Act are hoovering up Iranian and Jewish votes, and I will never forgive the Useless Tories for driving them rightwards
Over the past two or three years, Act Party MPs have been attending every pro-Jewish or pro-Iranian freedom protest that has occurred, and have also attended October 7 memorial events. No other party has supported either community as much. And this is bearing fruit. A prominent member of the Iranian community said this today:
There were about 4000 Iranians protesting for freedom at a recent event in Auckland. If there were another 4000 in Hamilton, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin respectively then that’s a tidy 20,000 votes for the Act Party, along with 5000 or so Jewish votes, without Act having to do anything other than show up and make speeches.
Mark Mitchell to his very great credit turned up to one of these events and spoke. But other than that, nobody in National has paid any attention to these demographics, and with nowhere near as much consistency. National have also dragged their heels on designating the IRGC a terrorist organisation. It is enormously irksome to me as a lefty to see National driving all of these potential votes into Act’s welcoming arms. And for a small party like Act, 25,000 party votes is no mean thing.
National needs to start doing what Simeon Brown was doing before Luxon idiotically shunted one of his most effective ministers into the health portfolio, i.e. playing on people’s resentment of “woke politics”. Raise unnecessarily low speed limits, tell health professionals to focus on immunisations rather than lecturing people about their diets, say stuff about free speech, etc etc. Making noise about the Iranian people’s struggle against the mullahs, or standing up against the anti-Israel cult when none of them are National voters anyway, falls squarely into the category of small things with a big impact with a particular base.
That is why I shall reluctantly persist with my present intention to vote for the Labour Party. I loathe the existing political parties nearly equally, but at least Labour cares more about working people than the Useless Tories, and the latter are no better than Labour on these kinds of issues.
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