he was a spitting image of Jemaine Clement, except that this was 1986, and Jemaine Clement didn’t look like that then. Anyway, he asked me ‘do you vant to die, Mr Peters? Or vould you rather never die, but instead have eternal life in the city of Vellington?’ He showed me the black book in his hand – it was a tome about vampires by Lord Byron. At the time, I turned down the offer, because I thought it would be difficult to campaign for re-election if I couldn’t go out in daylight, but the idea was very appealing.

“The issue came to a head in 1992, when the National Party caucus were getting fed up with me, so they sent me on a fact-finding junket to Mexico. Late one night, I got seduced in the back streets of Acapulco by a woman with a white-painted face and black hair. I assumed she was dressed for the Mexican day of the dead, and decided to go along with whatever seduction she had in mind, because I’ve never been as intolerant of the foreign cultures of beautiful women as I might pretend to be when there are votes in it. When I realised she was a Mexican vampire, I asked her a supplementary question, which was ‘If I get bitten by a mexican vampire, does that mean I cannot go out in daylight in New Zealand, or that I cannot go out when it is daylight in Mexico?’

She replied ‘why, when it’s daylight in Mexico, of course. I can’t see what New Zealand would have to do with it’. That night, I let her bite me, and that was when I became a vampire. When I got back from that junket, I founded the New Zealand First party, largely so I would be my own boss and could sleep in until 1pm New Zealand time, when the sun sets in Mexico. People say that New Zealand First hasn’t really achieved most of the things I said it would achieve when I launched it 23 years ago, but it’s early days yet. I have all the time in the world.”

Flags Fly at half-Mast for Death of Satire

All around the world, flags have been flown at half-mast in the last few days, to mourn the death of satire. Satire had been struggling to compete with the absurdity of real-life for some time, ever since the French government organised a massive march in support of free speech, and in the same week arrested people for using their freedom of speech to express the wrong opinions. The march was joined by government representatives from countries as diverse as Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Gabon and Algeria who united in satirising their own governments’ use of force to silence their critics.

The potential for ordinary people to satirise the actions of their leaders became further limited after the death of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, when David Cameron praised the king (who stoked Sunni-Shi’ite conflicts in his own country and in Iraq and Yemen) for ‘strengthening understanding between faiths’. Next, Christine Lagarde of the International monetary fund praised him as being a ‘strong advocate for women’. Women in Saudi Arabia need men to be strong advocates for them, because King Abdullah’s own government prohibited them from entering into legal contracts or even buying things without the consent of a male guardian. Furthermore, he kept his own adult daughters under permanent house arrest for daring to disagree with him.

Satire was finally pronounced dead at 9am on the 26^th of January, when Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott announced he would be knighting Prince Philip to celebrate Australia’s national day.

Reports of satire’s death may be severely premature. Bruce Theodorocopoulis, Emeritus Professor of Australian Politics and Funny Stuff at the State University of Queen Victoria Land, argues that on the contrary, Tony Abbott’s government has elevated satire to the highest levels of political power. Professor Theodorocopoulis cites as examples Mr Abbott appointing himself minister for women’s affairs, apparently on the grounds that he once had an affair with a woman, and the fact that he described climate change as ‘absolute crap’ – nicely satirising the governments of countries like Canada and New Zealand who won’t actually deny strong scientific evidence, but pursue policies that would only be morally defensible if climate change were untrue.

Despite the death of satire, we at Can of Worms, Opened are still committed to protecting your right to make fun of anyone we don’t like.

Fashion Police Raid David Cunliffe’s Home

Yesterday, David Cunliffe’s Herne Bay home was raided by the Fashion Police’s most elite regiment, the Silver Foxes. The officers wore tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses, grey dinner jackets, black merino polo-necks and straight-legged navy jeans. Fashion Police Commissioner David Farrar, whose reputation for having a keen eye for fashion is based largely on people getting him confused with TV3 entertainment reporter David Farrier, said that the raid had been intentionally delayed until now to avoid interfering with the election campaign.

