Posts by Rich of Observationz
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Hard News: The Next Labour Leader, in reply to Bart Janssen,
China does not have extremely rich soil
IANAF, but nor does NZ, right? That's why we need the topdressing planes?
Also IANC, but China is a bloody huge place. I'm sure some of it must have decent soil (and if a country is sufficently determined, it can make farmland out of poor beginnings. Look at all the Dutch farmland that used to be the North Sea).
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Waitakere Man has a good little plumbing business and fancies a house at Pauanui
And doesn’t realise that he’ll never be able to afford a beach house, with Key’s mates having driven the price up to six-figure levels. That plumbing business? Won’t look so sweet when the banks can no longer fund people’s new bathrooms.
And the V8 isn't going to be much use when gas tops $5 a litre.Which really frames the directional issue for Labour:
- Do they position themselves as a centre-centre party competing with National on "competence" in trying to keep the whole middle-class affluence engine going as long as possible. That way, they'll get elected in 3/6/9 years when the public is disenchanted or just bored with the Nats and wants a change of face for a few years.
- Or do they consider that actually the "affluence engine" isn't sustainable and we need an alternative strategy to actually fix things? (as opposed to waiting for them to crash, introducing "austerity" (for the 99%, not the 1%) and aligning policies with the opposition to deny people a choice).
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Legal Beagle: Election '11 -…, in reply to Michael Homer,
Thanks for that - it looks like a workable system. I'd note that they use a list-only system - and the Netherlands has four times our population and quite marked regional differences.
I wonder why we didn't at least get the choice of a pure list system on our ballot paper?
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Hard News: How long the leash on the…, in reply to Rich Lock,
Has some sort of subtle humour in your post just gone over my head?
Yes. Spend the weekend trying to work it out.
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Hard News: How long the leash on the…, in reply to Rich Lock,
Historical ignorance and distortion on a large scale.
- Von Braun’s level of nazi collaboration was about the same as that of the majority of Germans. They joined the army, helped in the war effort, ignored the fact there didn’t seem to be any Jewish people around any more.
While shooting them or systematically starving them was considered as an option, it was rightly rejected.
- The German rocket engineers were pretty much given design authority from the beginning, and certainly from the point that the US did anything more elaborate than assembling and firing a V2.
- Russian rockets did blow up just as frequently as American ones.
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In that hypothetical situation, people would have elected Phil as an electorate MP and because he is a member of the Labour Party, got their next list person elected, who happened to be Judith Tizard.
If they didn't like that, they could have voted for another candidate. If the Labour party felt that Judith was such a bad candidate, they could have not selected her to the list. (She was my MP when I lived in Auckland, could see much wrong with her. Didn't actually *vote* for her or anything - I voted for Nandor).
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most won't bother
That's a feature. If you don't care, then you vote for a party and accept their choice of list. You had the option to express and opinion and didn't take it.
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That's an awesome idea.
Maybe we could have a "don't buy a paper day" where people donated the money saved to real journalists?
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Up Front: What if We Held an Election…, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
And a written language that was created at a time of low-cost printing.
(English didn't really get its spelling standardised until the 18th/19th century. Before then, spelling was a matter of personal and local preference).
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Legal Beagle: Election '11 -…, in reply to Dave Guerin,
Exactly. The number of votes a candidate gets is largely determined by the demographics of the seat (as well as any tendency to vote tactically). A candidate for National in South Auckland or Labour on the North Shore is guaranteed a poor showing, even if they're the smartest and most diligent politician out there.
There's also the fact that parties would simply ensure that their favoured list candidates were also running in winnable seats.
We haven't been given any choices of truly proportional systems with a single class of MP. One option is a list-only system (as in Iceland). Another would be to have multi-member constituencies elected by STV, but with the results adjusted to achieve countrywide proportionality. E.g: if the Greens were underrepresented versus National, the highest polling unelected Green would go in and the lowest polling Nat would drop out.