Posts by Graeme Edgeler
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An incredible film, for everyone to enjoy on their Friday:
I promise you won't regret it, unless you suck :-P
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The National-Act-Maori-United agreements stitched up in November would still have had 65 seats out of 122, a clear majority.
That assumes that the Maori Party would have gone the same way. At the last election they didn’t have the option of going with Labour, so having some sort of deal with National was basically a fait acompli. With no threshold, there were options for Labour.
Labour + Progressives + Greens + NZF + Maori were one MP less than National + Act + United Future + Kiwi Party – who had 61 votes out of 122, and not enough to govern.
Probably, the Maori Party would have gone with National, but they might not have.
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Bill and Ben ... holding the balance of power after the 2008 election ... That sounds like way too much fun.
Oh no. Just Bill.
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every MP would have to have a majority in his/her electorate.
... How do we elect electorate MPs now -- give it to the second placed candidate, just to be fair? :)
Nope. At the moment they need a plurality. Thus Peter Dunne was elected MP for Ōhariu despite 67% of voters in the electorate voting for someone else.
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Oh, and before you say anything, I joined a Facebook group, so I've done my bit.
Not yet, you haven't. You do your bit in two years' time.
First tick "I vote to retain the present MMP system"
Second tick "I vote for the Single Transferable Vote system (STV)":-)
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Graeme: Wasn't 'vote yes to get no' only one of a number of problems with the Smacking referendum?
Yes. And now Bob is making a point about one of them. That it wasn't really a problem at all, just something people were saying at the time because they wanted to ignore the result.
And Bob was making this point via an ironic press release. That people seem to take as an indicator that irony is dead. For some odd reason.
That said, the only problem I had with the smacking referendum question was the inclusion of the word "good", and even then I'd note that "good [care and] parenting" is a phrase that actually appears is Sue Bradford's amended section 59, so it shouldn't have been too confusing for anyone.
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Because, unlike Bob, they bothered reading the relevant legislation? It's about time someone asked Bob and Co. what part of "non-binding" is beyond their pin-head powers of comprehension.
The MMP referendum in 2011 will also be non-binding. Yet the politicians are (presumably) going to accept the result and act on it.
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Family First's Bob McCoskrie on the referendum..
Good lord. I actually had to check twice to make sure that wasn't one of Lyndon's clever works of satire.
Are we sure it's not Bob McCoskrie being ironic?
[He has a sense of humour and I do think he has it in him]He's aggrieved that MPs have argued that they can ignore the result of the smacking referendum because the question was confusing because a voter wanting change in the law had to vote "no", when they're going to use the same type of question - with the same flaw* - this time 'round and are going to act on it. Basically - if a "no" means "yes" referendum is good enough for MMP, then what was the problem with a "no" means "yes" question about smacking?
Why do we think this is a media release about MMP, and not a media release using the MMP referendum to make a point about the smacking referendum?
* I suspect they're not actually going to use that question.
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Like most things, democracy is a continuum. Various arrangements are more and less democratic, but nothing will be absolutely so.
That was my point.
The suggestion I was refuting was than non-proportional democracies aren't actually democracies. I think they can be.
Those who consider that all non-proportional voting systems are undemocratic must consider that any system with a single winner (like an electorate contest, or a presidency) is not democratic.
A proof by contradiction, if you will :-)
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And a protest element might disappear if some voters decided that a protest is one thing, an actual MP is another.
You mean we can't have Bill MP :-(