And there is the Greens’ future focused campaign to vote for something positive from little New Zealand company Special.

“Not hectoring or bombastic, just a simple reminder of what is at stake.”

The Greens have also used a locally owned market research company and are using a locally owned media buyer, as well as swathes of local on-the-ground volunteers (and some overseas volunteers) to put together its election campaign.  Which all just shows promoting kiwi made does work.

Political strategy is a cynical business by its nature. Labour’s people were not appealing to higher ideals when they ran the “slippery” campaign against Key this year. Even the Greens once (in 2002) hired themselves an electoral shitkicker from Australia.

I have to admit I’m a bit confused.  I’ve asked around and can only assume he is referring to Cate Faehrmann who was hired to be the Green’s Campaign Manager that year.  At the time Cate was a Green Party activist in Australia leading election campaigns in both South Australia and at the federal level. In other words she was a Green Party member hired to run a Green Party campaign – a campaign during which the Greens were incredibly open about what we did and did not believe in and intend to do – genetically engineered corn anyone? (And incidentally had our best polling result to date.)

The Australian and NZ Greens have a close working relationship which has also seen several NZ Greens help organise Australian election campaigns in the past. I cannot see what this has to do with secretive consultancy companies that are using polling data to advise politicians how to avoid telling the public what their real agenda is.
However,we do currently have some not so secret Australian political operatives

For instance check out our Melbourne based candidate, number 28 on our list, Rayna Fahey, her facebook campaign page and her Radical Cross-stitch blog. Crosby Textor she ain’t: