Posts by izogi
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Legal Beagle: The flag referendum:…, in reply to Ross Mason,
I’m being pedantic here, but the current NZ flag doesn’t need the most votes to win. It only requires a tie to be declared as having the greatest number of votes.
On that, I have a legal question. Does the New Zealand Flag Referendums Act bind the government to carrying out the result of the referendum? Or does it only bind the government to holding a referendum and announce the result? I haven’t looked in great detail but so far I can’t only see the latter and not the former.
It’s hard to imagine the result being ignored, but in a weird situation like a Tie I could imagine controversy around a line which says “the current New Zealand Flag is to be taken to have received the greatest number of votes” even when it didn’t. More likely, if informal votes were extremely high, or if the turnout were extremely low, it could call into question how the government should react to the declared result.
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Hard News: The flagging referendum, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
I submit we could be up against change pretty soon, once a good design is agreed on
I tentatively agree, but I’d not want to rush it. There’s no reason why the conversation can’t continue to happen, why people can’t continue to propose flags and talk about them, nor why it has to usurp conversation and resources and attention over everything else that’s important during the time it happens. If there’s a general mood that “something else” might be better some day, then maybe there’s justification to help along the process by throwing some minor resources at elevating the conversation here and there, helping people to see what’s possible and helping people draw connections to it. And when that happens, change might actually be an overwhelming consensus, possibly with no need even to narrow down possible options.
But this whole current thing of “let’s have a giant referendum RIGHT NOW out of nowhere, even though nobody knows what we want…. but we use that silver fern on a black background for all our sports stuff so it’s really obvious that it’s a perfect flag which everyone’s going to want for everything. But wait, we’ll design something new over a few months!” We’ll have a competition which receives more than 10,000 alternative options, choose four of them with a committee, force everyone to narrow those four down to one, and have a vote on it. Right NOW!
It’s really no wonder there’s so much resistence with that sort of forced process.
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Because, well, you’ve only got two options: Hitler or Stalin? Bush or Gore? Kang or Kodos? If there’s someone you like: great! If not, vote for whichever you prefer, however unpalatable your options might be.
Just to link to the obvious.
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the big dramatic shows continued to be made by the same small set of people
That reminds me of the annual school production. You could show up to the initial advertised session to show you were interested in taking part, but within 2 minutes it was patently obvoius that the teacher running the thing had decided every favourite person who'd be filling every role of the production long beforehand.
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Hard News: The flagging referendum, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
The conclusion from this would be that either:
- we should never, ever consider changing our flag
or
- we should do it by the cheapest method, which would be for Key to have whipped his MPs into passing his chosen flag through parliament without further consultation, and then introduce the new flag as old flags (and passports, licenses, aircraft, tanks, etc) are replaced or repainted.Is that method preferable?
Or… it’s not done until there’s already enough of a consensus in society that even the latter could be done without any significant controversy. Obviously a portion of people like this proposed flag, but the entire process hasn’t allowed any particular flag to grow into everyone in a way that lets them consider, understand, accept and even like it it. Instead it’s been a largely arrogant and aggressive short term marketing exercise where people are fighting over who’s the bigger idiot. It's not consensus. Like so many things with this government, it's highly polarising.
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Hard News: So what now?, in reply to John Palethorpe,
What next? Winston advocating Green policies....
In Winston's defence (ugh) NZ First has had policies about obliterating 1080 use for a while, though it's usually spearheaded by Richard Prosser. But yeah, he seems to have ignored that (briefly) with the latest media statement. Its more pure stance historically has tended to be that 1080 use should be stopped immediately, because obviously it kills everything and doesn't work and stuff. The Green Party's position is more that NZ's conservation estate is in a dire crisis, and 1080 is the only realistic option to mitigate this on anything other than a small scale, but that its use shouldn't offset the need for additional research to find more and better options.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Alfie,
That video also has 792 shares as of right now. Share it to certain places and there’s a reasonable chance it’ll go viral amongst people who might comment with extreme views.
I agree with Danyl’s suggestion, though, that some of the most vile comments seem to have been made with manufactured accounts. (This doesn't automatically mean it's a setup by Slater et al.) It’s hard to know now, because the worst have been deleted by moderators.
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Is it possible to have a discussion around here without inevitably being dragged back to labels of 'left' and 'right'?
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Stuff is reporting that from his police interview, he was making about $100k/year on royalties for Feratox since 1993, but it'd tailed off lots more recently, and no longer supported his lifestyle.
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I think the next interesting thing to find out will be how he obtained he 1080 samples he used, and what sort of auditing for access was in place.