Transcript
Speaker: The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Edison and M. Denteth.
Speaker: Hello, it's the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy in Auckland, New Zealand. I am Josh Edison, and you're Zhuhai, China. i am indeed. Associate Professor, Imar Extendeth. I'm the Guangdong, no matter where I am. I'm in the Guangdong. Yes, yes.
Speaker: But you do you do shuffle around, depending on depending on circumstances and your word teaching workload and so on and so forth. Yeah, my mood, my circumstances, my wo my workload, whatever plots I might be engaged in, I can be found all over the place. Ah, you and your plots. Speaking of you and specifically your plots, ah the game that you made regarding plots and the like is now yes more available? is Yes, so when I first released Prestige, I released it on itch.io, essentially as a print and play game. So I give you the rules, I give you the files, but you have to make the cards yourself.
Speaker: Now, some people don't want to make cards themselves, and I can understand that. So I've made a physical edition available from the Game Crafters. It is horrendously expensive because when you're buying print and play games, you are essentially buying a single unit that's made individually as opposed to part of a large print run. So it is quite expensive to buy the physical copy from the Game Crafters, but if you're the kind of person who wants to play my game,
Speaker: and you want a physical copy that you don't produce yourself, go to thegamecrafters.com, look up Prestige with an exclamation mark. I have discovered there is at least one other game called Prestige out there, sans exclamation mark. Probably should have done some market research before I named the game.
Speaker: Too late now. You'll find it. You can you can buy it. It'll be shipped to your house within about two months. It takes these print-and-play, print-on-demand game crafters take a while to produce stuff in any particular volume. I received my physical copy of the game earlier this week, and it is interesting comparing the print quality with the ones I had printed in China. That's all I'll say.
Speaker: So there you go. if youre if you want to play Eam's game and you don't want to print it out yourself for for reasons that I dare not speculate, you can do that. Meanwhile, my new game, which I think I mentioned last episode, which is... You did indeed. You and your bullet. Or me and my bullet. Us and our bullet.
Speaker: We are the bullet. The bullet is us and we are the bullet. Yes, no I released a game an in no way physical game. i released what you might call a video game called Me and My Bullet. It's available on itch.io and also gx.games. When I released it originally and first mentioned it, it was available to play in your browser or to download for Windows. And I have to say the version that you could play in the browser really didn't work.
Speaker: it slowed down to an unplayable mess fairly quickly when you got a bunch of enemies on screen. It turns out after a whole lot of attempts at optimization and and things like that, that it was almost none of my doing. There was actually a bug in the HTML runtime.
Speaker: which meant that it was to do with the first two with generating random numbers and it wasn't resetting some seed or something, which when every time you generated a random number, this one seed number would get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and fairly quickly sort of make you run out of memory.
Speaker: And because I was generating a hell of a lot of random numbers all the time. ah so But then it turned out that GameMaker, the tool that I use, exports an HTML5 version and it also exports this GX.games version, which is the website that Opera, the the web browser company who also owns GameMaker, hosts games on. And I'd always thought it was that that that output was only for exporting to that one particular game site, but it turns out you can actually spit it out.
Speaker: in a generic format that you can put anywhere. And that's what I've done. And not only does it not have a bug, but it's not based in Java. It's some sort of web assembly language thing. So it actually performs like an ordinary game. The longer with the short of which is, if you go to monkeyfluids.itch.io and play me in my bullet, you can actually play it in your browser and it works. It's it's playable. It's actually genuinely playable in browser now.
Speaker: And I recommend you do that. Hurrah, i say. so so So I've i've had originally had requests from from m and others who own Macs and not Windows saying, could we get a Mac version? And the short answer is no, unfortunately. you you need an app I need an actual Mac to be able to build the Mac version on, which I do not possess. But you should be able to play it in the browser now, and it should just work fine.
Speaker: So once again, George, you've been raking in the cash from your video game release now, and you can easily buy a Mac or two for testing purposes. Ah, funny story. So game Maker has um a number of sort of tiers, and it's changed around a lot. When when this Game Maker 2 first came out, originally it sort of only had like a demo period and then you had to pay for it. Now it is available for free completely. um i think to begin with it was free, but only for the basic outputs. Now it's free for absolutely anything as long as you're not making any money off your game. If you're actually selling a game, then you need to buy some sort of a license for it. But since I give away all my stuff for free, I'm all good.
Speaker: Good for you. i should point out, Prestige will always be available for free on itch.io. You just have to be able to print the cards out. I'm not giving away physical cards for free. That is a losing proposition.
Speaker: Yes. Yes. So there you go. We both have games. They're both free. You should play both of them. Once again, and do that. Simultaneously. Well, if youre if you're good at multitasking, yeah, maybe. Me and my prestigious bullet. Now, there's a spin-off that I don't know how to make.
Speaker: No. Something to come up with. so Something to think about. Maybe over the Christmas break. Now... This episode, I don't quite know what's going to happen this episode. This episode is just going to be a bit of a conversation, I think, because I believe we said last time that in between the previous episode and this one, there has been both the midterm elections in the States and a general election here in New Zealand, and elections do tend to stir up a bunch of kind of conspiratorial talking. Or at least normally they have done in recent memory.
Speaker: So, this episode, we're going to talk about elections. I'm sure it'll be fascinating. Shall we play a chime? Bears.
Speaker: So, are we going to talk about the US first or the NZ first? Let's start with the US, in part because the US situation is more curious than I thought it was going to be. So everyone was assuming...
Speaker: that no matter what the outcome, Donald Trump was going to make claims of election rigging. Now, it is true he is making murmurs about election rigging now.
