Posts by Idiot Savant
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But what say 10,000 New Zealand Twitter users wrote flagrantly infringing messages? Or even the same flagrantly infringing message? Who do you charge there? The Electoral Commission is talking tough (see the update at the bottom of Toby's blog post), but exactly what would it do in the face of mass disobedience?
Realistically, they're screwed - they're just not resourced for that level of infringement, and PRwise its a nightmare. And making noise about it will just encourage people to break the law. Basically, they're just going to have to turn a blind eye, unless political parties organise it (in which case I'm all for prosecutions and jailings; dumbarses are one thing, but deliberately trying to subvert our electoral law so as to gain an unfair advantage by people who should and do know better is quite another).
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Legal Beagle: Voting Referendum: Jus' Sayin', in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
Single Transferable Vote (STV) is generally accepted to be a proportional system, in which minority views are properly represented.
Though with a higher effective threshold than we have at present.
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Legal Beagle: Voting Referendum: Jus' Sayin', in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
With a smaller 120 MP House, no overhang, and National and the Greens each dropping a seat, their seat share would be closer to its proper proportion.
Yes, but only because of the wasted vote. Meanwhile, it increases the relative rewards for overhang, and thus encourages parties to pursue one.
2. It’s not my solution. I’m fine with overhang, but I do note that others (e.g. Scotland, Wales, London(?)) don’t have overhang and are fine.
Wales may not expand its parliament, but it certainly has overhang. Just look at their latest election results. And Scotland has the same problem. In their case, its due to a broken version of MMP, with regional proportionalisation and a poor balance between electorate and list seats.
Getting rid of overhang wouldn’t break MMP, and if the majority of people want the feature gone, I’m happy to go along with the flow.
This I can agree with. It won't break it, and its not worth dying in a ditch over (unlike the big parties efforts to get rid of the electorate lifeboat, which will break things significantly). But I don't regard it as especially desirable.
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Legal Beagle: Voting Referendum: Jus' Sayin', in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
The Māori Party didn't obtain overhang. National and the Greens are the beneficiaries of an overhang caused by the Māori Party.
That's a wierd way of putting it. Surely the major beneficary is the party which has more seats than they would be entitled to by the party vote?
Now, we can't take those electorate seats off them. But your implied solution - penalising other parties - actually produces a [i]less[/i] proportional, and therefore less fair, result. And for what? A round number of MPs?
Screw that. While I hate overhangs, that solution seems worse than the disease.
(As for the disease itself, its the price we pay for clinging to geographic electorates. If you like electorates, you have to accept overhangs...)
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OnPoint: Budget 2011: A Credible Path to…, in reply to Danyl Mclauchlan,
Don't worry! Treasury confidently predict 4.0% annual wage growth for six years! Which, as far as I can tell, has not happened in New Zealand in at least the last hundred years!
And at the same time, they're squashing public service salaries by requiring departments to fund superannuation out of their budgets with no increase. Which means no pay rises, which in turn means less pressure on private sector employers to raise theirs.
So where are these wage rises meant to come from? Who is meant to get them? Un-unionised fast-food workers on 90-day contracts?
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Hard News: Budget 2011: While you wait, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
My calculation would have that at $660pa (i.e. 6% of $11,000).
I'm working on the new threshold, just as I'm working on the new salary.
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Experienced nurses can get $60K a year, plus overtime, according to the (expired) NZNO MECA. Again, not exactly terrible victims of the top tax-bracket, are they?
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Oh, but primary school teachers can top out (after 7 years) at $71,000. And the net ffect of Labour's top tax-rate on them was about $60 a year. Quelle horreur!
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Hard News: Budget 2011: While you wait, in reply to Jimmy Southgate,
Doctors aren't exactly the sort of people normally associated with being a wage slave are they? I haven't met many poor ones.
Likewise, Nurses tend not to earn $70,000 a year. And the teachers pay scale tops out at $69,000.
In other words, more lies to make them seem like us.
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Hard News: Budget 2011: While you wait, in reply to Sacha,
And the second graph on this associated post is quite chilling.
So basically, we could eliminate Treasury and replace it with an Excel script to generate a "good times just around the corner, growth return to 2.5% track" scenario, and save ourselves a pile of money.