Skip to Content »

Wellington Central candidate for the National Party

  • March 20th, 2008

I’ve just finished thank you messages to many of the people who encouraged or guided me on the selection. Thankfully the wait was not too long for the favourable decision.  

The democratic process followed by National involves the candidate in wooing as many of the selection  delegates (60 in the Wellington Central case) as want to meet. Typically a meeting takes about an hour. I can honestly say that I enjoyed every meeting. I was asked not one silly question. The membership impressed me.

Pity the  poor candidates in Selwyn electorate. That electorate has decided to adopt a unversal primary model, so 700 widely dispersed members must be lobbied, as well as attending many meet-the-candidate meetings. The  Parliamentary election will be a doddle in comparison.

Wellington Central’s  packed selection meeting promises much for the campaign to come. There must have been more observers than voting delegates.

The formal 10 minute speech promoting myself was one of the hardest I’ve ever prepared. I tried to discipline myself with full notes (very rare for me) to over-ride the urge to understate and to be conversational. I discarded draft after draft. In the end I thought the content was OK, but the delivery definitely lacked theatrics.  “Skiting” does not come easy for men of my generation.

The selection committee were  impassive. Taking their adjudication role seriously they gave none of the normal responses to desperate speaker glances round the room for  affirmation. Fortunately for me they must have decided that while a speech-making competition was entertaining, there were other factors to take into account.

Paul Quinn’s approach got dramatically better with each practice. He will be a formidable candidate in time, and David Broome too showed the benefits of a love of public speaking. The quality of candidates, the penetration and balance in the questioning made the whole process a credit to the National party.

All in all the rigour made me appreciate just how lucky I’ve been in the past not to have to go through challenged selection procedures. I’d rather draft and speak 10 times to 150 amendments to the Sentencing Act than face that again too soon.

Now I’ll have Easter, and catch up on some legal work. Next month the excitement starts, organizing the campaign team.

Comments

Gravatar

Congrats, it’s going to be a very interesting election.

Gravatar

Congratulations Stephen.

Hope you win the seat or get a high enough list ranking to get back into Parliament by the end of the year. And then help repeal the Electoral Finance Act.

Gravatar

Congratulations. All the best for the coming general election.

Gravatar
  • Susan Aucutt
  • March 20th, 2008
  • 10:25 am

I reiterate all the above comments.

Gravatar

Well done Stephen. I had my fingers crossed for you.

Gravatar

Stephen Franks was not one of the elitists in ACT party.
Far from it.
He was the only person in NZ with the balls and tenacity to take on the market insider trading criminals to the Securities commission and make it stick.

Also he got tough ideas on the penal system and the justice system, which is scary in a way .. but everyone else just stood by and mouthed blabber while the prisoner bill went to $90,000 per annum. Like for instance , take that extremely dangerous Tim Selwyn, you could have sent him down to me and I would have kept him for only $25,000 plus gst.

why don’t we propel Stephen back into Parliament.
Taking on Wellington Central is a big very big ask.
I know what you think
You think Stephen got to transpersonify into a liberal.
I agree
So here’s how he does it.
On Monday morning Stephen wakes up calls a press conference and announce that we can buy NZ RAIL which is a NATional asset back for
like $800 million dollars and we going to kick Australia arse from now on.

End of Stephen’s ACT problem.

I know what you thinking.
Key and NAT won’t back it. Oh yes they will.
Key took a 5% hit over his dithering last week and he won’t ever forget it.
NZ wants our railroad back and we will have it.

More late dudes, peterquixote

Gravatar

Congratulations

Leave your comments:

* Required fields. Your e-mail address will not be published on this site

You can use the following HTML tags:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>