Speaker: But what was interesting on the night and the day after... is that Donald Trump seemed to both accept the result and said that he would work with the the new Democrat House and Senate.
Speaker: And that was fascinating. Yes, yes, actually, possibly the most interesting thing from a conspiratorial perspective was the lack of conspiracy theories um initially. And yes, he he has, i don't know if it's a changing strategy or simply the fact that he can't can't help himself, but Donald Trump has started in his usual, all the elections were rigged like you wouldn't believe stuff.
Speaker: But yes, straight away, that wasn't just there. And I have to say, the any actual claims of conspiracy around the idea of election rigging are kind of just too boring to talk about.
Speaker: we we've We've seen them so many times before. Yes. The last time we were just not talking about Mike MyPillow Liddell. Yes. Now, possibly possibly we should say, I assume i assume everybody knows, but if possibly you've been living under a rock, or perhaps if you're living way in and in the future and you're looking through the the archives of the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy and want little bit of context for what we're talking about now, we are, of course, talking about the fact that that the blue wave...
Speaker: broke in America, that that they went hard for the Democrats in the midterm elections, and and and it's it's just all blue, all Democrat. although That's also an interesting thing when we're talking about elections in America and New Zealand. In New Zealand, the main left-wing party Labour, and their colour is red. The main right-wing party is national, and their colour is blue, whereas in America, the left-wingers are blue and the right-wingers are red, and it does get quite confusing when people are just referring to colour. That is a fairly recent... phenomena in that i believe the color coding of Democrat versus Republican is really only between 20 to 30 years old.
Speaker: For many years up until the late 80s and early 90s, TV stations would code the parties in various colors. And it's only really mid-90s onwards that a kind of design language evolved, where read is Republican and blue is Democrat.
Speaker: Does that have anything to do with gang culture? I have to wonder. When did Colours come out? When did the movie Colours come out? I'm looking that up right now. This is an interesting question, and I'm going to vamp whilst you do this, because I've never considered the association of the film Colours with the colour coding of Democrat versus Republican.
Speaker: Okay, 1988. 1988.
Speaker: Directed by Dennis Hopper. I did not know that. um ah My understanding, i you may be surprised to know that I'm not any any sort of authority on gang culture in the United States, but my understanding is that it was the movie, the 1988 movie colors That sort of um cemented in the the wider American popular consciousness, the colour scheme of of the Red Bloods versus the Blue Crips. um Certainly that it was after that that I believe it spread to New Zealand and that it kind of worked out nicely because you already had sort of Samoan gangs and Tongan gangs in the Samoan
Speaker: uh flag is as blue and the tog and flag has red no it's the other way around anyway but the the point is you had two sides that already used a bit of blue and and red coloring to them so that definitely went there but i'd be interested to know if the whole red versus blue thing started to become a thing after colors which was based on gang color and once upon a time we could go and research this on the internet But due to the way that LLMs have basically destroyed search, both in respect to making search engines less useful, but also because they draw upon LLM-generated nonsense, we could go away and do a bit of cursory research and just get everything completely wrong.
Speaker: You never know. Anyway, interesting point for someone to look into, and I assume someone has. But anyway, back to the Anyway, so as for the american American election, there have been a few wonky things. Now, what is the business with Dan Sullivan and Dan Sullivan? I've heard it mentioned, but I didn't understand what the details were.
Speaker: Well, I mean, Josh, it's quite clear. There's Daniel Sullivan and there's Dan Sullivan. They were both contesting the election in Alaska. And people just had to choose between a Dan and a Dan. So the more complicated version of the story is the the sitting senator in Alaska is a Republican by the name of Dan Sullivan.
Speaker: In the ballot for the midterm, a Daniel Sullivan as an independent appeared on the ballot. And this meant that Dan, sitting Senator Sullivan, decided to contest this other candidate, saying that people would be confused between a Dan Sullivan and a Daniel Sullivan when it came to his re-election. He basically appealed to the...
Speaker: Alaskan version of the Supreme Court. They basically voided the Daniel Sullivan and then reinstated the Daniel Sullivan going, look, the initial response, which is just to eradicate Daniel Sullivan from the ballot, was a nuclear option.
Speaker: Voters would not be confused because they'd see party affiliation as well as names. But people have been pointing out this other candidate, the Daniel Sullivan, may well have been put into the race to actually confuse voters or at least cause some degree of kind of consternation. And some people think this is an example of foul play by non-Republican aligned political operatives in Alaska.
Speaker: Yes, and it also led into another thing, which the student this I don't know if this was a consequence of the election, but it kind of happened right after it.
Speaker: the The two Dana Whites... So immediately, well, not immediately, shortly after the midterm elections, Donald Trump had a post online where he offered his new recently vacated role of press secretary. How long did the last one last? was she like be like we acara Less than a less the Scaramucci. Yeah, we're getting into into into partial Scaramucci's now.
Speaker: But offered the job to Dana White, the president of UFC, And people thought, like, that's a little bit weird, but not actually 100% out of character for Donald Trump to do, given that um Vince McMahon's wife, whose name so briefly escapes me, the secret tra linda Linda McMahon, ah was was appointed Secretary of Education, as I recall, um and and Trump does like him some UFC. So, like, people, it's not actually –
Speaker: 100% out of character for him to have done that. But then people also pointed out that there's another Dana White who who would actually be a more suitable pick for press secretary. And maybe it's just possible...
Speaker: that somebody said, hey, you know, you Trump, you need a new press secretary. How about Dana White? This is this is a woman, by the way, given that Dana is ah is a gender neutral kind of name. The UFC Dana White is a man, but this Dana W White is a woman. She's worked in public affairs for the Department of Defence. So she's someone who would actually be able to do be a press secretary.
