Posts by izogi
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Hard News: The Solemnity of the Day, in reply to Paul Campbell,
Why not open the thread on polling experiences now?
I voted this morning from Australia, and if I wasn't already loosely following the election in NZ I don't think I'd have realised there was one, except that the electoral commission (knowing where I lived from me having pro-actively updated the roll) sent me a letter some time back telling me how to download special voting papers, and last week the Green Party sent me a letter, bulk-sent from a mail centre outside Melbourne, reminding me that there was an election coming and suggesting why I should vote for them. Historically it makes some sense that the only party I heard from when overseas was the Green Party.
Yesterday browsing a random blog I discovered the election was actually this weekend, and that I'd have to figure out very smartly how to get my vote in. It turns out that after printing the form (I don't own a printer) I'd need to either fax the forms (I don't own a fax), or put the various forms into three separate envelopes (only a coincidence I actually own any envelopes), then either post it to arrive before Friday (I don't own any stamps so that'd have been a hassle) or drop it into one of two posts in all of Victoria. Fortunately they're both within 10 minutes walk of where I work in the CBD, so I hopped over to the Victorian Electoral Commission today during my lunch break with my two labelled sealed envelopes inside a third sealed envelope. T'was all part of the process of being a voter overseas, I guess, and I probably had it very easy by comparison, but I'm glad I didn't have to bother with trying to post anything!
I offered to drop a form in for my wife, who works well out of town, but she's not keen on voting because she doesn't have a clue what's been happening in NZ over the past year or so, and generally thinks all politicians are slimy and manipulative.
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Hi Graeme.
A $300 deposit is required for each candidate, and $1000 is required to nominate a party list.
Is the $1000 in addition to $300 for each candidate on the list? Or is it a $1000 flat rate for submitting a list of any length?
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Hard News: On Science, in reply to Bart Janssen,
The CRI model also created competition and a pretty poisonous relationship and times between CRIs themselves and between CRIs and the Universities.
This certainly seems true. Some of the inside anecdotes I've heard from friends about interactions between entities that you'd think should get along, like NIWA and the Met Service, seem positively bizarre with the way information is aggressively defended for commercial use, except for carefully crafted working-together publicity stunts. And yet this is what the model encourages or requires of them.
Any politician that boasts about promoting innovation in that environment is telling porkies.
Talk to nearly any scientist who relies on competitive grants and they'll have stories about frustrations of rarely being able to do what they do best, and instead spending large portions of their time creating applications for funding, having to explain (or make up) likely results before they have any results to "prove" their research is worth funding more than the next person.
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Legal Beagle: Referendum Fact Check #5:…, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
MPs have not really crossed the floor against their party in a very long time in New Zealand.
Although (I think) they've occasionally had disputes with their parties to the extent that they've left them, or been kicked out, and afterwards started voting more independently. Not to suggest that this is a great argument for independence of FPP and voting within parties. It's probably the opposite. (ie. A "don't you dare cross the floor or we'll cut you off!" sort of thing.)
Did this even happen under FPP? The earliest ones I remember were in the early MMP years.
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Speaker: Why Auckland, and New Zealand,…, in reply to Gabor Toth,
This enabled them to widen the street and turn Courtenay Place into a public transport hub to coincide with the electrification of the trams in 1904 and the gradual extension of the tramlines out to the suburbs (particularly with the completion of the Hataitai tram tunnel in 1907).
Tram infrastructure left quite an imprint over much of Wellington. The main reason for the wide, winding shallow-gradient roads up towards Brooklyn and Karori is that they were the steepest gradient fully-loaded trams could get up, and that was using the special trams built with the lower gear ratios, or whatever the equivalent is for electric engines.
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The point is that public television can deliver programming outside the bounds of the demographics targeted by the ad agencies upon whom commercial broadcasters rely, and outside of the need to win every timeslot. It can serve audiences that are loss-making for commercial broadcasters.
