This morning at 10 am 12 of us local candidates paraded for the regular coffee meeting of  stay-at-home mums and dads who call themselves ":Still Got a Brain".

They meet at Southern Cross tavern, assembled by Belinda Milnes and Rachel Dahlberg. See page two of this Herald report for more background. A Stuff search did not bring up the DomPost story on the group.

They’d be a formidable audience to a single speaker. They’d bore in on the platitude and promise mush I’ve been hearing from my opponents. Presumably our politics is  steered that way by focus groups. I can’t stand it, so I try to raise real issues each time. Some times it works. Some times it does not, as my wife Cathy promptly informs me.

This time we had 2 minutes each. With so many of us and only two minutes each Still Got a Brain eyes would have glazed if they’d not had children at knee.

I thought the most interesting question was on the extension of the 20 free hours early childhood education subsidy to Play Centre. National will extend it, and both ACT and United Future said they supported that. I think the Greens also did.

I was a play centre child in a play centre family. My mother became patron of our local play centre after 5 children had gone through it.

I was reminded of the  old Kindy/Play Centre tension by someone on whose door I knocked recently. She was hostile to the extension of the subsidy to Play Centre, not because of anything to do with kids, but because it would "undermine the professionalism we must bring to early childhood educators, to increase their status and conditions".

Sounds to me as if this is another policy area (like Corrections) where Labour has mortgaged itself (and the interests of parents and children) to its union funders.

I admired Trevor Mallard’s two minutes. He debated a real issue – the National policy to cut RMA process obstacles to infrastructure decisions. Trevor attacked the idea of requiring objectors to provided security for the costs they might cause, payable if their objections are without merit.