Speaker: And so the the insinuation was, the suggestion was, that somebody had said, Trump, you should hire Dana White as your new practice secretary. He thought of the wrong Dana White and offered it to that and now said it's all a joke.
Speaker: I would believe that it was just a joke. I would believe that it was just ah a spare-of-the-moment thing from Donald Trump. I would believe it was a misunderstanding from Donald Trump and and a cock-up all around. I don't think we'll ever actually know.
Speaker: Well, I mean, there's bound to be a tell-all book in about 10 to 15 years where someone is going to reveal what happened in the room at the time. Although, as has been pointed out, actually there have already been tell-all books about what goes on in the White House or the Oval Office. And they're often released opportunistically in that many of the revelations in those books would have been better to have known in real time rather than, say, 12 to 18 months after the fact.
Speaker: Yeah, so maybe something more will come out out of that. But for now, it's just been ah an interesting little sideshow. and again, not directly related to the midterm elections. Now, another thing is that the Y2K comparison,
Speaker: which I gather is the fact that people have now now that the dust has settled and things have gone blue in a major way and there's been ah a fairly comprehensive repudiation repudiation of of sort of Trumpism and his whole whole thing, people have said, well, there we go, it was all fine. We didn't have to worry. There was never there was never a chance that they were going to consolidate their hold on the government. It was always going to happen.
Speaker: And i I guess the argument is, well, no, it's like Y2K. People said Y2K was fine, nothing happened. And the reply that is, yeah, nothing happened because a whole lot of people put in a whole lot of work making sure that nothing happened. Is that um is that the situation this time as well?
Speaker: Yes, because we do know that people were pushing back against things that the administration said they were going to do, deploying ICE agents at polling stations and the like.
Speaker: Now, the federal government didn't engage in those acts, but in part they didn't engage in those acts because there was public outcry against them and legal challenges against them.
Speaker: So when people are going, yeah, that was all fine, we didn't need to worry. The only reason why it is all fine is that there were activists doing the job of ensuring that the elections were as free and fair as they could possibly be.
Speaker: and actually on the Y2K thing, the other example of the analogy here is the ozone hole. I have met people who go, oh, isn't that ozone hole thing a bit of nonsense? You never hear about the ozone hole anymore.
Speaker: And I go, well, I mean, A, Aotearoa, New Zealand, we still hear about the ozone hole because it is still there. It's just not as large as it used to be. And B, the reason why people don't talk about it anymore is that collectively, as a group of civilizations, we did the job of not releasing those fluorocarbons into the atmosphere.
Speaker: So we don't hear about it because we did the thing were meant to do so we would stop talking about it. A whole lot got banned. a of kinds of examples of people going, oh, if if if the crisis is not being talked about now, there was no crisis to begin with. In case of no, sometimes the reason why there isn't a crisis is because we did the requisite preparation to ensure that if the crisis was going to occur, we were prepared or prevent the crisis from occurring in the first place. Yes, no, I do find that kind of thing quite quite aggravating. it's like ah Especially the ozone hole stuff, because people in the Southern Hemisphere do still talk about it. In fact, the ozone hole is getting larger. I read somewhere somebody saying that ozone hole layer has nothing to do with with with how...
Speaker: I don't know what the right word to burny the sun is in New Zealand. I don't know if that's true or not. ah or i die I don't know if it is or not. But it is definitely the case that although summer in New Zealand is not nearly as hot as it is in other places of the world, even across in Australia, if you step outside in New Zealand in summer without wearing sunblock, you are getting sunburned.
Speaker: Burn times are like 11 minutes in the middle of summer. It takes absolutely nothing. My my oldest son got his first proper sunburn a couple of months ago before summer had even officially started just by spending a bunch of time out in the sun without putting any on his arms, which then turned a very interesting shade of pink. But anyway, anyway. I never leave the house without putting sunscreen on, even at night, because you can never be sure.
Speaker: Well, yes, that sun, it's crafty, reflecting off the moon, doing doing a bank shot off the moon just to give you cancer. it Wouldn't trust it. Wouldn't trust it at all. Never trust a stellar mass.
Speaker: No. So what else do we have to talk about regarding the American election? I mean, the blue wave thing is also interesting with respect to the fact that many of the polls predicted a much closer election than we got.
Speaker: Now, there are questions here about whether the polls were in any way accurate in the first place, right down to whether the polls were mismanaged in order to give the impression. it was going to be a closer election than it was. And we'll talk about the New Zealand aspect of polling when we get to our local election. But what was interesting is that many traditional Republican strongholds have turned very blue. Texas being a very big example here. Texas has almost entirely turned blue. It's an astounding repudiation both to Trump
Speaker: and to their outgoing governor, Greg Abbott. And this is interesting from my perspective, because of course in the work in conspiracy theory theory, along with psychologists talking about the psychology of conspiracy theorists, you get political scientists talking about how partisanship is one of the best indicators of belief in conspiracy theories. And so political science relies very heavily on using partisanship as a kind of predictive quality as to how people are going to act, how people are going to vote and the like.
Speaker: And it does turn out that partisanship can have its limits in that traditional Republican strongholds have turned very blue.
Speaker: strongholds which have had you know no Democratic senator for almost 100 years, Democratic senator now. Partisanship has its limits. It turns out that people can be partisan, but eventually they will get enough evidence to even though I want to vote for the Republican candidate because I am partisan towards a Republican cause, I can't hold my nose and vote for this one.
