Posts by izogi
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Hard News: Will the grown-ups ever…, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Honestly, and I'm not proud to be this cynical, I think the only way an adult is getting into this particular room is when The Herald and the "gossip media" manage to hound someone into a suicide's grave.
I think I'm even more cynical than you on this. To me it seems the irresponsibility being shown is the same kind which would, I'm sure, be perfectly complacent with blaming suicide on the victim.
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Hard News: This Anzac Day, in reply to Hebe,
Apparently since the Holiday's Act, cafe's can now open on ANZAC Saturday if they close on the following Monday. Or something.
That seems rather weird. If it was merely about ensuring that all of your workers has one of the two days off, it's hard to see why large supermarkets and similar would have bothered to close at all. But instead, businesses can open on ANZAC Day Saturday as long as they keep their doors shut on a future day which has little significance except being the Monday after?
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Hard News: This Anzac Day, in reply to simon g,
I started to feel uncomfortable about all this a few weeks ago, when the Camp Gallipoli Event at Ellerslie (since cancelled) was being advertised.
After I heard the Australian promoter talking on NatRad about how (from memory) it was New Zealanders' fault for not getting in to support something great, I felt mildly relieved that maybe we haven't gone quite so far just yet.
But it's depressing reading this comment thread. I've been disconnected from ANZAC events for a few years because, as well as marrying someone who basically doesn't care about it, I also couldn't closely relate to the highly patriotic Australianised ceremonies over the ditch during the time I lived there. I'd hoped that all this year's stuff might just be a one-off 100 year thing, but it sounds like we're going the Australian way, perhaps.
Leaving the Wellington dawn parade this morning, I noticed at least a couple of cafes open on Cuba Street, at least one of which had some ANZAC themed advertising out front taking advantage of the mass exodus, and Burger King on Lambton Quay appeared to be open. Are they allowed to trade on ANZAC morning these days?
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Up Front: Reviewing the Election, in reply to Moz,
Gee, Moz. It's just a compromise over not being able to vote at all, as happens presently, before people grow up and have the same rights for voting as everyone other resident. The point is to have something that might help to foster engagement earlier while people are still under the influence of school, to remove an isolating gap between when people leave school and when they're eventually expected to consider what's happening and vote. Ie. Encourage people into a habit early, in response to Emma's assertion (paragraph 4) that young non-voters remain non-voters as they get older.
Aside from people who have already missed out because they're no longer in school, that's no more exclusive than what we have already. Everyone graduates to a real vote for a real system when they get older.
Maybe it's totally appropriate to let kids vote directly into the current system. That's another issue again, and it can work then great. But if it isn't then I think there's merit in at least having something.
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Up Front: Reviewing the Election, in reply to BenWilson,
I think there’s pretty sound reasons not to let them vote, quite aside from whether they would show up. 14 year olds are legally children. They have far lesser responsibilities than adults.
As in my earlier comment (but which was not well phrased), what about in some kind of segregated parliamentary system that’s tied to the real one?
Let younger people vote for representatives. Those reps get speaking time in parliament. They get allowances for travelling and meeting people to understand issues. They get some reasonable amount of access to the rest of the system, including people with influence. They get a position to push for publicity of issues which concern youth. They can take part in relevant select committees or whatever else with agreement of others in parliament, and communicate what’s happeniing back to those they represent. This time, however, it’s directly on behalf of youth, instead of being from MPs who were voted for by their parents, if those parents bothered to vote at all.
Maybe youth representatives don’t have full, or any, voting rights on legislation, if that’s a concern, unless the rest of parliament decides to ask them to vote. As people then grow up into mature, responsible adults as determined by their age, they can elect representatives who do have voting rights, through the same polling booths and the same process.
I don’t know exactly how it could or should work but I think that encouraging young people to take an active interest in politics and actually vote for someone, if targeting people in school is the path to encouraging people to retain an interest, would be more effective if those young people can then take part in something which actually has some relevance.