Hi Russell. I agree, but I also think it worth emphasising that there's more to public television than screening programmes that don't fit the target demographic for advertisers. When I lived in NZ I'd often prefer watching TVNZ6 and TVNZ7 simply because they showed me good content without frequently spewing a distracting commercial mess in my face as a price of viewing it. From the private side I remember SKY made a big selling point of less commercially-polluted content in its early days, but that seemingly didn't last much longer than it took for SKY to get a critical mass of customers and content. (Haven't seen SKY for ages, though.) If part of the goal is to ensure loss-making audiences are served by broadcast television (which I'm guessing implies a right for people to be able to view content relevant and interesting for themselves on TV), I think there's a reasonable argument to include audiences who want content that might be of wider interest yet just don't always want ulterior commercial motives in their face for their entire TV viewing experience. Of course I guess a line needs to be drawn somewhere.
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One of the arguments for the 5% threshold is that it keeps extremist parties supported by a small minority of voters out of Parliament. The threshold is also said to stop our party system fracturing into too many small parties such that governmental stability is threatened, and that a party with just one or two MPs (which we’d get with no threshold) can’t be an effective voice in Parliament
This is really only an issue, imho, because we're all still so hung up on a polarised bipartisan FPP world that there's no way on Earth our two largest political parties could get it through some thick skulls to consider formally working together, even though historically they're comparably close on many issues, given how they're both perpetually vying for swing voters. It's so important to put on a show of how absolutely different they are that elections and chances in government will be sacrificed for it.
People fret about whether small parties like the Greens might go with National instead of Labour, or more realistically whether the Maori Party or NZ First or whatever might go with National or Labour, but the concept that Labour might ever formally partner with National in a major way is so preposterous and against the accepted political morals on all sides that not even those in the major parties would consider it.
Granted it'd probably be the death of one or both of the two large parties to work with "the enemy", but if MMP was working from a clean slate with no psychological baggage from previous systems and an expectation that people vote for what they want given multiple choices, rather than voting against what they don't want given two choices, you'd think it might be far more natural for the most popular parties to simply work together in a way that left any minor, extremist parties for dust. Wave goodbye to the tail-wagging-the-dog meme.
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Hard News: We interrupt this broadcast ..., in reply to Russell Brown,
David Cunliffe, former corporate consultant, is presented as an old-fashioned tramper.
Actually one of the most off-putting things I found in that video was David Cunliffe casually carrying a big pack without using the hip-belt to off-set the load. I bet there was barely anything in it!
Of course, I also had the sound mostly down because I didn't want my wife to notice me watching a political broadcast. Labour didn't subtitle it so I really only had pictures to influence my judgement.
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Hard News: Winning the RWC: it's complicated, in reply to Russell Brown,
It does annoy me sometimes when people just declare it to be true that family violence spikes on the night a team loses,
Sorry, Russell. It seems I threw in a bad and hasty example and didn't intend to mis-lead. I really just meant to allude to how invested New Zealand is in this one sport.
I don't believe for a second that most New Zealanders get unusually depressed or elated according to rugby fortunes, but people could be forgiven for thinking so. There's just so much infrastructure and investment throughout the media, heavy sponsorship, private companies, public entities, and constant reminders compared with any other sport or activity. It's great to enjoy a game, but when things are bad that juggernaut doesn't stop chugging.
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Hard News: Winning the RWC: it's complicated, in reply to HackneyKiwi,
Living in the UK for a while I don't get the sense they're any less obsessed by football, the difference being is their national teams are often pretty rubbish.
It's been interesting living in Australia for a while now and experiencing some differences. I'm sure there are complexities below the surface, but I've had the impression that whereas New Zealanders are sometimes ultra-obsessed specifically with rugby and seem to get overjoyed or depressed with some kind of correlation (or at least media portrayal might have you believe this), Australians are just ultra-obsessed with backing whichever sports team or individual happens to be winning at the time. Anyone who's having a bad day just gets shrugged off and ignored for a while because they're no fun to be around.