Elections...

Last Saturday NZ held a general election. The ballots were huge- to have enough room on one side for all of the parties- and the other side was the local district candidates- so that you could cast both your party vote and your local electoral vote. You also had to be careful to put it in the correct box- I was on the general roll- not the maori roll so my ballot needed to go in the general roll box.

When the results finally came in Saturday night, Key's National party received the highest percentage of votes. Next was Labour. Under NZ's MMP proportional representation system, a party has to either get an electorate candidate elected, or 5% of the vote to be allocated votes proportionally. Although Winston Peter's party got a higher percentage of votes (at over 4%) than several of the minor parties, they hold one seat each because they elected someone in a riding. If National gets 40% of the vote, it will get approximately 40% of the seats in Parliament. If it won 25 of those seats as a candiate vote, the remainder would come off the list. John Key was top of the National list & Helen Clark (the PM) was top of the National list. The interesting result you get is that a candidate can lose their electorate seat, but still get in on the party vote. (I believe this happened with the LAbour candidate in the Nelson riding who lost to the National party candidate).

Key has made an alliance with the Act party who have 5 seats and another minor party who has 1 seat. They're also trying to ally with the MAori party. It sounds like people from these parties will get ministerial responsibilities- but outside of cabinet. NZ has to be used to minority governments- it is what they get constantly under MMP. The governmentwill be opposed by the Greens/Labour and another minor party who has 1 seat.

On election night during her concession speech, Helen Clark indicated she would be stepping down as Labour leader and a new leader would be selected by Christmas. I thought at the time that it was a very quick leadership race. Things happen differently in NZ, I have learned. The new leader is ALREADY in place, several days after she stepped down. He stepped in with no opposition. Stephane Dion could be replaced tomorrow- if he was in NZ instead of Canada. Interesting...

I've finally finished my tax course. YAY. At least I hope yay. I sat the paper on Tuesday. Results won't be back for something like 4 to 6 weeks. I really hope that phase of life is over. Being a student was great. But being a student and working is another story.
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I've slowly started going for runs again at a terrible pace of about 1- 8 km run each week. I was planning on gearing that up, but my cold from Sydney has returned in full force. Hopefully it will not last long...

Petrol has dropped dramatically- its down to under $1.60/L now. Funny how cheap this now seems.

Seasonal produce is finally getting affordable again. My favourite red peppers have dropped from $3 each- I saw them for $1 at the grocery this week. Hurray!

Looking forward to summer... Days are longer and finally heating up a bit- it was up to 20 today and didn't even cool much over night last night.