School should be a great place to offer civics education and get people interested in how the government works and how they can influence it. Yet presently, many people will have spent multiple years completely outside school before they have even their first opportunity to cast a vote. Sometimes longer if they’ve left school early. Start it at 14 or thereabouts, get them on the electoral roll early, and everyone gets to cast at least one vote while they’re still at school, or not far gone from it, unless they choose not to.
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Speaker: We don’t make the rules, we're…, in reply to Fraser Rolfe,
I don’t see why Spark et al don’t just sit back and wait for circumventing geo-blocking to become illegal.
Through some kind of deluded reasoning, I've wondered if the thinking could be that if they lose a court case then it creates more ammunition for lobbying the government about why it's so critical for the law to be changed to preserve their business model.
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Up Front: Reviewing the Election, in reply to BenWilson,
Is there evidence that it does more than add noise to the result?
In my limited experience of an Australian local election I cast a donkey vote ranking thirty-something candidates, which felt stupid and destructive to their election (because adding noise is all it does) but after a few hours of headaches trying to read candidate blurbs and understand local issues for a region I barely lived in and failing dismally to care, I just didn't feel I had an option.
At the time I went to pains to search the rules about the legality of submitting spoiled ballots. I may well have missed something, but I think I went above and beyond what could be reasonably expected of most voters, and all I could find were overboard official statements explaining how to vote correctly and the penalty for not doing so, but nothing to say whether it was legal to cast a vote that was invalid.
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Up Front: Reviewing the Election, in reply to Bart Janssen,
It could be quite a cool thing, though. Political parties could send delegates around schools to speak to youth about their voting decisions they’d actually be making towards a real outcome, have debates and so on. Being at local political debates is often a completely different experience from watching the highlighted trash of parliament. Sometimes there’s even evidence that MPs and candidates (certainly some of them) can act in civilised ways, contrary to the entrenched view I suspect more than a few people have of everything to do with politics.
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Up Front: Reviewing the Election, in reply to Heather Gaye,
What would happen if we dropped the voting age to, say, 14?
That could be interesting if it makes it easier for schools to foster more youth interest while they're still inside the system. (Cue people complaining about partisan teachers.)
If there are too many cold feet amongst those who aren't certain that the developing brains of the irresponsible irrational impressionable youth would vote for the same correct options as the deteriorating brains of us responsible rational rigid adults, is there at least some way that part of the parliament's representation could be allocated for youth reps to vote for, at least as a trial run?
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Up Front: Reviewing the Election, in reply to Grant Taylor,
I wonder whether a lot of young people just don’t ‘get’ politics. They don’t see how it is relevant. Most of the post-young people I have met who don’t vote (there aren’t many of these in my daily life, so small sample), don’t do it out of a sense of pointlessness, just a sense of irrelevance, “what’s-it-got-to-do-with-me?"-ness.
I’ve never felt like not casting a vote in a New Zealand election. Even when I was younger and thought all options were stupid, I intentionally went to the polling booth and spoiled my voting paper so it’d still be counted. I loyally voted from overseas because I always planned to come back, even without the specific plan.
BUT, I had my first taste of utter indifference during my few years in Australia recently. I have dual citizenship through inheritence, and they picked up that I’d arrived when we signed up for electricity and I had to sign a statement saying I was a citizen. Meaning no disrespect to the wonderful country of Australia, we never had plans to remain there long term. I didn’t feel as if I had any reasonable stake in its future, or Vic’s future. Being made to vote in the local election for a geometric rectangle of suburban houses and roads, where I’d spend 7 hours sleeping each night but otherwise had very little commitment to or understand of, just felt like an insult to the people who must actually be living there long term and understand the issues and care about the place. If I wasn’t forced to vote then I wouldn’t have.
It gave me a new perspective on voter apathy in New Zealand, though, especially when trying to explain this to my (Australian) aunt who’s well in the camp of it being everyone’s duty to vote. Is it always that some people simply don’t understand politics and find it too confusing and irrelevant to bother with or don't see options they like, or more that they don’t feel a very strong connection to New Zealand and its future?