New Zealand Herald columnist Deborah Hill-Cone, who set off the investigation when she complained that Mr Cunliffe was ‘just not sexy’, said she was glad the issue was being given the attention it deserved. When asked if her initial complaint was fair, Mrs Hill-Cone said “everyone agrees that Prime Minister John Key is the sexiest New Zealander alive. Even Hone Harawira, who is not inclined in that direction either politically or sexually, agrees that John Key is extremely sexy”

We checked this claim with Mr Harawira himself, and he replied “that’s a bullshit question. I’m not even going to dignify that with an answer, because it’s not the sort of issue the people of Aotearoa care about”. Clearly Mr Harawira was not as in touch with the concerns of ordinary Kiwi mums and dads as he thought he was.

When asked if she was a secret member of camp Robertson who was trying to undermine Mr Cunliffe on the grounds of his heterosexuality, Mrs Hill-Cone replied “Grant Robertson is gay, Winston Peters is Maori, and David Cunliffe has a wife to help choose his clothes for him. There is no reason in the whole universe of lazy cliches why any of these routes to being well-dressed should be any less effective than the others.”

After 10 hours of searching, the fashion police came out of the Cunliffe house carrying a red scarf in a sealed plastic evidence-bag. At this point I noticed that one of the officers wasn’t wearing the same straight-leg dark blue jeans as the others – he was wearing tight blue acidwash jeans with his polo-neck and linen jacket. A reporter standing beside me in the stakeout said he was unlikely to be prosecuted for this faux-pas, because the fashion police always protect their own.

David Cunliffe’s defence counsel, an obscure fashion designer and staunch Labour supporter from South Auckland, described the offending red scarf as “… a casual item, in a strong manly shade of red. This simple, bold statement goes well with an open-necked shirt, and is unlikely to be objectionable to anyone except possibly Black Power, who interpret red as a symbol of their enemies the Mongrel Mob”. One thing that’s for certain is that the prosecuting counsel will take a different view of the scarf in question. They may even be selected from the ranks of Black Power.

The last politician to be convicted of a fashion crime was former Christchurch Mayor Bob Parker, who was convicted for wearing an orange jacket in 2011. His sentence was reduced in acknowledgement of the fact that he is not a member of the Labour Party.

ACT Caucus Split Over Plan to Work With Labour

The ACT Party is planning to reposition itself as an ally for Labour, and at least half of its caucus is not happy.

Some ACT caucus members believe that the ACT Party should just plod along with initiatives like Charter Schools, which give companies the freedom to choose what sort of schools they want to set up with government money. Others believe they should focus on the great philosophical questions of our age, such as who pays for traffic lights? and why do we have them when they don’t make a profit?

But there is another branch of the ACT Party caucus which believes in applying a strict business model to politics, which means that if your commercial niche isn’t profitable, you should look for where the next opportunity is likely to pop up, and realign your brand values to make that niche your own. ‘What goes down must come up’, as many right-leaning political commentators were keen to point out in 2002, when National’s election result fell to an unprecedented 21 percent. Some say it’s different now, that National have broken the cycle of up and down and will stay in government forever, but a truly business-oriented ACT party would take a punt on the idea that the next big opportunity will be as a coalition partner for Labour.

I asked an ACT party staffer about the plan to reposition ACT as a party on the centre-left that could work with Labour. He said there was no such plan. I don’t know if he was lying, or if he genuinely didn’t know about the plan. Yeah, that’s it – they had probably kept him in the dark because they were planning to get rid of him and replace him with someone who was more sympathetic to working with Labour. Clearly I had to go to the top, and ask a member of the ACT party caucus. There was only one person to ask – a Mr David Seymour.

When a one-person caucus like the ACT caucus is split into multiple parts, it is usually bloody. Except where David Seymour is involved. This is because of the actions Mr Seymour took to guard against the political death that has befallen previous ACT leaders – before becoming an MP, he split his soul into seven pieces, and made seven horcruxes, which he buried under the seven biggest volcanoes in Auckland. Being new to wizarding, he made the classic mistake of forgetting to keep a part of his soul for himself.

I approached David Seymour to ask about the rumours. He said ‘hi’. Then he said ‘hi’, followed by ‘hi’ then ‘hi’, and ‘hi’, ‘hi’, and finally ‘hi’. I wasn’t sure why he had said ‘hi’ to me seven times – perhaps it was something to do with the horcruxes. I asked him ‘Why are you planning on moving the ACT party to the left?’

