The choice is clear

The NZ Herald reports Rodney Hide has more support from the public to be ACT Leader than the three other contenders combined. In fact he has four times as much support as Ken Shirley who is second.

I am not a member of ACT, and will not be voting. But I hope those who do vote are aware of what is at stake. Electing Rodney as Leader gives them a reasonable fighting chance to be in the next Parliament. If they do not, then sadly it will be “the longest suicide note in history”.

My order of ranking on Monday would have been:

1 Rodney Hide
2 Ken SHirley
3 Stephen Franks
4 Muriel Newman

After Stephen posted his newsletter this week (discussed here) I now put Muriel third and Stephen fourth.

People may wonder why I should care, not being a member. Well as much as I would like National to win enough votes to govern alone, this will be a rare occurence. So National needs coalition partners. And frankly ACT is the only one I would be comfortable with.

In fact if I had to rank preferred coalition partners in order, they would be:

1) ACT
2) Outdoor Recreation
3) Legalise Cannabis (and no I have never ever)
4) United Future (if they can dump the fundamentalist wing)
5) Labour
6) Maori Party
7) Alliance
8) Greens
9) Christian Heritage
10) Progressive
11) NZ First