Speaker: And I am curious to see what the political science literature is going to make of this. Now, admittedly, the first response and the logical response is, this is one election, it's one data point. We can't infer too much from this because there is a big question here as to whether it was a vote against Republicans or a vote against Donald Trump.
Speaker: We should probably talk about whether trump Trump's notion of being on and off the ballot at the same time. But that being said, this doesn't look good for a strictly partisan-based, no, I can't even say partisanship.
Speaker: partisan so oh See, I should say parsnip now. This does not look good for a strictly parsnip-based policy. No. Analysis of politics. Keep your parsnips out of politics. That's what I say.
Speaker: I agree entirely. Yeah, the polling thing is interesting, especially then the, like some people, and I think this is not particular to this election, it happens all the time, but some people will say, the polls, the actual results didn't match the polls, therefore something fishy must be going on. Worse than that, though, I've seen people talking about the betting markets, which really aren't much of a... Yeah, Kalishi and the like. Yeah, Kalishi and the like. Was a polymarket? Is that the other one? I don't know. We don't... I think we mentioned this in the last episode, or maybe in the bonus episode, the last episode, which is using betting markets as a predictor for how people are going to vote would be like using...
Speaker: betting markets on horses as to which horse should actually win. You tend to bet using long odds to get the best return.
Speaker: So you don't get an accurate, this is how people are going to vote. You get a, if people vote this way, and they And it's an unexpected result. Then I get a payout. It's not an indication of how people will vote. It's an indication of how people want other people to vote on the basis there's a financial reward at the end.
Speaker: Yeah, betting markets are an absolute blight on our society. Nevertheless, we we we have seen people, on social media at least, saying, hey, the the betting market suggested this was going to happen and yet it didn't. all Is that evidence? Something fishy is going on? and I don't know. It's a weird notion of the rationality of the market being I mean, so first of all, I don't believe in kind of the rational agent economic model. But even if I did, you can't apply it to betting markets because betting markets aren't predictive in the sense that the market is because it's a gamble.
Speaker: in the sense of going for long odds. It's very weird that people are making these claims, and I have to assume some of them are doing it insincerely.
Speaker: Yes. Now, the other thing is, of course, people who did conspire in some way getting defeated and then assuming there must have been a conspiracy against them.
Speaker: Well, yes. We do know that there was a fair amount of, well, existing gerrymandering in the American electoral system. And we also know there was a fair amount of gerrymandering that was going on pre the election, actually both in Democratic states and traditional Republican states.
Speaker: But it does seem that a lot of people were going, but hold on it would be impossible for the Democrats to win, given the way we've gerrymandered our state.
Speaker: So the fact that they have won indicates there must be a really, really big conspiracy, because we conspired to ensure this kind of result would never happen.
Speaker: And yet it happened nonetheless. And maybe maybe that's a good lead-in to the New Zealand angle because we've had an interesting result this time. And by result, I mean not a result yet fully. Yeah, so tell me about your election experience. Right. Well, so as as I believe we mentioned in the last episode, the election period for New Zealand extends over a few weeks. Em had already voted before our previous one because because you can do that overseas. The actual election day was November 7th. Unfortunately, a really rainy rainy, crappy day, which I think they they think has definitely sort of suppressed a bit of voter turnout. It was just so lousy outside. But
Speaker: Yeah, as the results came in it was um that was interesting to see. But now perhaps we should we should just give a quick refresher in case you're listening from somewhere outside New Zealand, exactly how New Zealand's electoral system works. We have a system called MMP, Mixed Member Proportional Representation. The country is divided up into electorates. How many are there? Is it exactly 60? Is it half? I can't remember.
Speaker: divided up into electorates, which run regular sort of campaigns like you would expect. The parties put up candidates in each electorate, people vote for the candidates, whoever get whichever one candidate gets the most votes wins that electorate. But as well as voting for a candidate in your electorate, you also place a second vote for the just for the political party that you want. And so then when all of the votes are counted up,
Speaker: Seats are in Parliament are allocated to ensure that every party has... oh because i got them I just had to double-check this because fairly sure I knew the answer, but it would be terrible to give the wrong answer given it's our own election.
Speaker: is going to be important for our discussion of the overhang. 120 seats in total, but over half are electoral seats, under half are list seats, and that's where the disproportionate result is going to come from. But please do consult.
Speaker: So we have 120 seats in Parliament. As you say, 71 of them are given immediately. if if you If you win your electorate, you are a member of Parliament. whoever Each of the people who wins each of the electorate votes gets a seat, and then those seats are topped up or not, depending on the case, according to the proportion of votes you get. So, for example, just making up ah an example with easy numbers, say your party wins 20 electorates.
Speaker: and you win 20% of the vote. 20% of 120 is 24 seats in Parliament, so but because you are guaranteed 24, you get the 20 electorate seats, your partner well your party gets the 20 electorate seats that its members won, And then they get an extra four seats in Parliament, bringing them up to 24 because they got 20% of the total vote.
Speaker: And that's usually how it works. Sometimes there's a bit of a fiddle and and things can go a little bit wonky if you win a bunch of electorates. but get a small proportion of the vote. So say if you won 25 electorate seats, but still only got 20% of the vote, now you have 25 seats in Parliament, but your proportion means you should have only got 24, and everybody else's votes are awarded to them in proportion. So at the end of the day, assuming everyone this this only happened for your party and no one else's, there's one extra seat in Parliament. Parliament now, instead of having 120 MPs, has 121, and that one extra seat is referred to as an overhang.
Speaker: And that they're not uncommon, the overhangs. we often It's often sort of the smaller parties will... um Yeah, we usually have a huge or children between one to three overhang seats. often But not this time. But not this time, no, because...
