David Cormack

Why?

I have a child. She's four. Cool kid. Four is a fun age. She's got her own little personality and views of the world. She tries to make jokes. They're terrible. We laugh along together anyway.
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The treatments keep being shittier than the illness

National eh. They bloody love to privatise. Their latest brain fart is to privatise a form of social welfare. 

Nicola Willis, National's Deputy Leader and finance spokesperson, 2022-10-22 01:09:47 +0000 UTC View Post

The running race

Imagine 200 years ago some folks just showed up and told your ancestors they were taking part in a running race. They weren't super keen but these folks would not take no for an answer. So your anc...

The peculiar ambivalence of Labour's environmentalism

I'm a fairly staunch advocate of the environment. I was the Green Party's head of communications and policy (for like five minutes, but still...). I have written several times about the plight of t...

Vote for them, not for now

It's October 2011. Kim and I are house hunting. We had an upper ceiling of $450,000 to buy a house. We had a combined income of about $130k. Fortunately we had a friend who said that lifting our ce...

The fundamentals

With about twelve months to go until an election, polls stop being hypothetical and we can start making proper assessments.

At the moment it's pretty damn close. In the most recent Talbot Mi...

The Great Green Clusterfuck

I've been waiting a while to write this. I wanted to get a sense of where it all landed. But it's been a schmozzle.

Ahead of the Green Party AGM there were murmurings that people were going t...

Dark money

Donations. Political donations. Gross. Not a fan. I think we should ban them to be honest. Or make them compulsory. Give every New Zealander $500 or some amount and they have t...

Cynicism in spades

Gangs. Gangs. Gangs. Gangs. Poors. Gangs. Crims. Extremists. It's all gangs.

National announced it would be getting tough on gangs. Because National is tough on crime you see. TOUGH. ON. CRIM...

Who framed Christopher Luxon?

It's been a charmed run. The media has been gagging for National to be actually competitive. Since Covid they've not been. Then when Collins tried to knife Bridges in the dark of night and found he...

My 10/10 tweets

I have a recurring bit. I'll do a gag on twitter and then self-grade it. I've had a few misses, probably more misses than hits if I'm honest. But occasionally I'll smash it out of the park and give...

When my truth becomes her lie

About 18 months ago the Guardian interviewed me. It was 2022-04-04 01:44:25 +0000 UTC View Post

The 'R' Word

ACT had been the wunderkind party. Its polling had gone from like 0.5% to around 16%. The party thought it had a chance of becoming the main opposition. But then oh no, National got its shit togeth...

But who are you really, Mr Luxon?

The moment had arrived. Christopher Luxon was giving his first major speech (apart from that major speech where he appeared to side with protesters). We've imported that horrendous Americanism "Sta...

Probably should have just shut up

I do media training. One of the first things I do when I'm doing media training is to ask the person "do you fuck dogs?".

100% of the time the answer has been "no".

"Cool" I'll say. "Th...

Social insurance ≠ social welfare

Sounds nice. Needs work. That's my takeaway from the social insurance policy announced by Labour.

It's a policy that's been worked on for a while now, and it essentially amounts to middle cl...

Happy Anniversary!

It's Wellington Anniversary day today. This means I'm not at work. Instead I have woken up to Omicron vs NZ round 1.

It's been nearly two years now. Covid has owned our lives. Whether we ope...

I'm tired of pretending

I'm sick of it. As I've continued the inexorable march of aging I expected to become more conservative. That's what we're told. It's that axiom "If you are not a liberal when you are 20 you have no...

Seize deez nuts

Summer Holidays! Bliss. Fucking round. Not needing to find out. Just roasting in our climate changed scorchers all round the country. Haven't even had to think about politics.

And yet, had I ...

Left! Right out.

Whew. What a year eh. 

There are plenty of political columns citing people's politicians of the year. 

Hot tip: it ain't David Seymour. He disqualifies himself for a whole hos...

Luxon? Luxoff?

He's been leader for two weeks. Suddenly National has a spring in his step. But is he really the messiah? Or is he just a naughty little boy?

The first disgruntled call came in just before th...

Grabbed a Seat

Update: just received this.

Luxon with Willis, Bridges will be ranked #3 and take finance, Bishop at 4.

National is a shitshow. Even afte...

Content change

I'm considering mixing up my political columns with more attempts at humour. Is this something you'd welcome? 

The more things don't change, the more they stay the same

Last night's poll on TV1 was both boring and fascinating. It was boring because fuck all had really changed since the last poll, but that was what made it so fascinating.

Everyone admits it'...

The lying lies of David Seymour

He's a real piece of shit. I have spent a long time ignoring David Seymour because he'd been an irrelevancy and I didn't want to give his toxic views an airing, but now he's less irrelevant thanks ...

No the Greens haven't gone too far left

This trope has to die. Every now and again someone writes a piece bemoaning the Green Party for not just focusing on environmental issues.

The most recent addition to the genre said that the...

Some random thoughts on the Vaxathon

Shit that was good. What a vibe eh? People were excited and engaged and we smashed the target. It felt like the whole country was swinging in behind it; there was a feeling of hope in the air. It w...

The horror of the push alert

I really need to turn off news alerts.

The nature of my work means I need to know what's going on in media land, but the Covid alerts are ruinous!

They seem to love coming th...

A new approach

Patreon stresses me out. Every week I sit down to write something and every week I freeze and can't come up with something good enough.

So I'm trying a new approach, I'm going to jot down id...

Won't somebody think of the ecosystem?

There's a battle of framing. It's usually split between left and right wing divides and it's frustrating.

Because framing is just the way you talk about something in order to make your argume...