Posts by izogi
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Apparently Mike Bush is on a salary of between $680k-$690k/year, which is the third highest (equal) public sector CEO salary.
I can vaguely appreciate arguments that commercial competition pays absurdly ridiculous amounts to its CEOs and so government must compete, but where’s a Police Commissioner going to go and receive an equivalent or better salary than $680,000 a year?
Is this salary meant to be entirely about accountability for things like, I don’t know, making sure the New Zealand Police adhere to the law and stuff? What’s the supposed justification for such a salary?
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Apparently iPredict is being shut down by Simon Bridges, reportedly as a money laundering risk stemming from the site not identifying its customers. Or, at the very least, it's not being given an exemption to continue operating in its current state, and is not willing to change.
It’s probably unrelated to the allegations of manipulating odds to generate headlines, but Stuff has still picked up on that…
A number of staff around Parliament, as well as MPs, are known to have used iPredict. Although some of the information brought out in public could be embarrassing to the Government, Todd believed many in the Beehive found the website “useful” and so did not think there was a political motivation to the decision.
[Edit: Whupps. I see Alfie already picked this up in another thread.]
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Legal Beagle: Voting in the Flag Referendum, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
We know at least with THIS referendum that there is a conscious spoiling of the paper.
This is sort-of what I’m getting, at though. We know that some people are spoiling voting papers in protest. But that’s only one possible reason for a spoiled voting paper. In the end, it won’t be possible to look at the resulting number and know how many people spoiled their ballot for that reason nor any other reason.
Sure, people can spin the outcome whichever way, and they will, but ultimately it’s nowhere near as meaningful as having identifiable people clearly saying what they think.
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Legal Beagle: Voting in the Flag Referendum, in reply to David Sherry,
I don’t agree with Graeme though, invalid papers WILL be seen as a protest and the protest will be noted.
I think a problem, though, remains that it'll only be seen as a protest by people who choose to see it as a protest. Annette King will be out there screaming it's a protest by thousands of people who obviously think this whole flag thing is stupid, if for no other reason than because she was previously telling people to spoil their voting papers if they wanted to protest.
But votes remain anonymous. It's not even possible to verify who marked a voting paper let alone try to identify why they did it. Even if the odd person photographs their ballot paper, where's the evidence that it's the vote they mailed away? Even if it can be verified, does that mean thousands of other ballot papers were spoiled for the same reason? It's also risky to make assumptions on why people act/vote the way they do, especially if those assumptions are just based on "but everyone I know thinks this way and I can't think of other plausible reasons". But that won't stop people making whichever assumptions most suit their agenda.
Based on past performance, if there's a significant count of spoiled votes then the PM's office will spin up some excuse for it to not matter, just as Annette King et al will spin up reasons for it to matter. It'll be processed ad-nauseum by the apologists through the machine, just to provide an excuse for anyone who needs one. Maybe the referendum process could even be abolished if private polls tell the National Party elite that it's so unpopular, but it'll be attributed to something much more excuseable than a torrent of outraged people spoiling their voting papers in protest.
I'd agree with Emma's comment on page 1. Mark your ballot paper however you like, but if you want a real message to be heard then get out and say it. Tell people. Tell MPs. Tell Ministers. Tell media. Otherwise the "message" of a spoiled ballot paper will only be regurgitated by those with a pre-existing agenda, as they see fit. Ballot papers are inanimate objects disassociated from those who marked them. They're sealed away in a place where they can't be re-opened, by law, before being destroyed, except for strictly defined reasons. Even if you wrote your reason on it, ballot papers won't argue back when their meaning is mis-represented. -
Legal Beagle: Voting in the Flag Referendum, in reply to victor brown,
If, during the count, your most preferred choice gets ruled out (by being least popular after counting first preferences), your vote is transferred to your second choice. Then, if your second choice remains least popular, your vote is transferred to your third. Then your fourth. Then your fifth. Eventually one of the options is left, and everyone's voted for it.
Everybody wins!
In practice, counting stops once an option hits 50% and it can't be overtaken.
Preferential voting tends to make sure that a less popular option won't be elected as a consequence of a larger number of voters having their votes split between two similar options. If 60% of people wanted "a fern option" but split their first preferences 20/20/20, and meanwhile 30% wanted hypnoflag, then as long as those 60% ranked the three ferns first then we'd end up with the fern option which that 60% wanted most, instead of getting a hypnoflag which fewer people wanted.
This, however, doesn't validate the mechanism by which everyone's choice was restricted or why we're doing this at all. That's really a question for the government.