Speaker: While the two major parties, oh, and I suppose the other thing to point out is that and under an MMP system, it's very unlikely that a single party gets enough votes to govern alone. It happened once with Labour under Jacinda Ardern after the 2021, I think it was, election after COVID. Everybody was was so pleased with the government's handling of that at the time. Not anymore, but that's another story. I think you'll find that was the 2020 election. There was no election in 2021. Was No, it wasn't that soon after the COVID lockdowns. My memory my memory fools me. Yeah, so 2020. Of course, it's 2026. Yes, three-year terms, yeah. But anyway, the point is, at that time and that time only, Labour got enough votes that they could have actually governed alone, I think. But anyway, the point is you normally normally you need a coalition. And there' I remember there was one year where sort of um people tried to kick up fuss because National got the most votes out of any party, but National and the right-wing bloc combined was smaller than Labour and the left-wing bloc. So it ended up being a Labour-led government. And some people were like, well, that's not right because National got the first boat in most votes. They should be leading the government. And everyone else was like, no, that's how not how EMP works. You fool.
Speaker: Anyway, this time around, where we are is National got a massive overhang that almost never had. Five seats. Five seats.
Speaker: Was it five? I thought it was six. Has that gone down? A bunch, anyway, which basically means National won a whole bunch of electorate seats and didn't get that high a percentage of the vote. I believe the Labor and National percentages were almost identical. I think there was only a point, maybe less than a point in it. Labor, for National.
Speaker: There we go. So it's near as identical as id need to cause isn' anything. Now, I certainly saw that in my home electorate of Maunga Kierke. The national candidate won quite handsomely by a few thousand votes. And yet the Labour Party vote was significantly higher than the National Party vote. So in my electorate, people voted for the national candidate, I believe, because i don't know the man who himself, but he's quite well regarded around here, I think, mostly because he he just turns up. he's He's visible. He's at community events. People like what he's doing.
Speaker: So they thought he was a good enough guy to be representing our electorate specifically, but weren't so fond of National and so gave their votes, party votes to their opponents. Now, there's been now that this has worked out really nicely for National because they didn't get as big a share of the votes as they might have liked.
Speaker: But because they won so many electorate seats, yeah they've had a massive overhang in their favour. As things stand right now, there are... i The the the number i last number I saw was that the left wing block, I guess, has about 66 seats and the right wing block has about 67, which you'll notice adds up to way more than 120. And yet it's only a difference of one.
Speaker: As things stand right now, National and their allies have the numbers to form the next government. But not all the votes have been counted yet. There are those pesky special voters like your good self. Like me. vote if People who vote outside they from outside their home electorate, either because, like you, they're on the other side of the world from their home electorate, or sometimes people just can't get to their electorate on the day and have to vote somewhere else.
Speaker: And those votes take quite a while to come in. Indeed, there's another two weeks. It's not going to be until November the 27th that all of the special votes are guaranteed to be counted. And because a few of the electorate seats are very close, I know Mount Roskill, the Labour candidate, Michael Wood, is currently in the lead by about 200 votes.
Speaker: Now, special votes historically favour the left parties, and Michael is a Labour candidate, so they'll probably go his way, but there's a chance that that in that electorate at least, it could go to national, and there are a bunch of other very close ones as well that could change hands.
Speaker: So it's possible that when the dust settles after the special votes come in, that will only take a change of a seat or two, and suddenly the left-wing coalition has a chance of forming a government.
Speaker: Well, especially because those votes tend to go left, the party proportions are going to change. So typically right-wing parties lose support on the list votes after the specials are counted. Now, this isn't going to affect national and its overhang because they have so many electorate seats anyway.
Speaker: But their right-wing colleagues, New Zealand First and ACT, their proportions are also likely to go down, which means the number of incoming MPs they have will reduce slightly.
Speaker: which presumably will mean a benefit for parties like Labour and the Greens, which then makes it easier for them to cobble the numbers to have a rolling coalition. So yes, a lot hangs on those special votes.
Speaker: And there are a lot of them. there are i think it's a third of a million special votes yet to be counted. Yeah, so despite the fact that we are recording this on the 12th of November, five days after the general election, it's still literally anyone's anyone's game. Not literally anyone's game, because it's not literally a game, but you know what I mean. It it could go either way. At the moment, it's favouring the right wing, but it could switch to the other side by the time all is said and done. But...
Speaker: This was all a big long-winded way of getting to the point that I wanted to make, which was comparing it to your talk about the gerrymandering and what have you in the States. The overhang really benefited national this time, and that meant a lot of people were voting, were splitting their vote, which you can do under MP, though, voting for a national candidate, but voting for a non-national party.
Speaker: And some people have been out saying that's a good strategy you should do. Most notoriously, Mr Mowbray. What's his name? Hamish? I can't remember. Henry. Henry. You had started with an H. He was a private citizen, put up a website encouraging everyone to vote strategically. Not just a private citizen, Josh, a billionaire.
Speaker: Well, yes, that's that what comes into it. He has put his resources behind encouraging people to vote a particular way, which eventually was judged, I believe, to be in contravention of our election laws, and he had to take the website down.
Speaker: But people have accused, if accused is the right word, have claimed that National has deliberately taken a strategy whereby they've exploited our election system to generate this large ah overhang that benefits themselves, even though the proportion of party votes suggests that the people don't actually want them to have that much of a seat in power. Now, one response to that is look, dude, that's how MMP works. The people voted this way. This is what the system entails. It's just what happens.
