My thoughts too. From memory sales of double cab utes also surged immediately before and plummeted immediately after the prices went up as expected due to their high emissions.

I remember them in the UK when we visited as long ago as 2012. My main recollection was that they seemed very effective at causing you to think very carefully about your speed, because in a long line of traffic nobody wants to be the person who drives extra slow to make up for accidentally going too fast a few seconds earlier.

I’m curious to know the reasons for them apparently being hated.

Just on this, it’s extremely hard for unestablished political parties to get established in NZ. I think a thing we constantly need to be conscious of, though, is the possibility of existing established parties being infiltrated and redirected from within.

Several major parties this election have list candidates who’d not look out of place in some of the much more fringe parties. It’s not as if we haven’t had fringe candidates enter Parliament previously via existing parties, and they have tended to be either controlled from the top down or ejected, but those groups are getting more organised and aren’t as stupid as some people like to think.

If the US is anything to go by, they started with school boards and local politics which often have lower turnout and less attention. Since then, one of the two major political parties has effectively been usurped and reshaped by people who’d simply not have had a significant place in political life two or three decades ago.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen TNG and maybe my memory’s bad, but the first one that came to mind, Data’s Day, seems to be one that nobody’s yet listed.

This is really interesting. Is it something to do with people wanting to feel as if they’re on the winning team, even though you can effectively declare you’re voting for someone and there’s still no way for anyone to prove it^*?

^* Although the recent trend from the past couple of elections of people photographing their completed ballot papers and posting to social media really needs to be clamped down upon, imho.

In the NZ context it’s a wider part of the pest control discussion. NZ never had native land mammals (except a species of bat) until fewer than 1000 years ago, and everything’s changed radically since colonisation from Europe began around 200+ years ago. We have lots of native flora and fauna that’s in a downward spiral, being eaten or hunted or starved towards extinction. There’s never been stability during that period, especially due to particular introduced species (rats, possums, mustelids) that destroy them.

Cats are also a big part of that dynamic, particularly feral, but it’s a complicated discussion because so many people have grown up and still have them as pets. At the same time as there are efforts to reintroduce native flora and fauna to populated areas, the presence of cats is a contradiction, particularly when the law allows them to roam in ways that sometimes result in them being many kms from home.

The “I don’t want cats on my property” line is often an extension of the belief that cat owners simply shouldn’t be allowed to let them leave their own property in the first place. That isn’t unprecedented, even near here. Across the Tasman in Australia there are lots of local jurisdictions which require cat owners to keep cats indoors or in proper enclosures. There are counter arguments, though, along the lines of “I keep my cat indoors at night” and “my cat never hunts any of that stuff”.

There are definitely past NZ examples where smaller parties in particular, notably ACT, New Conservative, Internet Mana, etc, have spent a lot of money for relatively few votes to the point where you could sometimes calculate the cost per vote in the terms of dollars, maybe tens of dollars.

I don’t think it’s as simple as saying that money is meaningless, though. If you have a compelling message but don’t have the resources to constantly remind voters that you’re there, and to make sure your message keeps being heard and reinforced over all the other messages telling people why they’re better than you, then you can fail to get votes you otherwise might have gotten.

Similarly, having resources to drown out badly resourced competitors can always pick up a few votes that you mightn’t really have been entitled to if it’d been a fair exchange of ideas, but as that was probably a small party anyway it mightn’t be as many votes as some people assume.

But yeah, the popularity thing seems quite accurate. Seymour has huge charisma and might have been the PM if he led National, but his charisma didn’t get ACT anywhere in 2017 or 2014 - it only reached Parliament at all in those years because National allowed it. The obvious difference this time is that National has had a serious leadership crisis and is badly lacking charisma and connection with its normal voting block.