3News Reid Research released their latest poll last night, and it’s good news for almost everyone but the major parties.

National are down 2.5% to 45%. That’s the danger zone – if NZ First is over 5% and National is on just 45% or thereabouts, then the odds are that Winston Peters holds the balance of power.

Labour also fall, down 2.6% to 26.4%. It’s another poll result showing Labour getting less than their abysmal 2011 result, which will be scaring the hell out of a few list MPs.

With both National and Labour falling in this Reid Research poll and the last Herald Digipoll, you’d have to assume that Dirty Politics is having an effect, possibly tarring both major parties with the same brush and squeezing policy out of the debate.

The Greens rise 0.5% to 13.5% – a good result, but they’ll be disappointed they haven’t picked up more of the vote…

In Anti-fluoride activists unhappy about scientific research I related how local anti-fluoride propagandists were busy rubbishing the Royal Society of NZ  fluoride review – even before it was released. Now that it is released (see Health Effects of Water Fluoridation: a Review of the Scientific Evidence) they have gone into a manic mode – launching press releases and facebook attacks. Given that some of these were launched within hours of the report’s release these propagandists hadn’t bother actually reading the report itself.

These attacks are typical of anti-science people when confronted with scientific information undermining their strong beleifs. As we say in New Zealand, these critics “play the man rather than the ball.” But first, let’s deal with  the single criticism of the scientific content of the report – the question of the mechanisms of the beneficial roles of fluoride for teeth.

The old “topical” argument

The anti-fluoride brigade has a thing…

Political punditry is definitely a matter of perspective. If you were a Fox News commentator during the last US presidential election, Mitt Romney’s campaign was a dead cert winner; if you were Nate Silver, Obama was going to romp home. (Of course, if you rely on Fox News for your political commentary, you probably deserve to be duped.)

Here in New Zealand, in Election 2014, I’ve just read two very different accounts of the two main parties’ campaigns – Andrea Vance’s ‘The slick and the dead calm‘ and Tim Watkin’s ‘If this was Labour we’d be calling it a mess‘. On the one hand, Ms Vance describes National’s campaign as “slick, polished and organised to the last detail”, while Labour’s “is ad hoc, chaotic and oddly low-energy”.

Her description of Team Key?

National leader John Key whizzed his way across Auckland on Monday, barely pausing for a…

When National opened the books ahead of the election with the Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Update (Prefu), the projected surplus for 2014/15 fell from $372 million to $297 million. In a way, the decrease in the projected surplus was an electoral bonus for National. John Key and Bill English have been painting National as sound fiscal managers, while accusing Labour of spending projected surpluses before they’ve been achieved. The Prefu’s decrease in the 2014/15 surplus allowed National to keep their budget halo intact (“We’re still achieving a surplus as promised!”), while being able to warn that conditions were not so rosy as to allow Labour’s proposed spending increases.

David Parker’s mantra has been that all Labour’s policies were fully costed. He and Cunliffe have been desperate to appear just as fiscally responsible as National, such that Labour (and indeed even the Greens!) were boasting that they would in fact be paying…