Speaker: But another response to people saying that has been saying, no, no you're peddling a conspiracy theory by saying that. And that has happened a little bit. So the leader of the Labour Party, Chris Hipkins,
Speaker: has accused National of manipulating the electoral system by by deliberately encouraging people to not vote for their party so to me it to not vote for their party, but instead vote for their candidate and vote for one of their allies with the party vote.
Speaker: Now, National says we've done no such thing. It's true the Prime Minister, who is a National Party MP, has been telling people on the campaign trail, if you want a national government, you need to vote for both the candidate and the party.
Speaker: But it's also true their coalition partners have been encouraging this activity. Yes, so there's been a little bit bit of claim and counterclaim. National said, as they've always said, ah but both major parties, Labour National, always talk about running what they call a two-ticks campaign. your tick tick for your ah party candidate and a tick for the party itself in the party vote. Now, we know that's not always true. Notoriously, the Epsom electorate is one where the Nationals always let that one go to the ACT party, their major ally on the right.
Speaker: And so even though they'll be out there, it's always vote national, wink. And indeed, the Labour Party candidate in that one is always vote Labour, wink, when what they actually want you to do is vote national because they know Labour will never get in there and they'd rather have a Labour one than get more a people in it anyway.
Speaker: Some people have said that national candidates have been out there actually saying, yeah, you should probably split your vote, even if they've been saying it surreptitiously. Where are we? I'm i'm looking at a looking at an article about this right now, trying to find the quote, and I can't because I can't read faster than I can talk. But there were there were specific claims of a national MP saying ah that get either saying, yeah, vote for the national candidate but for another party or standing right next to a candidate from one of their other parties who was saying that and kind of nodding along.
Speaker: But National says, no, that's nonsense and not just nonsense. They're saying that's a conspiracy theory. Chris Lux and Chris Hipkins. God, these parties and their Chris's. Christopher Hipkins is peddling spreading conspiracy theories when he claims that National has deliberately manipulated our electoral system.
Speaker: Yes, and Nicola Willis, who was the finance minister, probably isn't going to be the finance minister in the future because she's not going to be back in parliament, has accused Hipkins of engaging in Trumpian rhetoric.
Speaker: e Now, admittedly, this is following on from previous claims by both Labour candidates, Māori Party candidates and Green Party candidates about the whole disenfranchising of certain people in our electoral system. And there are two senses there.
Speaker: ah There's been a ah a back and forth between rival governments over the last few years as to whether prisoners are allowed to vote. Labour-led coalitions say, yes, your franchise doesn't get extinguished even though you are in prison. National coalitions go, no, if you go to prison, you shouldn't be allowed to vote. So they keep on re-enfranchising or disenfranchising people in our prison muster.
Speaker: But I think, as we mentioned in a previous episode, the other big change in our electoral system from previous elections is up until recently, you could enroll and vote on the day of the election.
Speaker: So you could swing into a polling place to say, look, I forgot to enroll. I want to vote. Enroll me now. And it would be done. And your vote would be counted as a special vote.
Speaker: The current government, under Justice Minister Paul go Goldsmith, got rid of that and said, no, you must be enrolled two weeks before the election.
Speaker: Now... The reason as to why they did this was the claim that it took too long to count the vote last time. So it took about three weeks for the final vote to come out. The electoral commission who actually run the elections were saying, look, changing the enrollment period does nothing for the count of the vote.
Speaker: The count of the vote just takes a long time because we need to make sure the count is secure. It's not the number, it's the system. If you actually want to speed up the vote, you need more people to be employed immediately. as part of the electoral commission, disenfranchising people doesn't actually speed the vote up at all. But the national-led coalition claimed, no, this was the only reason why we did it. It took too long to count the vote.
Speaker: As other people have pointed out, in the same way that specials tend to favour the left, last-minute enrolments, which are part of the special votes, often favour the left as well. And it seems that by disenfranchising people in this way, National has subtly altered...
Speaker: the voting population in a way that does seem to favour right-wing vote. And so that has been put forward as a theory to explain why the National-Led Coalition did it, and that has also been labelled a conspiracy theory.
Speaker: And it seems to be a warranted one. Yes, because they really can't come up with a decent justification now, because as I said, it won't be until November the 27th, almost three weeks after the election. Which is about the same time as last time. Yeah, that's it's made no difference.
Speaker: So the only other thing when I've seen people being questioned about that, the other way they've tried to justify it is just along the lines of, well, come on, if you can't get your act together enough, you know, we've been telling you, campaigning for months, people have known about this for a very, very long time, if you can't get your act together enough to get yourself enrolled in advance, then you don't deserve to vote, essentially, to which the response obviously is voting isn't something you deserve, it is a right And we should be making it as easy as possible to exercise your right, not throwing up roadblocks to it.
Speaker: And it's not the job of politicians to decide who deserves to vote. And also, I mean, I know someone overseas... I know someone overseas who was not a aware the late registration thing was an option now. So he went to cast his vote, logged in, realised that the address was wrong, went to update it and then discovered that actually he wasn't able to vote as an overseas voter. Because even if you can make the claim that every New Zealander resident at home was aware of this policy change,
Speaker: Getting that message out to New Zealanders living overseas is difficult. And that by itself is a reason to go you should allow enrolment.
Speaker: People voting overseas who know an election is going on but aren't actually spending all their time reading news at home would not have been aware of this change of policy.
Speaker: And it is an unexpected change of policy. Normally, the tendency is to give people more ability to vote rather than reduce their ability But also people move people move houses during the electoral period.
Speaker: People change jobs and have to move from one side of the country to the other. Some people aren't going to be able to vote in the electorate they're enrolled in because of a change of circumstance in that two weeks.
Speaker: Yeah. i I myself moved house earlier this year, and one of the first things I did after I moved was made sure I um updated my address. But anyway, I found the quote i was looking for.
