Posts by tussock
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Surely saying it's an insufficient step, fails to solve the problem at hand, and is merely palliative toward proportionality is about as disdainful of a dismissal as you'd ever see from a royal commission?
They didn't reject it out of hand as a fundamentally flawed system like cumulative or points voting, but that's because it basically does what it says on the box: FPP with token representation of smaller parties.
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The Māori seats under MMP have helped mitigate the low enrolment rate and electoral turnout of Māori voters. Ideally government would work harder on getting disenfranchised minority groups to vote, but out here in the real world they don't, for various reasons, some of which are even principled.
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@Richard, regarding small parties getting disproportionate power, that's increased by the 5% threshold in the first place. More small parties gives the Majors more ways to get a majority when things are tight, but the margin keeps them out and some of their seats go to the remaining smaller parties to give them more say.
It's helped New Zealand First quite often, even though it killed them in '08.
2002's a good example: with the threshold only Lab+NZF could realistically make a majority (with United and Greens being deeply opposed). Without it they still can, but so can Lab(+Jim) with either Green + Alliance or United Future + Christian Heritage, giving each small party much less power and the big ones more options. Someone like Michael Appelby sitting alone for the ALCP would have no real power, but could still act as a safety valve against any labour party defectors.
Heh, with 99 MPs in 2002, the LGP option would pull ahead on Labour's 5-seat overhang. I would've liked that, even though it wasn't proportional. 8]
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How few list MPs could we have without adding constant overhang?
99 MPs (29 list) in 2008 would see
National 41+6
Labour 21+15
Green 0+7
ACT 1+3
Māori 5-2
Jim 1+0
United 1+0101 seats, Nat+ACT+Uni at 52, 2 overhang same as now. Still bugging me about that advert in your next post Graeme. One more overhang for Māori Party at 89 seats, but down to 84 before National gets an overhang, with only 14 list MPs! "Can have 99 MPs"!
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They're not trying to get that one right, eh. It's as much of a lie as you can reasonably tell about every option but the one they want. Like every other privately funded add in existence.
I mean, STV's complicated for innumerate literate people with strong opinions I guess. 99 MPs is not what we're voting on but we could have 99 MPs with MMP if we got rid of the south island electorate limit. STV could have one electorate with 99 MPs in it if they wanted, which makes it just like MMP where you get to vote on everyone's lists, otherwise it will tend to screw geographically diverse small parties.
It even forgets to mention that FPP, PV, and SM are all massively undemocratic, as is STV with smaller electorates. Even with all 7 seat electorates it'd be highly unlikely to be proportional. Very easily gerrymandered to get the rounding to go in favour of one major party or another (National would want Invercargil-Southland to get 4 MPs for 3:1, Labour would give them 5 for 3:2, neither of which represents the actual 2:1 ratio in the area, depending on how you count).
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Nat, yes, read just such a study at some point when this first came up. Linked from here I recall. If you cut fruit and veg prices (via a refund system, only way to test), you get the same amount spent on groceries on average, but people buy more fruit and veg in the mix.
Works for real, just like capitalism says it should.
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I'm torn on the second vote. STV would make a reasonbale alternative to MMP given my own desires, but FPP is more likely to lose to MPP in the following referendum than STV is.
Perverse incentive: vote for the system I least want. Then I may not even get the option to add STV to the MMP electorate seats, because no one voted for it earlier.
And what I most want is the MMP referendum, to ditch the threshold, get multi-member seats (to compensate for the dwindling number of list MPs), and maybe more MPs in general (popular as mud, eh).
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Legal Beagle: Up to 11, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
Rather than 1/120th, use half of what it takes to get 2 seats. Not d'Hondt where you make all the small parties smaller (because the little parties work better in our parliamentary system if they're a bit bigger), just keep the micro-parties from further splitting to gain representation.
Anyhoo, that's 14,654 last election, which is roughly what electorate MPs get in on anyway (30-35% of ~50k). 0.625%, 1/160th. Gets the odd wonk and pervert a seat over the years, but I doubt Bill and Ben would've run if they could've won a seat, and it would've kept the Christian groups out of United Future.
Anyway, the nutter angle for the threshold is bogus, as when the big parties have more ways to make a majority, the little parties have less power, and the Nats and Labs totally work together to keep them out already (like the opposition speaker we had for some years there).
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against "tier 1" teams we win 81.2% at home vs 67.3% away
A huge number of tier 1 teams send their second or third string to NZ for tours. We beat France here because they almost never send a top team. Every nation fields it's best at home and for the RWC.
You simply can’t give Tonga and Samoa non-zero values.
Yes you can, those just might describe that one of those teams would win about once every 250 years, by stringing together 3 very close, very lucky wins after scraping through the pool (presumably, as other top teams suffer much worse injury and their small pool of talent stays fit, gets a lot of the bounce, and the ones they can't beat go out to someone else).
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making up stories about controlled demolitions?
"The great masses will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one"? Makes it hard to talk about the cost-cutting during construction?
But really, there's so much bullshit out there that it takes a bit of serious research to even find the basics of any major event now.
"The US did have plans to invade Afghanistan before 9/11", along with plans to invade all sorts of other countries, as they do today.
"FBI men are pulled off the trail of future hijackers", and off and onto a lot of other people too. The standard tactics of getting stupid people to say something criminal didn't work (as these were actual terrorists), no convictions possible means no further investigation.
"Places hijackers train are affiliated with the CIA", as is a huge amount of the US. The CIA is absolutely fucking enormous. US$90 billion dollar per annum enterprise.
"On the day, NORAD was running a training exercise about commercial airliners being hijacked and crashed into buildings, including the WTC", as it had been the target of two previous terrorist attacks and lots of local and international spy agencies had just recently warned them about the airliner threat and they knew they had no response ready.
"The terrorists left an orgy of evidence about their identities and motives", because they weren't planning on being able to tell anyone why they'd done it afterward, and it was totally political in nature (specifically, the endless suffering in Palestine directly funded and armed by the USA).
"George W. Bush is a fucking idiot", who happens to make all his friends incredibly rich by getting to be president and handing them hundreds of millions of dollars in public money to basically do nothing at all.
"The republicans are insane", but they get elected, dish out big money like candy to their "campaign contributors", pass laws that make those same companies even richer, and retire as multi-millionaires off a rather small wage. Just like the democrats do.
"Dick Cheney stopped flying on commercial airlines before 9/11", because he and GWB were incredibly unpopular at the time, to the point of his security finding it very difficult to operate in public.
Cynical manipulation of the public mood to bla bla bla, yes, they did. If you're not being cynically manipulated by your government, they've probably resorted to shooting at you instead. We are ruled over, for reals.
But yeh, they had to bomb someone (bread and circuses, stories of villains and heroes), so they picked on an unpopular nation who couldn't fight back, and when that was all too easy they picked on someone harder. The campaign contributors are on the pigs back during wartime, so expect it to end when they finally have to start shooting kids to maintain the peace at home, as it was for Vietnam.