victory!

yay!! we've done it, an emphatic victory in mt albert and pretty well deserved too. i went up and helped with door-knocking. and the campaign organisation was really strong, there were so many people out there to help. it's a campaign i've been proud to be part of, even though it wasn't a big part.

i do feel sorry for melissa lee though. she wasn't the right person for the job, she didn't have the experience, training or support that she needed for this campaign. that was emphasised by the fact that her leader is on holiday. that is incredibly unbelievable, and shows he has absolutely no strength of character. he should have been there standing by his candidate and supporting her, regardless of the result. but when the chips were down, he ran away. he's not a person i have much respect for anyway, but i'm pretty appalled at that.

ms lee is understandably shattered, and it will be interesting to see where she goes from here. after this experience, she must seriously be thinking about whether or not she wants to continue in politics. again, i suspect it will depend on what support she gets from her party.

i had an interesting encounter with an iranian man today. it turns out he's a sunni arab, and it turns out that there are a significant number of arabs in southern iran. we had a discussion about the iranian elections, and came to the conclusion that neither of the candiadates were particularly great. for more (brief thoughts on that), see my comment here.