Speaker: it was Chris Hipkins himself who said it. So some people, someone from the Herald, to the New Zealand Herald, said to Hipkins that the National didn't deliberately seek an overhang and and hadn't gone for a vote-splitting strategy, Chris Hipkins responded to that, oh, for goodness sake, I saw Chris Bishop in the electorate right next to mine standing next to Winston Peters, that's leader of the New Zealand First Party, asking New Zealand First voters to vote national on their electorate vote. So Chris Hipkins claimed that he saw national MPs, if not explicitly asking people to split their vote, tacitly endorsing it. But... um
Speaker: All we can say is that it worked for them. It also, I have to say, worked for Te Pate Maori, the Maori party, yeah who also got to get some of the one seat overhang. Yep. Yep. But so that's that. Now, the other the the party we haven't mentioned yet, apart from the Greens, who did quite well for themselves, is the Opportunity Party. They showed up a couple of elections ago didn't do very well, largely, I think, because they were fronted by Gareth Morgan, who can be a bit of a dick. Well, yes, Gareth mort Morgan's most well-known policy as leader of the Opportunities Party was cat genocide.
Speaker: Well, to be fair, that wasn't a policy of the Opportunities Party. That was an op-ed he had in the year old years before. but Yes, but it became the thing that the Opportunity Party was known for. Unfortunately, became the thing that... Yes, they're going to come and kill your cats.
Speaker: It became the thing that Gareth and Morgan... yeah He had an op-ed in the newspaper years ago saying that cats are responsible for so much death of of native birds. There's that famous case of a single cat killing an entire species when it was brought to an island by a light. housekeeperer and that we should just kill all the cat all all pet cats the same way we should get rid of fireworks or whatever. But anyway, the point is he's no longer directly associated with the party. He's not involved in it. He's not the leader of it. um but They bill themselves very much as the centrist party these days. They're all about our... our we We don't have...
Speaker: we We just put forward politics that we believe, that you know, evidence-based and worked and aren't we we don't have left or right-wing ideologies. And you can think of that what you will. But what you can't deny is that this was the election this was the opportunity party election. They are now essentially in the position of of being the kingmakers because although right now National has enough power seats to form a coalition without them. If they drop a couple, one or two, and the National picks up one or two, or the Greens pick up one, suddenly, if the Opportunity Party goes left, the left-wing coalition has enough votes to form government. If they go right, the right-wing coalition does. Now, prior to the election, Chris Luxon, leader of the National Party, had said they would never work with the Opportunities Party, and certainly the more right-wing people, the the the more right-wing parties, first in act, have said they will never work with the Opportunity Party, although at least Christopher Luxon,
Speaker: has some it has it softened his stance since, so we'll see about that. But the other more conspiratorial story, which involves the Opportunity Party, came up a couple of weeks before the election, which is when Michael Laws, who these days, he's an ACT he's an act candidate, isn't he?
Speaker: No, New Zealand first. New Zealand first. I tried to think about him as little as possible. help Paul Henry. I'm about to have a a small rant on because Paul Henry was going for the ACT party and has got in on the list and was one of the political commentators on TVNZ on the night of the election. And I can't help but think that If you're angling to be an MP, you shouldn't be commentating on the election in general on primetime TV, on what is the de facto national broadcaster.
Speaker: Yes, Paul Henry, better known as a television personality. but but Better known as a racist. Also one of those very sort of opinionated talk radio loudmouthed guys, famous for a number of... of of You could call them gaffes, or they they they got called gaffes on New Zealand television, which basically involved him saying incredibly offensive and or stupid things on TV and getting a rap on the knuckles for it, but no, serious consequences. So he's in Michael Laws as kind of a similar guy. He's he's a guy he's he's been he's been a television personality. He's been, where was he, the mayor of Whanganui, something like that. I don't even remember.
Speaker: And now he is a New Zealand first candidate. But prior to the election, ah Michael Laws was talking on his show, The Platform, where he made a bunch of quite sexist remarks about the Opportunity Party, particularly their female candidates. got but The Opportunity Party's current leader is a woman, Kiu Lei Wong, and he was talking about her and other things. He called them called them stern, called them princesses, and even made comments about what their faces would look like, quote, post-sex, which I think you'll agree is not not an appropriate thing to be saying on a national platform about any woman, certainly not about your political opponents.
Speaker: ah Now, when they were sort of made on his on his show, which I think is a radio show, again, I'd pay no attention to the man if I can avoid it. So only the listeners to his show, which would be people who were actually fans of Michael Laws, heard about this to begin with.
Speaker: ah But then it was reported more widely by the New Zealand Herald and was obviously some very brad a bad press for Michael Laws. There are a bunch of stories. Michael Laws says horrifically sexist things about female opposing female politicians. Not a good look for Michael Laws and, by extension, not a good look for the New Zealand First Party. However, there were claims of conspiracy conspiracy theories around the timing of this announcement, because it didn't happen immediately after he made these comments. It took um like half a week or something before it actually got reported on in the New Zealand Herald.
Speaker: And a bunch of people said, my goodness, is is isn't that convenient? They wait until right before the election. I believe it was... The fifth is when they were talking about the conspiracy claims around it. so it would have been a couple of days before that. So and I believe the week of the week leading up to the general election, suddenly there's a story that makes a New Zealand first MP and by extension the New Zealand First Party look very bad. And so some people claimed that the Herald had deliberately sat on the story until closer to the election.
