Posts by izogi
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Hard News: About Arie, in reply to Che Tibby,
indeed. these men are HEROES!! heroes i say!!1!
According to some of the crap I saw on Channel 7 during the week or two afterwards, Australians were practically the only authorities in Christchurch --- certainly the only ones doing anything useful --- and they were all heroes!
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Can anyone confirm what's happened (if anything) with the Christchurch Airport tower? Stuff reported early on that it'd collapsed, but now I can't find a reference. I'm guessing someone mixed up the airport-closed stories with the cathedral tower.
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Hi Graeme.
The question you have to ask is: would I prefer one of those MPs to be John Key or Roger Douglas. If you really don't care, and would be exactly as (un)happy with John Key as Roger Douglas, then don't vote for either of them.
This is getting academic, but I think STV can become less representative when people don't rank all candidates. For a fair system, it really relies on all voters making a clear and informed choice about all candidates, even though this is probably unrealistic.
I tried to create a proof-of-concept example of how this could happen a few months back, which I posted at the time in a comment on Frogblog.
In essence if you have candidates A, B and C, consider that candidate C gets eliminated first by a very small margin behind both B and A. Voters for C never bothered to rank anyone else, so their votes are wasted at the point of C's elimination. Candidate A then remains ahead of B by a small margin. A significant factor overlooked by the system, however, is that everyone who voted for B had a second preference for C, but these preferences aren't counted after B's elimination because C was eliminated first... even though the total number of transferred preferences could have been nearly twice the votes of A if C hadn't been eliminated first-up. And, of course, none of the B voters ranked candidate A because they all hated A's guts.
What's effectively happened is that candidate A was elected even though only a third of voters explicitly voted for candidate A at all, despite nearly two thirds of voters explicitly indicating that they preferred candidate C over candidate A. Implicitly, I think the system implicitly divided the C-voters' preferences evenly between A and B, and this effectively put both A and B at the point where C couldn't have beaten either of them anyway, even if later preferences of B had been able to be transferred to C. I think many people would still consider it an unfair result, though, because so many people had stated outright that they wanted C rather than A, and in particular had refused to rank A at all.
There's some irony in that if C voters had ranked A and B, then either A or B would have had to win rather than C, so it might not be quite right to say that apathy of C-candidate voters prevented their own candidate being elected. There's still something twisted going on, though.
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If a multi-party coalition wants public legitimacy and a mandate, then voters need to know what they're getting into before the election.
Hypothetically, I wonder if this could be resolved with an extra round of acceptance voting. ie. People vote as present based on party campaigns, parties propose a coalition to govern and give clear and definite policies, and then voters have a second chance to accept the coalition (thereby providing a mandate) or reject it (in which case parties either try again or call another election).
Of course, in practice it has potential to be very expensive and inconvenient, and would probably also result in lower voter turnouts over time. It could also create a lengthy window without a government, although this might be reduced if the election were held a few months before a new government was due to take over.
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This is no intended defence for anyone, but as a pedestrian (in Wellington) where I frequently walk everywhere, I've noticed that cyclists can often spring out of nowhere amongst traffic. Especially in rush-hour traffic, it's easy to be keeping an eye on a very obvious line of slow-moving cars without noticing two-dimensional bikes suddenly folding out from behind them as they get closer. I came close to being involved in a collision or two, but I now force myself take a second and third look specifically for cyclists coming down Glenmore Street before I step out into slow moving traffic.
Cyclists have become much more common on the roads in the past decade or so, and they come out of different places at different speeds to other traffic. I think there must be a lot of drivers out there who simply need re-training about how to actually look for them.
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Garret should have applied for the lifting of name suppression the moment he considered public office. The fact that he didn't is deceitful to say the least. [...snip...] I may go as far as saying this was election fraud, a deliberate concealment of the facts so as to gain public office.
Yes we now know that he didn't, thanks to an anonymous leaky person, and he's already been there for a couple of years. Unless that continues to happen years after people are elected, we'll never know for sure how many other MPs are actually nasty people who didn't apply to lift their name suppression around an embarrassing crime at the time they decided to run for office. Perhaps in the grand scheme of things David Garrett was just unlucky compared with his mates, but there's no way we can know for certain.
If there was an election rule that said that a judge had to reconsider suppression orders on people who decide to run for public office, only allowing the suppression to stay under circumstances where they protect other people, for instance, there'd be a better chance that voters would be informed about who they're voting for... even if they're nasty people who'd rather keep that hidden.
I guess nearly any employer would like that kind of information about applicants and there are reasons why they don't have it. Personally I see MPs as being a special case, where name suppression shouldn't be as easy to maintain, given the responsibility they have combined with the generally lesser amount of checks and balances. It depends on where you draw the line, I guess.
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Stealing the identity of a deceased child is disgraceful.
Not to lessen this statement, but stealing the identity of anyone is disgraceful.
Shame about the name suppression. I wonder if there's a case to require name suppression be reconsidered by a judge for anyone running for public office, to decide if it's then in the public's interest to know. (Especially given the platform David Garrett campaigned on, and as long as it wasn't there to protect others.) Not that I understand the mentality of people who vote for ACT.
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@Mellopuffy -- Thanks for that. I'm sure the infrastructure damage and the CBD damage will reach everyone to an extent in one way or another for a long time to come, even if there's no serious personal property damage. Skimming overseas media, though, the reporting often seems to be based around recurring pictures of a specific selection of actual damage (car crunched by bricks, wall fallen off restaurant, floods in New Brighton seen from the air, etc). Looking at it I've had some trouble figuring out how representative it all is.
Our Chilean friends were very concerned. All they'd heard was that a major earthquake had caused extensive damage in New Zealand, and of course they're still very jumpy about earthquakes over there at the moment. (The 100,000 person town where my wife spent 6th form had its town centre pretty much destroyed back in February, and that town wasn't even serious enough to make international media.)
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Was anything in Christchurch not damaged? I've heard rumours.
I know with this kind of event it's normal for media, and everyone, to focus on damage, and understandably. It can sometimes give a skewed picture of things though.
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Tricking media is like shooting kittens in a barrel.
I agree. The real test will be if the media now keeps going back to this guy for pro-whaling comments in the same way they keep going back to McCoskrie, who also has a website... probably unlikely given how it's been so clearly revealed a hoax. (Actually in McCoskrie's defence it looks as if he's finally published a Board of Reference that lists other actual real people who agree with him.)