Retribution

With the second reading vote out of the way, talk is now turning towards political retribution against those MPs who betrayed their party's values to vote for inequality and homophobia. JustLeft expresses his displeasure with Labour's errant "boy's club":

the Labour MPs who voted against - John Tamihere, Ross Robertson, Harry Duynhoven, Clayton Cosgrove, Taito Phillip Field and Damien O'Connor - all I will say is they are very lucky they don't depend on the Labour Party list for their election. I am ashamed that they have "Labour" attached to their names. To vote against this legislation indicates their values base is not Labour's.

Unfortunately, many of these MPs have large majorities and therefore cannot be effectively harmed by Labour. But they can be challenged from outside Labour, and I would hope that those parties to the left of Labour will put up strong challengers in these people's electotorates and draw attention to their consistent illiberal voting patterns.

KiwPundit is also talking retribution, threatening before the vote that

ACT MPs who vote against should be prepared for a nasty surprise when the next list selection is done. The ACT Board is quite a lot more socially liberal than the caucus

and now promising to "get even - or at least try". And on Rodney Hide's blog, he goes further:

In the next list selection, the Board needs to take out the trash, namely: Franks, Newman, Coddington, Eckhoff and Wang.

I am not going to spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars on another election campaign to help increase ACT’s share of the party vote, only to have crap like this happen.

Rodney, please publicly announce what you are going to do to fix these five problems.

I look forward to this. Unlike their Labour comrades, ACT's traitors are vulnerable; on current polling, they would only get three or four MPs, and even if they make 5%, they would still only get six. With nine current MPs, someone is going to lose out, and I'd like it to be the right people; here's hoping Nigel is successful.