Posts by Chris Waugh
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Not lost, just building a new subway station.
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Lost faces.
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Hard News: The Letter, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
You know, an awful lot of Tories (myself included) were singing the same fucking song at the same pity party in 2002 – you know, the general election where all the polls were pointing towards National getting its lowest share of the popular vote in the party’s history.
Good point. However, I do think we could do worse than have a serious discussion about the roll polling, especially the reporting of polls, plays in our political culture. Take that Political Scientist post I linked to up thread, for example. I don't know anything about statistics, so I can't critique the analysis, but it does make some quite interesting points that are well worth thinking over. So, is National support really as high as we are lead to believe? Or Labour really that dead in the water? I've been watching the apparent mainstreaming of the Greens with curiosity, wondering if perhaps they'll take over as the main party of the centre left, but if their support, like National's, really is a solid, largely constant and loyal bloc, then maybe there's some other dynamic at work I'm unaware of.
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Meanwhile, an actual conflict of interest. Pity it can't be blamed on any particular political party, though.
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Hard News: The Letter, in reply to Russell Brown,
they’ve don’t have the information to cite a figure like $38,000.
They've also completely failed to demonstrate that there was anything improper in Liu's donations or that Labour did Liu any favours in exchange for that cash. But still they insist:
Next we revealed Mr Cunliffe, a day after denying any advocacy for Liu during his residency application, had, in fact, sent a letter to the Immigration Service outlining Liu's investment intentions and giving them a hurry-up in making a decision.
Sigh. I suppose that's one way to interpret the letter, but the simplest, most likely interpretation..... oh, this is all getting rather tiresome.
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I hope you all saw this interesting post about that mysterious undecided tribe at The Political Scientist. The statistics are all a bit too technical for me, but what I understood was: Nat and Green support is pretty stable, Labour support fluctuates with the undecided, such that high undecided = low Labour, and vice versa. Also, high Nat poll ratings aren't actually high Nat poll ratings, there's just something funny in how the media reports polls. Now, hopefully those of you more conversant in statistics than I can fill in the many gaps in all that...
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Hard News: The Letter, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
NZers get to vote from overseas if they’ve been here at any point in the last three years (even transiting the airport counts, I guess). Permanent residents, it has to be in the last year.
Exactly. I was last in NZ in 2010.
Ben, by 'expat' I mean any NZer who is living outside NZ. As nzlemming's link says:
you are eligible to enrol and vote from overseas if you:
are 18 years of age or older,
have lived in New Zealand for more than one year continuously at some time in your life,
and are either:a New Zealand citizen who has been in New Zealand at any point in the past three years,or
a New Zealand permanent resident who has been in New Zealand at any point in the past 12 months.So, we do lose the right to vote.
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Hard News: The Letter, in reply to ,
Staying overseas longer than 3 years. The limit is only 1 year for permanent residents. I have been told I could work out a way around that by claiming a home base in NZ, but I could not in good conscience do that considering I haven't actually seen any of the houses my parents or siblings live in except on Google Streetview - and then the pictures on either Satellite or Streetview weren't even updated to include any more than the foundations of my brother's house last I looked.
It's a relatively minor issue in the grand scheme of things, but something all expats or those thinking of leaving should consider. I have no problem with expats losing the right to an electorate vote (or perhaps the creation of an Expatria electorate?), but I do think so long as we have MMP expats should retain the right to a party vote. We do still have an interest in what the NZ government gets up to (5 YEAR PASSPORTS FFS!!!!!!!!!! What bright spark dreamed that up?!).
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I would like to see a party of the Left respond to the tired, old "tax and spend" cliche with "Well, yes, we are going to tax people, we're going to pool all of the money gathered from the taxes, and we are going to use it to build a better, fairer, more equitable society for all citizens and residents of our country."
What would be so wrong with that?
