Posts by Matthew Poole
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New layout looks OK, though will take some getting used to.
How's the RSS arranged? Newest OP, or most-recent comment? I can't tell, and I used the separate RSS feed for PAS for precisely that purpose: find out which threads have new comments. Definitely a dislike if that's no longer possible.
Also, what's with the preview button being greyed-out? It works, but having it dimmed is a UI indication that it's disabled. Not good design.
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Got to remember that a lot of people know that their electorate vote isn't necessarily going to come close to making a difference. So the link between the party and electorate vote might be a little frivilous.
I'd be one of those. Voted for Worthless Dick in the vain hope of keeping Rodney out of Parliament, but cast my party vote Green. I imagine there were a few of us in Epsom who went a similar way, or split Worth/Labour.
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Graeme, this is where we encounter the problem of people not knowing how the calculations are done. I would say that I know more about our electoral system than the average voter, and I still couldn't have explained exactly how they work out how many seats get allocated to whom. So when someone says "abolish the threshold, it restricts democratic participation", the logical conclusion is that they mean a single vote will get you an MP. An erroneous conclusion, as it turns out, but not one that's divorced from defensible logic when confronted with the paraphrased statement above.
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He doesn't. That's not what abolition of the threshold involves.
Except that his wording suggested that he considers any limitation on votes leading to representation to be an imposition on one's democratic rights. Which lead me to the conclusion that he did indeed mean that a single vote would be enough to get you a seat. After all, anything less is "restricting people's rights" by negating votes because there are too few to matter.
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I/S, it's only a straw man if one doesn't understand how a fixed-size Parliament can end up with over-hang but not have the same effect if you give everyone who gets 0.00000001% of the party vote a seat. Which, as it happens, I didn't.
You talk of the threshold as depriving people of a right, say abolition will fix that "problem", and now say that there's a system that, actually, will still negate the voting effect of a potentially large number of voters. Pardon me for not seeing how any kind of limit on minimum numbers of votes could possibly fix this notional interference with the right to exercise one's democratic voice. -
Any solution which involves restricting people's rights is a backwards step, not a forward one.
Who's restricting whose rights? You can vote for any party that's listed, or even write in your own if you so choose. The right to vote is not being interfered with or modified in any way through the existence of the threshold.
If you equate not putting a representative into Parliament for every party that gets a single vote with interfering with someone's rights, you've got a fairly interesting definition of "right".Also, complete abolition of the threshold would pretty much ensure that Parliament blew out to a completely unmanageable size and cost. You could find 500 people who would agree to support each other in all registering political parties. The guarantee of a seat if you get a single vote ensures that people will game the system in order to get a cushy job with a hefty salary. There must be a bottom limit in order to avoid such an occurrence, unless you consider that people have a right to play the letter of the rules and end up on the public payroll.
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There never has been a parliamentary role in this country for an avowedly marxist party, and I do not see one in the future.
Who said anything about Marxist? It's possible to be left of Labour (even left of the new, cuddly Labour) and still be far from Marxist.
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Keep MMP, change this single-seat rule. Please.
The solution is either to drop the threshold to some very low value like 1 or 2% (in order to at least keep some level of serious representation), or to require that a party that gets an MP in on an electorate must also cross the threshold in order to get list MPs. Or both.
Dropping the threshold requirement as soon as a party gets an electorate seat gives us the nonsense of Rodney hauling in Garrett and the Zombie of Parliaments Past whilst Winston gets nothing despite having more popular support. I don't particularly object to Winston getting nothing, but it sure does rankle that the 3.4% Mussolini gets to bring a supporting cast of four off fewer party votes. -
There are a number of people close to the Greens who would like to see Bradford start a proper social justice party. Their feeling is that the new Greens leadership don't give sufficient levels of anything resembling a damn about the socially disadvantaged, and that's borne out by things like Greens members supporting the anti-prostitution by-law proposed by the erstwhile Manukau City Council. There's also the whole other discussion about the pragmatist vs idealist approach that saw the CERRA supported by the "new" Green Party whereas the "old" Green Party would've voted against it as a matter of absolute principle.
If Bradford and McCarten were to play the social justice line, and fill that gaping void in our political landscape, they'd probably have a lot of support. Maori sovereignty would fit within that ideological space, which is where Harawira would come in. -
and if that smiley Key guy would just kindly step aside those same talking points would be National party policy by lunchtime
Or if he can just win them the next election. I, and many others I suspect, am far from convinced that National are not using the first term to soften up the electorate before the second term unleashes "National of old" politics upon us. We already know that flogging off SOEs will be firmly on the agenda for a second term and we've seen a number of un-cuddly policies appear already this term, championed by the likes of Paula "got mine, screw youse" Bennet, Tony "education is bad for the taxpayer" Ryall, and Gerry "mine the world" Brownlee.