Posts by Rich of Observationz
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Hard News: Haphazardly to war, in reply to Russell Brown,
You'd have to consider that more survey respondents are likely to give frank answers to such a survey in places like Britain and France (where more people approved of IS than the percentage of Muslims in those countries, albeit before their atrocities got much publicity) than in dictatorships like Egypt or Saudi.
Not to mention that 5% is a lot of support for an insurgent movement. 400 or so IRA fighters kept 30,000 UK security force members busy for thirty years.
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useful for the party apparatus to judge the candidate’s mettle before potentially standing them in a more-winnable seat
Interestingly, with National’s last three train-crashes (Mike Sabin, Aaron Gilmore and Claudette Hauiti) this process did not take place.
This would be worse if you had a ban on dual-candidacy. You’d get the main parties 30 or 40 best candidates (along with various seat-warming has-beens) in electorate seats, then the next 30 or so on the list, then a tail of trainees in marginal and unwinnable seats.
I’d expect a trail of by-elections as Brian Boofhead and Betty Bunny-Boiler won (through their high public profile as a sportsman or shock-jock) election for marginal seats and then fell foul of a conviction for spectacular misdeeds.
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I think you need to parse my words again:
...would have been considered “worthy” by your logic
As in; you believe that someone who wins an electorate seat (even where that seat, like Helensville or Mangere, would be won by the proverbial trained monkey with the appropriate coloured rosette) is more "worthy" of being elected an MP than someone who is elected on the list.
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Legal Beagle: The Northland by-election;…, in reply to sean mahoney,
many candidates ( including Andrew Little ) were rejected at the polls but still in Parliament. There may be a good reason they are rejected yet this gets wiped out
They weren't rejected at the polls. If the voters (as a whole) wanted to reject Andrew Little, they could have given Labour a sufficiently low party vote that a candidate of his ranking didn't get in. They didn't.
Andrew Little didn't get elected in New Plymouth because that constituency has moved to the right along with much of provincial NZ (and many potential Labour voters are on the Maori roll). If he'd elbowed the Labour candidate in Mangere aside (as would happen under FPP) he'd have a huge majority and would have been considered "worthy" by your logic.
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he’d be resigning as the electorate MP
Could the MP not make it clear in their resignation letter what they are resigning as?
Also, consider:
S.55 (1) The seat of any member of Parliament shall become vacant...
and
S.134 (1) If the Speaker is satisfied that the seat of a member elected as a consequence of inclusion of the member’s name on a list submitted under section 127 has become vacant
Is the list in S.55 the *only* grounds a seat can become vacant, or could the Speaker consider that the seat of a list member who has been elected as an electorate MP and hence cannot fulfil the role of a list MP is automatically vacated?
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Legal Beagle: The Northland by-election;…, in reply to Steve Barnes,
Read the article again.
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Hard News: Haphazardly to war, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Pine Gap was originally put there because a US spy satellite (Keyhole, possibly) hadn't got room for the hardware for an encrypted downlink and so they used an unencrypted beam - the idea was that the Russians wouldn't be able to set up a monitoring dish in the middle of Australia.
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Interesting.
I suspect one conclusion, if you're the sort of person who thinks democracy is a waste of public money, is that we shouldn't have by-elections and should instead just allow the departing members party to nominate a new candidate, maintaining proportionality. I would not agree with that though, although I admit it has some logic.
(In UK politics, where there are more MPs and five year terms, by-elections have more importance in that a government with a small majority will tend to have it eroded by subsequent by-elections which tend to go against the party in power. This happened to the 74-79 Labour government).
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I see “Jihadi John” has been “identified”
They won't identify Jihad Jerry though:
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I’m not advocating the shooting down of civilian aircraft BTW, or even suggesting the military force might be appropriate with Fiji (economic sanctions, including a ban on aircraft and ships that have visited Fiji ports and the criminalisation of coup/military participation might have been).
But many conflicts since the US Civil War have showed that a country with brave and resourceful troops (the Confederacy, Japan, Germany*2) will lose to an opponent able and willing to bring superior economic resources to bear.
(Not Vietnam and Afghanistan, obviously. But those were wars for national survival on one hand and marginal strategic advantage on the other).