Hey hey hey, it's Mt Albert!

There are, as far as I can see, three main groups of disappointed people after any election: disgruntled supporters of the losing party, defeated MPs and newspaper publishers. The buzz around election time sells papers as, for some unknown and sadly misguided reason, people turn to the mainstream media to tell them which colour - red, blue, green, Act - wants what and who will give them the biggest bribe. So what's the next-best thing to an election? A byelection!

Of all the pumped-up pseudo-scandals that the Herald has talked about, the only one that seems to have any merit - the principle of people running for election, their party losing, and them deciding they are going to take their ball and go home - has barely been mentioned. Instead, the Herald has been full of scandalous tales of rampant political skullduggery:

• the nefarious Greens' plans to - shock - run a candidate in a byelection
• Labour's nefarious (alleged) plans to ask them not to
• the 'Tizard effect', whereby Labour supposedly had to choose someone who was not a sitting MP so that Judith Tizard wouldn't get back into parliament
• the nefarious academic paper that Labour favourite David Shearer wrote years ago calling for the UN to regulate mercenary groups in failed states, and how this allegedly conflicted with Phil Goff's views, and how no two politicians in the same party have ever disagreed on an issue before, never ever
• now, today's article alleges a massive rift on the 'left' with the headline "Greens attack Labour's 'grey' man:

The gloves are off between the parties of the left in the Mt Albert byelection, with Greens co-leader and candidate Russel Norman dismissing Labour's flag-bearer, David Shearer, as a "grey machine man" and "National-lite."

Holy crap! The gloves are off! Rivers will turn red with blood! Just look at these quotes:

Norman: "I'm sure he's a very nice guy, but it means we've got National versus National-lite versus the Greens."

Shearer: "It would be a long bow to draw to say that. My actions stand for themselves in where I sit on any political spectrum. Dr Norman is really looking at trying to increase his profile, so I guess we can expect this sort of thing from him over the next few weeks."

Ouch! That's hard-hitting.

For the second half of the article, Claire Trevett, who has starred on these hallowed pages before (EtH, that is), simply plagiarised her previous articles on the topic, reusing the same old lazy slander about Tizard and the "controversial battle for the candidacy" - controversial because, as far as I can tell, the Herald made it so.

To finish up, Claire mentions the obviously less-controversial battles for the nominations of the parties on the 'right'. The fact that National head office seems to favour Melissa Lee, while the local organisation allegedly favours one Ravi Musuku, does not register on the Herald controversy-o-meter. Hang on, when it was the Labour central party allegedly meddling in the selections, it was news, but if it's National... oh, never mind.

Finally, on Act:

Act will stand John Boscawen, also a list MP, who became well known for his opposition to the Electoral Finance Act last year.

He has a "take no prisoners" approach to campaigning and could take votes from National.

I guess that's the only area where Act have a "take no prisoners" approach. Thank you, thank you, I'm here all week.