He replied “I’m not”

“What about the rest of the caucus?”

“Um, there is only me. I am the ACT Party and the ACT Party is me. I’m not being grandiose in saying that, it’s just the truth”

“You’re saying there’s no truth to the rumour that you split your soul to make horcruxes, and the caucus now consists of 7 competing David Seymours”

“Seven competing Davids rending the soul of the party apart? Aah, I see where your confusion comes from – you’re thinking of the Labour Party”

“So you admit that you’ve moved the ACT Party to the point where people could easily get it confused with Labour?”

“No, not at all. Except maybe if you mean the Labour Party in the 1980s, when it stood for flat tax and asset sales”

“You were born in the 1980s, weren’t you, Mr Seymour?”

“Why, yes I was”

“So you admit that you’re the love-child of the Labour Party?”

“I’m afraid you’ve lost me there”

It was obvious he hadn’t really lost the thread of my reasoning – he just had no answer to it.

Next, I asked the Labour Party for a comment on the rumours that ACT were preparing to position themselves closer to Labour. They replied “Sorry, we are busy with a reality television contest called ‘New Zealand’s Next Great Labour Party Leader’. Please try back later”. It seemed they were going to great lengths to avoid answering my questions.

I had looked for evidence to back up my assertion. No evidence was forthcoming. There was only one reasonable conclusion – there had been a cover-up.

Cactus and Mike have a Completely Balanced Discussion about Tax Policy

Cactus: Labour and the Greens just don’t get tax, eh, with their extra tax bands and their capital gains tax?

Mike: Indeed – what you do with tax policy is you cut taxes. Everyone knows that. Sure, ironing out perverse financial incentives is all very fine as a justification for cutting taxes, but not for raising taxes, because what you do with taxes is you cut them. It’s not the place of tax policy to reduce income inequality or provide revenue to pay for government services. Providing government revenue is the role of gambling policy, and reducing income inequality is the role of some other area of government policy. Maybe telecommunications policy – if those Internet Party people are as intelligent as they want us to think they are, surely they can find a way to solve poverty issues using telecommunications policy, because we know it’s not realistic to do it using economic policy.

Cactus: sure, but I don’t want big government taking over the role of cutting my taxes

Mike: cutting taxes is one of the core functions of government

Cactus: Commercial tax cuts can be provided more efficiently by the private sector. When you pay a political party to cut your taxes, they cut your competitors’ taxes as well, but when you pay an accounting firm to find ways for you to reduce your taxes, you get all the benefit of this for yourself. In Latin American countries, a large percentage of all tax cuts are provided by the private sector, and this is clearly more efficient. Additionally, the creative accounting sector employs thousands of hard-working New Zealanders. It is time that creative accounting was granted the same respect as other creative industries, instead of having the value of the tax loopholes they find taken away by government-provided one-size-fits-all tax cuts.

Mike: so if you don’t want tax cuts, what kind of tax policy do you want? What other kind of tax policy is there?

Cactus: The New Zealand First policy of taking GST off so-called ‘proper’ food will create more work for computer programmers in the GST-programming space. Currently this is dominated by Australian firms, and New Zealand firms haven’t had a look in. We need to encourage them to innovate in this space.

Mike: … and it won’t actually reduce the tax take by very much, because there’s all the GST on the fertiliser and transport fuel and packaging materials and combine harvesters and stuff. Those already have GST on them when the food producers buy them. I hope they’re not going to refund that GST, because if they don’t, then the price won’t go down very much at all, but everyone will think the government has done this big thing to make food more affordable and will shut up about it.

Cactus: The best thing to do would be to keep those costs as GST credits, so you’d have to sell those credits to a business that did pay GST so they could use them to offset their GST. This is the sort of boost the accounting industry needs.

Mike: If you like that, I assume you’ll like the Green Party’s policy of taxing inflation-adjusted capital gains as income, just like other income except assigned to various years in the past and future to take advantage of lower tax brackets? That would create good work for innovative tax accountants, wouldn’t it?