I think preferential voting would be a much fairer way to vote for MPs in electorates. It'd mean candidates disliked by a majority of voters couldn't so easily win as a consequence of votes being split against similar people running against them. Parties wouldn't have to do dumb things like telling their supporters to vote for someone else so as to avoid an even less preferred option. But it comes with the cost of fewer people understanding and trusting how the counting works, and that's also quite an important thing to consider.
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Hard News: The Police Ten 7 State, in reply to Thomas Lumley,
Having the right to see the reports in advance is reasonably standard, though not uncontroversial. Veto power over publication is not.
Hypothetically, what would happen if Police attempted to veto someone's publication, but they went ahead and published anyway?
Would Police have much of a show in court if the information was, indeed, deemed discoverable under the OIA? Can a court, if given reason to do so, declare an agreement like this illegal across the board?
Not to suggest that it should be necessary to challenge this type of thing in such a way to begin with, of course.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Alfie,
My first thought on seeing this was that it's really tiresome to see MSM even bothering to pay attention to these inconsequential attention-seeking sideshows (or at least that's how they seem to me). Sadly there's still a chance Colin Craig could return at the next election, even without publicity like this to remind everyone he exists. It'd be a shame if there wasn't much of a public record of these weirdisms if and when he does.
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Legal Beagle: Voting in the Flag Referendum, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Sadly it seems that no matter how you vote you end up getting politicians.
Yes, and I’ve seen similar reasoning over and over. (They’re all useless, and so on.)
I think what gets me, though, is the way in which many people seem to lower their expectations and become accepting of it in an absolutely defeatist way, sometimes even defending it, instead of speaking out against it and demanding accountability from all politicians.
The Dirty Politics mess revealed a whole lot of crap going on, which various apologists naturally then claimed that they knew it all happened anyway. Even many regular people stood up and declared “We already knew they were useless scum”. “The opposition did it too when they were governing.” Whatever.
But why is all this stuff accepted as okay by so many people?
I get that not everyone wants to condone an opposition which they might dislike even more, but why is it somehow not okay to vote for National, or vote for Labour, or for whoever, yet still demand high standards from them?
It’s as if some people are often afraid to criticise and demand high standards from those in power because they think to do so might come across as some kind of approval of alternatives.
Or this…
I also have a nagging suspicion that some of the problems with NZ politics are the fault of the bureaucracy that surrounds the MPs.
Maybe it’s just that our system’s set up so that the political class really isn’t accountable to anyone, except the Prime Minister. But what happens when the PM’s allegedly in on it, too, or is otherwise simply not interested in enforcing accountability? What happens when the public can't reasonably hold the PM accountable in an election due to a lack of adequate alternative options?
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the police have been imposing research contracts on anyone who seeks information that ought legally to be available to any of us under the Official Information Act.
Given the OIA doesn’t require a requestor to explicitly invoke the OIA when requesting information (and specifically says it's not necessary), but rather defines how agencies must respond to requests, does this make it Ombudsman territory?
Not that I’d necessarily expect much, considering the Ombudsman’s resourcing situation.
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Legal Beagle: Voting in the Flag Referendum, in reply to linger,
Apologies if I came across as overly harsh in my earlier comment.
What you’re saying there is,
the associative logic of advertising doesn’t work,
because we’re all too smart for it.Not at all. I think the there’s plenty of evidence that advertising manipulates how people think, and I’m not entirely comfortable with how it crosses with politics and money that’s spent on political advertising. I know I get manipulated by advertising every day, sometimes I even notice exactly when it's happening as it happens, and I suspect there are few if any people who could claim otherwise.
I don’t think that alone makes people naive or stupid, and what I said was that I prefer to give people the benefit of the doubt that they’re not stupid.
Similarly I’m sure more than a few people are consciously aware that their like of the PM might relate to how well he appears to get on with the All Blacks. But what does it accomplish to declare that he’d not be popular it it weren’t for hanging out with them so much? Would that really be the case?
Granted I only have my own subjective observations to go on, but I’ve also run into plenty of people who are perfectly aware of spin around the PM, get sick of rugby, reckon the flag referendums are something dreamed up by a money-wasting moron with a giant turd for a brain, don’t especially like him, yet still claim to vote and support National. Why? That’s ultimately their business, but my best theory, derived from other things these people have often said, is that they care about other issues and policy beyond who the Prime Minister, and/or they perceive available alternatives as worse.Surely the best way to replace the government is to provide a decent alternative for people to vote for – not to skite about how the single figurehead at the top is a vacuous smiling shell made of teflon. That’s been claimed for years and really hasn’t made much of a dent.