Posts by BenWilson
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Legal Beagle: A four-year parliamentary term?, in reply to James Caygill,
You don’t have to buy it Ben – I’m simply telling you that that IS my experience in Government.
Presumably you mean that is your judgment based on your experience. Or are you saying your breakdown is some kind of policy or procedurally accepted system?
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Legal Beagle: A four-year parliamentary term?, in reply to FletcherB,
All of which is simply the tu quoque fallacy. It doesn’t constitute a reason against doing something now.
Sure, but the purpose of the reasoning is not directed at whether it should be done, it's at whether the other side can score points from it not being done. For that purpose, calling the other side hypocrites does work, tu quoque or not. Well, so long as the pair of them are the only choices. If they're not, then it can give quite a lot more points to a third party than it saves against its target.
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Hard News: The Next Act, in reply to Steve Barnes,
Been a bit busy for the last few months….
Nice work. Curious what YouTube offers as videos one may like after this - 3 out of 6 were Zombie based first person shooter walkthroughs.
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Capture: Someone, Somewhere, In Summertime, in reply to Nora Leggs,
Heh. No. They did prove that undies are togs on the beach, though.
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Capture: Someone, Somewhere, In Summertime, in reply to Nora Leggs,
1. Takapuna wasn’t that crowded. I was there yesterday.
2. Well patronized, I’d call it. Everyone who was there seemed to be having fun.
3. The kind of day you just stand around and chat :-)
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Legal Beagle: A four-year parliamentary term?, in reply to James Caygill,
I don't buy any of that. "Pet peeve" could be fixed in any of those 9 years. Pet peeve could be an election promise, or it could be an election year "bribe", or it could be done as part of the governing budget (by which you presumably mean the one budget where they can most deprioritize popular budgetary moves, IOW the "unpopular party agenda" budget). To blame being ineffective on 3 year terms is a really lame excuse, by the end of a decade in power, when every minister has had 9 years to work out what they're doing.
In the case of Labour and National, with time servers spanning multiple decades, they've often had more than one go in government too. Senior politicians entering parliament after a governmental change aren't just n00bs, they've got lots of connections, lots of experience, and they should have been understudying their portfolio in Opposition. They have their grand old party with all its old hacks and mentors to fall back on for advice, not to mention the civil service that actually has to implement things, and run them.
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Clive Wilson the artist? My second cousin. He lived next door in St Mary's Bay when I was a small child. I think he's more into photography now.
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Capture: Someone, Somewhere, In Summertime, in reply to Nora Leggs,
Same tree, but this time with light. The shot from the previous night was taken well after sunset, using only my headlamp and bike torch for lighting (I didn’t want to startle them with a flash). It was my first time down the track along the Whau just below the industrial area, a track I never knew was there. Blundering along in the dark, I had no idea how far it went, and lost my nerve to continue when it became narrow and overgrown.
So I tried to get out up the bank in the second picture. I thought it led to the road, but no, after scaling the treacherously steep bank with my bike, in darkness, I found myself in the back of the Cadbury complex. I didn’t dare risk the bank again, so I had a surreal 10 minutes trying to escape a setting that smacked of Half-Life or Wolfenstein. I kept expecting to get chased by dogs, or guards, or aliens or zombies.
Which was a pity, because I missed out on discovering the spot in the last picture, at the end of the track, the rowing club pier, at high tide. Beautiful 270 degree vista on the corner of the Whau. I’ve lived in this area for 9 years and never knew this was here – the entry to it is down an obscure industrial backstreet, down what seems like a private driveway.
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Legal Beagle: A four-year parliamentary term?, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
I certainly appreciate the theory. It is a good argument in favour of a longer term.
Longer than what, though? How long is a piece of string? There's no upper or lower bound set by such reasoning. Why not 10 years?
As a counter, a longer term also increases the damage caused by Cabinet not getting policy working through the wider Executive Branch, if they are incompetent, or the wreckage caused if they do competently get it working, and it's bad policy (and unpopular), but serves the interests of the powermongers concerned.
How much? How long is this piece of string? It can't be measured easily, but I offer this argument. A bad policy gets worse and worse exponentially, compounding on itself. It's far, far more catastrophic to have bad policy in for a long time, than for good policy to have to go to the polls, and possibly get voted out. That, in a nutshell, is what democracy is about - the power to get rid of bad government before it ruins us all, is far, far more important than "efficiency", something that it often competes poorly on against authoritarian systems. So shorter terms are simply safer.
In any other kind of work, people seem to be able to organize lengthy projects whilst only having short contracts. At the end of a year, their performance is evaluated, they tell their story about what they've achieved and what they will achieve next, and get reinstated or booted accordingly. The project continues to roll on. I don't see what makes being an MP so different there. It's an incredibly sweet deal to even get a 3 year job. Brendan Horan must be stoked that he's going to get 2 more years of a mean salary to do absolutely nothing other than turn up occasionally. Politicians have the best union ever organized, especially considering that the decisions they make are amongst the most important in the whole country, to only get a performance review every 3 years.
As Graeme notes, the population itself in this country extends frequent credit to the parties (more often to National by a factor of 2, and Labour got the only single terms) to get their act into gear. 9 years in power is the actual median since the 1930s. In other words, the people don't always boot out the party on a whim, so the argument about the need to prevent that with longer terms falls rather flat.
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Legal Beagle: A four-year parliamentary term?, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
Yet we can look at the assumptions they make, and draw entirely proper conclusions based on our different values. Of course the analogies will be imperfect, but that doesn’t mean they will be entirely unhelpful.
I'm not saying it's not a debate worth having, or that the debate doesn't help. Just that it won't be purely "evidence based". It's going to have a high element of moral reckoning it in, because it pertains to the very way in which our practical morals are set, especially in this country, where the power of Parliament is so great.
I would argue that the major flaws in the PRC system are in local governance, and the more local (township, village) the more broken it is.
Curious, I've heard the exact opposite argument, that it's the local governance where the system is best, it's the only level that is participatory on a grand scale. The PRC government is incredibly heavy handed, making decisions for millions of people at a time with little attempting to hear their concerns and almost no interest in their rights. I guess it depends on who you are, where you are, and what happened to you.
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