Cactus: Are you crazy? That would destroy the livelihoods of hundreds of hard-working accountants who find ways to convert income to capital gains to make it non-taxable. I far prefer Labour’s policy of taxing non-inflation-adjusted capital gains, at their own tax rate, thus protecting the basic human right to make money from converting income into capital gains.

Mike: Now what about the Greens’ carbon tax? It seems to me that climate change cannot be a serious problem. Adam Smith’s Treatise on the Wealth of Nations said that everyone benefits if everyone pursues their economic self-interest, so there can’t be externalities like climate change that could become a serious problem through each person pursuing their economic self-interest, because that would mean that Adam Smith was wrong.

Cactus: Didn’t Adam Smith also say that eating meat was immoral and that everyone should be vegetarian?

Mike: Okay, well, obviously he was wrong about that, but he wasn’t wrong about anything important, like anything involving money. Also, we know that future generations are going to be richer than people today. Fifty or a hundred years ago, people used to think they needed to go out of their way to leave a better world for future generations, but since then we have seen that each generation is richer than the last, so clearly you don’t have to do that. We can be confident that future generations will automatically be richer than us and will be able to buy their way out of any climate-change related problems.

Cactus: well yeah, absolutely, but that doesn’t give governments the right to abolish emissions trading schemes. Credits for notional carbon dioxide equivalents are a property right. Carbon trading is a legal business, and the government has no right to shut down a legal business just because it wants to.

Mike: Does that mean New Zealand First are criminals for threatening to close down the tax avoidance industry by closing unspecified tax loopholes?

Cactus: Not really. Closing tax loopholes is just part of how you drive innovation in the tax avoidance industry, and innovation is a good thing.

Mike: Now, what do you think of National’s tax policy. They say they’re going to cut taxes sometime, by whatever amount is affordable at the time

Cactus: Can’t fault that, except for the ‘affordable’ bit. If you only cut taxes by what’s affordable, you don’t end up with deficits that justify cutting other things.

Mike: Yeah, but apart from that, I think the emphasis on tax cuts, combined with a lack of detail, makes it pretty much the perfect tax policy. I’ll be voting for them.

Labour Party’s Best Hope Steps Down

New Zealand Labour Party members were disappointed last week by the shock resignation of Claudette Hauiti, who has done more to encourage New Zealanders to vote Labour in her one year in Parliament than many MPs do in 6 years. Ms Hauiti’s demographic identity as a Maori, a lesbian, a South Aucklander and a former teacher ticks many of the boxes of a Labour Party stereotype, and yet it was as a National Party MP that she did her greatest work in convincing people to vote Labour.

One night at David Parker’s Wanaka holiday house, when they had had a few too many chardonnays and sat through a farcical performance by Sir Michael Cullen pretending to be a baby-eating National MP, Claudette did a masterful impression of a blusteringly arrogant National MP whose devotion to National was fiercely tribal but devoid of ideology. Bob Harvey suggested that Claudette was so good she could pass for a real National MP, and suggested she try going undercover as one.

A dastardly plan was hatched – to make use of the urge to tokenistic diversity that leads National to have two Maori women in the top 10 on its party list, and convince National that Labour’s Manurewa candidate Louisa Wall was only popular for being a Maori lesbian, rather than for her political talent or rugby-playing background, and that all it would take to unseat her was another Maori lesbian. National ended up selecting Ms Hauiti for Mangere instead of Manurewa, but Mangere and Manurewa may as well be the same place to New Zealanders who live in far-off places like Dunedin or Pakuranga (except for conservationists, who think Mangere is where the black robins live).

Claudette was able to stay deeply undercover in the National party, finally getting in as a list MP when Aaron Gilmore was forced to resign for getting so drunk he had to ask a waiter who he was, and the party needed a replacement blowhard. As well as completely getting in the way of National’s attempt to convince the more biblically-minded South Auckland voters that they were the party for homophobic bigots, Claudette Hauiti managed to perfectly play the part of an arrogant National MP every time she appeared on television, and did more to steer voters back towards Labour than even Trevor Mallard has been able to do.

