Posts by Idiot Savant
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At what level is a parliamentary party likely to be too small that its MPs will be unable to do a substantial amount of the work we would expect even a small party to be able to do? Perhaps if a party is so small that it can do almost none of the things we would expect of people representing our voices in the House of Representatives, the arguments in favour of thresholds have some meaning.
But surely that's a question for voters, rather than self-interested political elites, to decide?
And if the voters keep electing small parties, then the onus is on parliament to change its Standing Orders to allow them to be effective representatives, not use those arbitrary rules as an excuse to constrain voter choice. It has already done this once, around the 1996 election (when suddenly we got proxy voting, proportional distribution of select committee seats and primary questions, and a whole host of other changes). It can do it again.
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And yet they smear him as a criminal in order to save face after their over-reaction.
How typical.
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Hard News: Time to move on, in reply to Stephen Judd,
Jack, there's nothing stopping you making such OIA requests yourself...
And he can do it easily through http://fyi.org.nz/
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Hard News: The Vision Thing, in reply to Bart Janssen,
At present, I would not advise any child to become a scientist in New Zealand - that shocks and horrifies me.
That's been the case for at least a decade. There's just no job (or no secure job, which amounts to the same thing in science) at the end of it.
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Hard News: The Vision Thing, in reply to BenWilson,
A very unevenly divided pie can't grow very fast, because neither the people with the big piece, nor those with a very small piece, are incentivized to grow it. A worker, totally alienated from the profits of the company, doesn't really give much of a shit, at heart, about the performance of the company, which is just as likely to sack them in good times or bad, just to make better profits for shareholders.
And by extension, a population which does not share in economic growth has no reason to care about it, except possibly to oppose it to prevent their relative position from getting even worse. And where that growth comes from actively reducing living standards at the bottom (wage cuts, service cuts, reductions in labour standards), people have an active reason to fight against it.
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Hard News: The Vision Thing, in reply to BenWilson,
Except all of those things (regional development, telecommunications, energy, resources, consumer rights, plsu the new immigration, building standards, science, and immigration) need doing (and need oversight by their own Ministers, to boot).
You can't just remove entire government functions by changing an organisation chart.
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The idea that immigration, science, and labour rights policy will now all be driven by economic development fills me with confidence.
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Hard News: The Vision Thing, in reply to 3410,
Why is "vision" "a delicate word"?
Roger Douglas.
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Interestingly, there are about 50,000 more registered jobseekers than unemployed persons in the HLFS. Is this underemployment, or people who haven't really left the labour force?
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Rhetoric that would once have been deemed unacceptable is now becoming more mainstream here. A recent demonstration in Athens involved a performance with an actor dressed as Hitler and another as an SS officer pretending to rape a woman representing Greece.
There's a context to this. the last time the Germans ran the Greek economy, they looted the place so thoroughly that 300,000 Greeks starved to death.
The great achievement of the European Union was to bury all that and let Europe move on as a settled continent. German moralising and subversion of democracy has ripped off that scab and brought all the nationalistic pus bubbling to the surface again.