Posts by Graeme Edgeler
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Your ideal level of threshold?
Probably zero, but moving from Sainte-Laguë to modified Sainte-Laguë.
If we're to have one (which I concede is likely), no higher than 3%, probably 2.5% (which is three MPs in a 120-seat Parliament - a level I consider high enough that your party isn't a joke, can play a small but very real role in legislating and holding the government to account, and is sufficiently high that there's something really wrong about telling the voters who supported that party that they're not important enough to matter).
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Well, I don't think that's quite concurring.
I favour abolishing the constituency seat exception.
I favour lowering the threshold (or abolishing it).
I particularly favour doing both.Lowering the threshold is more important to me than abolishing the constituency seat exception, but I would favour doing that even even if we didn't lower the threshold.
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I still don't think it's right that a party that scores 4% nationally should win that share of the house due to a single constituency win.
I concur. A party that gets 4% of the party vote nationally should get 4% of the House irrespective of whether they win a constituency.
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But the playing field could be leveled. There could be two questions: 1. What voting system would you like?, and 2. how many MPs do you want?
Of course, you might want to proffer a different answer to the second question, depending on the result of the first.
The increased MPs wasn't particularly tied to the voting system by the Royal Commission.
It wasn't tied at all. They wanted to increase the effectiveness of select committees, enlarge the talent pool for ministerial office, and increase the number of ministers.
They also thought it should be higher, but were of the view that people wouldn't like that idea, but when the public realised how much more awesome a Parliament of 120 MPs was over a Parliament of 97, they'd be sure to support an increase to 140 and beyond, so that it could be even more awesome a Parliament.
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To allow them 5% of the house with only one electorate win compounds that further.
Parties don't get 5% of the House with one electorate win, they get 5% of the House with 5% of the party vote. For example, Jim Anderton's Progressive got one constituency and have one seat overall based on their 0.9% of the party votes.
Seems about right to me.
And certainly better than a party getting 55% of the seats with 40% of the votes as National managed in 1981, or 50.5% of the seats with 35% of the vote as they did in 1993.
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Nuremberg and Tokyo made it very clear that the primary responsibility for the more wide ranging crimes that led to those orders still lies further up the chain of command, as the sweeping indictments in those trials made evident.
I'm not sure that the Tokyo War Crimes Trial made all that much of anything clear.
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But didn't the Royal Commission recommend 120 whatever the system, and the government then screwed with it putting 120 MPs in the MMP option, and 99 in the FPP option?
Yes, but I think that's a little unfair. Parliament gave us the option between the status quo and an alternative. That's the only proper way to do something like this.
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But does the law prevent them from screwing around with other things, like number of MPs between the two systems? That's where they mangled things in 1993.
That was hardly Parliament's fault in 1992/3 - the Royal Commission recommended the increase to 120.
The current statutory review of MMP (if that wins) includes a prohibition on looking at the number of MPs, and I anticipate that any statutory look at some other system would as well.
There is nothing to stop Parliament from deciding that their first-past-the-post system would have 100 MPs, but I don't think they will:
1. neither major party looks like they want to play games with this; and
2. they'd need majority support in Parliament (and that's the next Parliament, not the current one) - so unless National and Labour jack it up between themselves, they'll likely need the support of either the Greens or the Maori Party (this assumes National + ACT won't be a majority by themselves).And of course, there's nothing to stop them mucking around with this even if MMP wins =)
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When I watched that video, the words of Jacob Bronowski came powerfully to me...
Speaking of video:
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But parliament will screw it up afterwards right?
I'm confident that won't be the case. First past the post and preferential vote largely write themselves. They'd have to try really hard to stuff up supplementary member more than it is already, and while they could muck around with STV, they'd look stupid doing it, because the things you'd want to muck around with are reasonably technical =)