It all unravelled when Ms Hauiti was found to have used her parliamentary credit card for personal spending that was clearly nothing to do with being an MP. She wasn’t just confused by Parliamentary rules like ‘you are welcome to lend your work car to members of your extended family for their private use’ – the fact is, Ms Hauiti thought her handlers in the Labour party wanted her to abuse her credit card priveleges. Actually, the seductress who egged her on to do this was working for Northland arsonist Allan Titford, who wanted her to help him convince the world of his belief that all Maori people are crooks.

Ms Hauiti has committed to helping get Key people into positions of power, but she insists this does not mean she is tied to the National Party. “Look, don’t you try and tell me that being a ‘Key Person’ and forming a team to support Key People is some kind of cheap pun on the National Party leader’s surname. People like you make me sick – it’s like claiming the Prime Minister is friends with a blogger who is immature enough to like referring to himself as ‘Whale Oil Beef Hooked’ in a tacky fake Irish accent. Of course I want to see key people in positions of power – I love New Zealand, and I always encourage people to vote positively. There’s nothing partisan about that”

National Party Minister Invested all his Fortune in Dunedin

National Party ‘Minister for Everything’ Simon Joyce recently let slip that he has sold all his shares in previous employer Radio Dead (‘kills time – for those who like it better dead!’) and invested the proceeds in Dunedin real estate.

“it seemed like a no-brainer”, he told Perspire magazine. “I was looking for a city that has all the elements for economic growth. Dunedin has a casino, it has a conference centre, it has a covered sports stadium, and it has more kilometres of motorway per capita than just about anywhere. And inland, there is a massive open-cast mine. How could it possibly not be a good financial prospect?”

“It’s all about the address. In London, you’d pay millions for a terrace house in Kensington, but in Dunedin you can get a terrace house in Kensington for a couple of hundred thousand. That’s got to be a bargain”

When asked why he focussed his investments in the Dunedin economy on residential property, he replied “it’s a no-brainer. If a city has a promising economic future, residential property prices must be going to skyrocket. I mean, that’s what economic success is”

* correction: Sorry, we now realise that Simon Joyce is not even an MP, let alone the minister for everything. He just has a similar-sounding name, which confused us.

Goldsmith not so confident of failing to win this time

National Party candidate Paul Goldsmith is reported to privately have doubts about his ability to not win the Epsom electorate this year. In 2011, Mr Goldsmith narrowly managed to avoid winning, despite his party getting two thirds of all the party votes in the electorate.

While there are some doubts privately about Mr Goldsmith’s ability to avoid winning the electorate, he has not expressed any such doubts in public. In fact, he has refused to say anything in public at all. This may not be enough in the face of competition from Labour Candidate Michael Wood and Green Candidate Julie Anne Genter, who are already out and about in the electorate, pressing the message about why Epsom voters should not vote for them. Ms Genter is a past master at elections, having comprehensively failed to win against Phil Goff in Mt Roskill in 2011, despite not actively trying not to win.

After the National party selected Paul Goldsmith as their candidate this year, rumour has it the Labour party tried to select him to be their candidate as well. Perhaps they were impressed at his masterful skill in plucking defeat from the jaws of victory in 2011. Mr Goldsmith did not turn up to the Labour Party meeeting at which he was considered for selection, which is very telling – ‘not turning up to meetings’ is Paul Goldsmith’s favourite method of electioneering.

When told that polls suggested he was in danger of winning the seat, Mr Goldsmith replied that he had some explosive revelations involving himself and Auckland property developer Donghua Liu, which he would release if necessary. He also added that he suspected himself of sending a number of emails eleven years ago, of which he had no recollection whatsoever.

The group ‘Hipsters for Goldsmith’ supported Paul Goldsmith in 2011. Officially they are supporting him again, but in light of his growing mainstream appeal they are looking at switching their support to Rachael Goldsmith, the author of the Green Party’s abortion policy, who is standing for the party in the safe National electorate of Clutha-Southland. On the other hand, the Taxpayers Union has criticised Ms Goldsmith for her comment that if she won the Clutha-Southland electorate she would choose to live in it. They say the travel costs associated with having an MP based in the electorate would be a waste of taxpayers money.