The Northland byelection

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

[reality]

..anybody know what's happening about this guy...charged...going to court?😳
...probably had a pay increase😜


Mike Sabin's new job at luxury resort

3:44 PM Wednesday Apr 15,

Mike Sabin will be in charge of plans to redevelop the property into the largest five-star resort . Photo / John Stone
Former National MP Mike Sabin has picked up a job as the head of a luxury resort in Northland.

Mr Sabin has been appointed chief executive of Peppers Carrington Estate, a five-star, 1000-hectare resort on the Karikari Peninsula.

The former MP for Northland will be in charge of plans to redevelop the property into the largest five-star resort in the country.

Chinese real estate giant Shanghai CRED purchased the business from US businessman Paul Kelly for $28.7 million in 2013, and planned to market it to wealthy Chinese tourists.

Mr Sabin resigned as Northland's MP in early February.

Mr Sabin's resignation forced a by-election, which National lost to New Zealand First's Winston Peters.

Before he entered Parliament in 2011, Mr Sabin was a policeman and founded an anti-methamphetamine company called MethCon.

- NZ Herald

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

It's hilariously funny how Nats supporters () effectively poured $100K down the drain when they attempted to BUY the Northland by-election result…

…yet Winston won!!     




from The New Zealand Herald....

Northland by-election: Mark Osborne received almost $100k in donations

By CLAIRE TREVETT | 5:45PM - Monday, July 13, 2015


National Party candidate Mark Osborne on the
campaign trail in Dargaville for the Northland
by-election. — Photo: Dean Purcell.

NATIONAL'S unsuccessful candidate in the Northland bye-lection got almost $100,000 in donations from far and wide including Auckland business bigwigs, Talley's fisheries boss Andrew Talley, Tauranga property developer Paul Adams and property developer Remarkables Park Limited in Queenstown.

Candidates are required to disclose any donations of more than $1,500.

National's Mark Osborne listed $60,216 from the National Party, $12,000 from the Hynds family computer company Stuart PC, $5,736 from the chairman of BMW Auckland Tim Cook and $2,900 from Hydraulink co-owner Noel Davies.

Other donations included $2,900 from insurance company Partners Life in Auckland, run by the founding CEO of Kiwibank, Sam Knowles.

Andrew Talley donated $3,000, Mr Adam's Carrus Properties company donated $5,000 and Remarkables Park, owned by the Porter family, donated $4,105.

The only donation NZ First leader Winston Peters listed was $46,422.84 from the NZ First Party — the same amount as his expenses.

That possibly indicates he followed the same process National often uses under which donors donate to the party rather than the candidate and funding is then passed on to the candidate.

Party donations have a higher $15,000 disclosure limit.

Mr Peters' expenses included $16,000 for a region-wide pamphlet drop and $7,043.75 for the signage on his infamous ‘Force of the North’ bus.

The bus hire and driver costs do not have to be disclosed as election expenses, which covers mainly advertising spending.

The spending cap for candidates in a by-election is $52,100 and Mr Osborne spent slightly more than Mr Peters at $48,817.

His costs included $1,150 to the National Party's pollster Curia Market Research for phone rental and call costs to ring around the electorate in the lead up to the by-election.

National was criticised for appearing to filter its donations through the party rather than straight to individual candidates during the last election.

Although it is within the law, it escapes the much lower disclosure thresholds for candidate donations.

Mr Peters would not say what he had told donors to do, but said both National and Labour had sent donations to the party instead of individual candidates in the past.

“I declared exactly what was required by electoral law.”

He said the party had also paid for the costs of the bus and driver, although that sum was not included in his declaration of a donation from the party.

He said he did not have to declare those expenses under electoral law. He laughed when told none of his rival Mark Osborne's donations were from Northlanders.

The candidate returns also show Focus NZ candidate Joe Carr spent $2,300 on front page ads in the local papers urging voters to vote for Mr Peters instead of himself.

Those ads appeared to breach electoral laws because Mr Carr did not have Mr Peters' permission to run them.

A spokeswoman for the Electoral Commission said it had investigated the advertisements but decided not to take further action after Mr Carr explained he misinterpreted the rules and it was not “wilful”.

In his return, Mr Carr split out the cost of the ads in question saying they cost a total of $2,288.70 — slightly more than half of Mr Carr's total advertising spending of $4,346.

Failure to get written authorisation from the candidate in question carries a $10,000 fine if the breach was not deliberate or up to $100,000 and/or up to 2 years in prison if wilful and a corrupt practice.

It would also have required Mr Peters to include some of the costs in his own expenses.

Mr Peters has previously said he did not authorise the ads and had not known Mr Carr intended to run them.

• Claire Trevett is The New Zealand Herald’s deputy political editor.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/politics/news/article.cfm?c_id=280&objectid=11480227

[reality]

Yup...Northland is now absolutly booming with Winnie in charge, some very good rental property returns on offer

[reality]

NZ First's appeal to diminishing fan base spells doom for party

5:00 AM Tuesday Aug 4, 2015

The longer Winston Peters fails to address this underlying threat to the party's longevity the likelihood of the party's survival as a potent political force continues to diminish. Photo / Ben Fraser

Unfashionable - and deliberately so.

New Zealand First's relative popularity resides in its offering the politically dazed and confused a vision of the future based on nostalgia for the relatively recent past.

The party is marooned in a time bubble of the economic boom of the 1950s along with the suffocating social conformity of that era.

Its unwillingness to confront that myth of a better past will ultimately be the death of it as those who lived through those times and who gain comforting reassurance from Winston Peters' pronouncements pass away.

The longer Peters fails to address this underlying threat to the party's longevity - along with at least publicly acknowledging the necessity for some indication of how he will manage the question of leadership succession - the likelihood of the party's survival as a potent political force continues to diminish.

As much as the public has been able to ascertain, that day of reckoning was once again postponed at the party's annual conference last weekend. The party seemed more intent on swimming against the prevailing political currents, seemingly as much for the sake of being seen to be different from its competitors as upholding its core principles.

That was very much the case with Peters' keynote address to delegates. The old master castigated National for "governing for the few". He slammed Labour for long having accused him of racism and xenophobia, only for that party to make the same criticisms of immigration policy that he had, but without the same conviction.

But as much as the speech fizzed, it then fizzled.

It turned out New Zealand First's solution to the country's supposed economic woes was to dredge up the party's historic hankering for work-for-the-dole schemes.

It was another case of New Zealand First going back to the future in its policy development. It appears the party is still wedded to a concept which produced very mixed results in terms of getting people back to work when it was in vogue in the late 1990s.

The majority of political thinking now favours the "investment" approach to getting people off the benefit through intensive management of circumstances that preclude an individual's return to the workforce. The sharp drop in beneficiary numbers is seen as vindication for that approach, although a more buoyant job market has also been a major factor.

Other political parties are now instead grappling with the modern-day political complexities of turning the minimum wage into a living wage, while New Zealand First is trying to resurrect what it calls the "community wage".

It is hard to see the attraction of workfare schemes given the relative success of National's approach - and the likelihood that Labour would not change things in any fundamental way. Times have moved on. New Zealand First has not.

- NZ Herald