Reflections on a week of our election survey

First up - thank you to my fellow bloggers here at The Hand Mirror, who threw ideas around for this for ages, and worked away to get the questions right (with the exception of Anjum, who decided to limit her role to answering the questions as a candidate).

And a big big thank you to all the candidates that have responded to date. We've had 25 replies and, as I write, 15 have been published. The remainder are scheduled for the next week, and more will be slotted in as they arrive. None have been edited at all, or declined, and as long as we don't get anything that breaks our comment policy I expect that to continue.

If I get a chance I'll send out a reminder to candidates who haven't responded yet, and I'm thinking I'll send a little prod to the Parliamentary party organisations of those I've heard naught from today. That would be NZ First (not surprising), the Maori Party and the Progressives (a little surprising, but I couldn't find contact details for their non-MP candidates so will have another hunt), the Family Party (again I had troubles finding email addresses so could only send it to 3 of their people) and NATIONAL (who have over 70 candidates, most of whom would have got the survey) . There are also a few other minnow parties that I'll email if I get time to track contacts down.

Thank you also to the readers who are a) reading and b) commenting on the surveys. Even though some responses don't have any comments I can see from the stats that they are all getting read, frequently, so candidates who feel a bit lonely should take some solace from the clear evidence that lurkers are soaking up their wise (or not) words. In several threads candidates have joined the discussion, and that's been fantastic. Big ups to Kelleigh Sheffield-Cranston, Colin du Plessis, Brian Ward and Jordan Carter for responding to queries or points from readers, and to other candidates who may be commenting too. And cheers to everyone for abiding by our comment policy and keeping things sane.

There's been some discussion of the survey in the wider blogosphere:

• Idiot/Savant gave us some much appreciated linkage, and I should also acknowledge his supportive email conversations when I broached this topic with him some months ago.
• Peter McCaffrey (whose response is scheduled to go up here next week) has put his reply up on the Act-on-Campus blog, resulting in a bit of a comment discussion there, particularly around Q3 (the dreaded abortion question).
• Regular commenter barvasfiend juxtaposed one of the answers of Alliance co-leader Kay Murray with a particularly Lord-of-the-Flies approach to the Domestic Purposes Benefit taken by Cactus Kate.
• scrubone takes issue with our tenth question (the one about food prices) and labels it the "idiotic discrimination claim of the day." A commenter there doesn't like question 2 (the pay gap question) either*. It's nice to know you're reading, guys.
• Frogblog got rather excited about Paul Chalmers' (Labour, Whangarei) support for country of origin labelling for food.
• And those who have been following the survey will already know that Act's number 7, Peter Tashkoff, labelled our survey spam, and gave us a somewhat unorthodox reply to boot. I see from the comment thread over there that another Act candidate, Clint Heine, has also decided our survey is not worth bothering with as we Hand Mirrovians are apparently just unfairly ripping the Act responses to shreds. I actually think the Act responses to date have stimulated some of the most interesting debates. Shrug.
  

If you've blogged about our survey and I've missed it please feel free to add a link in comments.

A full index of the candidate responses is continuing to grow (kudos to Deborah who is keeping on top of this), and we look forward to receiving, posting and reading more responses up until election day!

* And it turns out that he's a candidate for the Family Party, so I've emailed him to ask for his response to the survey.