Posts by Idiot Savant
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You don't shut people up and lock them in a corner, you let the sun shine in
Vampires flee the sun.
Speakign of which, has anyone seen Roger Douglas in daylight recently?
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Could we raise the bar as to what constitutes a national party at least? You'd think that a reasonable number of paid up members would be a honest prerequisite and weed out some of the fringes (and I say that as a lifelong holder of fringe political ideas).
The bar is currently set at 500 members, which is a lot harder then it sounds. There are only 19 registered parties, which is not an enormous number. And at least four of them (the two jokes, the Family and Pacific parties) are almost certain to disappear by the next election.
(Sorry, this is part of my geekdom. Not to mention something I contribute to on wikipedia)
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You forgot National Front. I'm sure we'd love to see them getting taxpayer dollars to produce election material, right...?
If Labour deserves money, then so do they. And regardless, the same spending caps should apply to each. Anything less is undemocratic and a way of distorting the outcome.
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** strapping the chicken.**
Is that like spanking the monkey?
More like "stacking the deck".
Its a piece of jargon from the US Star Wars program, where incredibly expensive but ineffective lasers were "tested" by shooting them at point-blank range at stationary targets, which had been painted black (to increase absorbtion) and tensioned to ensure they exploed messily at the slightest pinprick, and then declared "effective". This was compared to strapping a chicken to a table, shooting it at point-blank range with a shotgun, and concluding "shotguns kill chickens". The "result" is really an artefact of the artificaly simple test, rather than anything real.
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Really, go and look at some of the fruiter threads on Newman's website. And then consider that Gibbs et al are about to give her a whole lot of money.
Maybe its an art project? Or an experiment into whether a monkey with a computer and an internet connection can produce Shakespere.
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Muriel Newman:
"who scrutinises all these Waitangi claims to make sure they are correct? Does anybody? If not, there is nothing to protect taxpayers from exploitation,"
Historians, great whopping scads of them. The claimants have them, the government has them,the Tribunal has them, and they excavate the history with a fine-tooth comb. Which is one of the reasons the process takes so bloody long: because the claims are checked (and because an important part of it is having the story fully told).
But I guess actual facts about the process don't sit well with Newman's desire to bury the crimes of the past and paint Maori as the modern equivalent of the C16th's "sturdy beggars".
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There's definitely a need for a cap on broadcast spending - I don't think anyone wants to see saturation ads like US elections - but it needs to be the same for everyone (total cap, that is, public funding aside). Make it lower, if you like; but as much as I disagree with everything ACT is and stands for, they deserve to have the same opportunity to advertise as all other political parties.
Ditto.
But do you think that, say, the Workers' Party ought be able to spend $500k or whatever the eventual average works out to?
Yes. A level playing field means exactly that: all parties having the same broadcasting limit. At pesent, if the Worker's party is limited to spending a token sum (last election they were allowed $10,370). Meanwhile, National and Labour got to spend $1 million. And that is simply unfair.
If Labour gets to spend $1 million on radioa nd TV advertising, everyone else should be too. Anything less is strapping the chicken.
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It all makes sense now.
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(And OTOH, a government untempered by public opinion would be worse. We had enough of that pre-MMP, thankyouverymuch)
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Brian Fallow got it right: "[T]is a profoundly conservative Government and that what it is chiefly interested in conserving is its popularity." Sensible, evidence-based drug-policy doesn't play well with the redneck "tough on crime" vote, and so they're not interested in doing it.