Speaker: so that it would have the maximum political effect. So the was story was broken by Herald's senior correspondent, Katie Bradford, probably. i do have to say at this point, there have been a couple of cases recently of major stories that were sort of first brought first brought up by um more and smaller independent reporters that then were first, it wasn't sort of until they were reported on by a major newspaper that this newspaper would then say, we broke the story. I know local journalist David Farrier, who you'll know from Dark Tourist and his what's his, what's his podcast? Flightless Bird, things like that. oh and the movie Tickled, of course. Yeah, Tickled and Mr Organ.
Speaker: He's complained recently about a couple of incidents of him or other small reporters being the first ones to actually find out about and start talking about a story. Then once once it hits the major newspapers, they'll then claim that they broke it. So I don't know for a fact that it was the Herald reporter Katie Bradford who broke the story, but according to the New Zealand Herald, it was New Zealand Herald Katie Bradford who broke the story.
Speaker: And she's basically said no, moved very quickly. she were Actually, I'll quote her instead of trying to paraphrase. She says, this is a story that moved really quickly, and I want to address some of the claims and conspiracies around this. I was the reporter who wrote the story. I got sent the video yesterday morning, referring to the Wednesday, which was Wednesday the fourth So only three days before the election.
Speaker: I got sent the video yesterday morning at about 10.30am and we had it up on the blog within 15 minutes. There was no sitting on the story. Someone sent it to me. Yes, it was on air last week, last Wednesday. So there we go. It was a week and a half before the election that the comments were actually made. But it was four days before the election that the story went up.
Speaker: but So Bradford continues, for whatever reason, no one had picked it up in that time. As soon as I saw it, I thought, you know, this is going to become a story and put it up. There was no discussion about whether we wait. There was no intention to put it out in election week, which seems to have been some of the theory out there. It wasn't a stitch up about opportunity. It was literally, here is what Michael Laws had to say.
Speaker: So the people involved in the story say there was no conspiracy around the timing of it. It's just the the way the story went out. But at the time, there were claims of conspiracy from the people for whom this story was the most damaging. So there you go Indeed.
Speaker: that's That's exhausted our list of um conspiratorial things to do with the US and New Zealand elections. Do we have anything else to round things out? I don't think so. I mean, what has been interesting with the US one is the lack of really, really overt conspiracy theories. And maybe they're about to emerge.
Speaker: Maybe it's just too soon. The interesting thing about the New Zealand election has been minor talk of conspiracy theories, but mostly talk about vote manipulation, which may or may not have been conspiratorial. Certainly, Henry Mowbray, when he was running his split-the-vote campaign, wasn't keeping it secret at all as to what he was doing and what his intention was. So even if National were covertly supporting it, the actual head conspirator, so to speak, and I guess the question is whether he was the leader or a patsy, certainly wasn't keeping that aspect of the campaign a secret.
Speaker: So, and assuming we record at the regular time for our next episode, even by the time we record our next episode, we won't know the results of the election, although possibly by the time the episode is up, we will. Maybe we should delay it a day or two. don't know. We'll see. Maybe there won't be that much interesting to talk about it.
Speaker: yeah yeah I mean, yeah but be we can make a decision closer yeah to the date. I mean, so i don't and don't and um um yeah I guess it depends on whether there's even more conspiratorial yeah murmurs in the next.
Speaker: Yes, but so if if the next episode is a couple of days late coming out, it'll be because we've decided to wait a couple of days until we actually know what's happening with the election, because right now, we don't. What we do know, though, what we do know is that we have to wrap up this episode and then go record a bonus episode for our beloved patrons.
Speaker: And in that episode, we're going to talk about some some media that we have been consuming. I see that just now you've gone and corrected your typos because originally you claimed that you were going to talk about the fact that you read the most recent series of b of Lies, and I really... I like ah saw that. I could have fixed the typo myself, but I really liked the idea of ah of the thing about the lies of the bee, that honey, where does it come from? They won't tell you. Well, I mean, here, Josh, where does the term honey trap come from? Well, hes indeed. and We could probably have talked about a recent honey trap as well, but I kind of don't care.
Speaker: Maybe we should. i don't know And the fact that actually there's a big debate there is when did the term honeypot first enter the discourse about honey traps? And it turns out the 1980s. Well, there you go.
Speaker: That's another method for another time. yeah but Frankly, we're gonna we're going to talk about NVIDIA and that whole stuff. Probably not. me It's kind of kind of dull, yeah. No, we're going to talk about various media we have been consuming, and we've got an update on our previous story about balls.
Speaker: All the balls you can handle, we're going to talk about. Sanding the balls, Josh. Tampering with the balls, fiddling with the balls. It's all happening to the balls. Polishing the balls. It all happened to the ball.
Speaker: Polishing balls is not against the rules. Fiddling tampering with the balls is against the rules. If you want to know what we're talking about, you should have listened to our previous bonus episode, and we're going to have an update to that story in this bonus episode.
Speaker: So there you go. ah so once again... If you want to be a patron, go to Patreon and look for the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. Once again, if you want to play play a fun physical card game, go play Em's new game. If you want to play a fun new video game, go play my game. Em's is called Prestige! exclamation mark Mine is called Me and My Bullet. They're both available on itch.io.
Speaker: Go play them. And I think I'm done. I think you're done as well. Well, then I'll just say goodbye. Goodbye. Game on, I say. Game on.
Speaker: The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy features Josh Addison and Associate Professor M.R. Extentis. Our producers are a mysterious cabal of conspirators known as Tom, Philip, and another who was so mysterious that they remain anonymous.
Speaker: You can contact us electronically via podcastconspiracy at gmail.com or join our Patreon and get access to our Discord server. Or don't, I'm not your mum.
Speaker: And remember... these!
