Posts by Idiot Savant
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It may have been weeded out, or the select committee may have said "this is too broken to fix". But in the process of the latter, they would have shown everyone part of what needed to be done.
An indicitive referendum triggering an inquiry is much less ambitious, but also much more legally achievable - bt it does leave the process open to Australian-style sabotage, and there's no guarantee that a future government will implement the identified results - just look at what happened with MMP. OTOH, as that process showed, politicians can eventually be electorally forced to progress things, even when they hate the idea.
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Which is what happens with member's bills. Unlike the government, opposition MPs don't have a large professional staff of analysts to work out all of what has to be done, or drafters to make sure the law actually does it without perverse consequences. And when you're looking at the sort of job which basically requires a royal commission (oh, the irony), that's a bit difficult.
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I mean, it was *nice*, and I felt very tender towards them all for being so self-deprecating, and I would love it in real life, but it doesn't make for much televisual drama, does it?
Modesty is NZ's cultural trait. It makes for bad TV, but better people.
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What ever happened to social security?
The government wants to wash its hands of it.
This isn't just a cost-saving effort, or another play to give windfall tax cuts to the rich by fucking over the poor. This is an attempt by the government to abdicate responsibility for a core function - social welfare - to the free market. It is a radical amputation of state functions, and we shouldn't have a bar of it.
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Bless you, Steven Moffat, you really know how to scare the crap out of children.
Apparently children all over the UK are now afraid of cracks in their wall.
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After Davison, I stopped watching. Like everyone else.
Not helped by TVNZ changing timeslots (or something) around that time.
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Or what about the time that a pilot ejected himself over the skies of Bologna, allowing his plane to crash into a school, killing 12 children?
But were they American children?
Because that seems to be all they care about. Everyone else is a wog to them.
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If we cut the crew maximum slack, and view them as merely stupid and confused rather than psychopathic, that's still manslaughter, and they and the commanders who covered up for them should still be going to jail. People who play with guns don't get to make mistakes and walk away from them. With martial artists, posession of capability imparts a greater requirement for caution. The same should apply to those posessing attack helicopters.
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Let's not forget that the Royal Commission on Auckland Governance had some really really stupid suggestions: like telling people who live in the CBD that they shouldn't get to vote in super city elections at all.
Or at-large elections. These people really had no idea about democracy.
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Wait. Peter Shirtcliffe is arguing for a preferential system? Did he get confused some time in the last 17 years?
No, he's just trying to strap the chicken. A preferential vote means a lower chance of MMP winning outright on the first ballot, which means another bite at the cherry of change.
But more broadly, I understand that Shirtcliffe is now arguing in public meetings for PV or SM, because he thinks they can be sold to the public as "not as bad as FPP" while still being undemocratic enough for his tastes.