Posts by BenWilson
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hard News: The Politics of Absence, in reply to Russell Brown,
Well, executive power rests with Cabinet, for a start.
Yes, I just realized that. I should have said legislative power. My local MP has no share of executive power at all.
And while local representation is a legacy, it's not a legacy that should be easily discarded -- if only because the electorate simply won't let you do that.
You're mixing up justification and explanation there. I'm sure that it's hard to break from an electorate model, but that in itself does not justify it, any more than the fact that it was hard to break free from Gaddafi's power justified that power.
The idea of all representation being divorced from place is slightly scary.
Yes, I'm not convinced myself. But I'm not suggesting that either. There's all kinds of representation that has nothing to do with Parliament all around me. Local body politicians are by definition tied to the place, and they actually have briefs that give you some indication what kind of problems you could go to them for. What I don't get is why I'm voting locally for people who wield national power.
I'm not sure if you understand how much good local MPs actually do.
No, I really don't. There are anecdotes of people who have got help from them. I can't independently evaluate if any of these people actually deserved the help they got. There are also people who didn't get any help, and again, I can't judge whether they deserved it. There are no rules about it, no standards. I can't judge the scale of the help. It could be about as much as the local greengrocer, or more than local police chief. I can't be sure if the public money spent on these people might not have just been better served by having free lawyers available.
Even the touchy-feely stuff is important -- turning up to local community groups and the like.
It's certainly important to the politicians, but is it really important to the local community groups that they got to press the flesh with someone who will then go back and vote in Parliament for 90 day fire-at-will law? I met Roger Douglas once and shook his hand too. It didn't do any good, though, however good it might have made me feel at the time.
-
Hard News: The Politics of Absence, in reply to Russell Brown,
Hmmm. Big call.
Yes, there is always the chance that one of these 60 people serving the entire country might be able to help you in some random way. I just don't see how that should give them half of the executive power.
It's totally self justifying. They only need to have done something useful, and they can point to that and go "Hey look! I made a difference! Vote for me!". To actually quantify how useful that is is impossible, because their brief is undefined. They "represent". Some of them could do a totally, utterly useless job of it, and get re-elected repeatedly, just because they're in a safe electorate. They could live in Wellington, when I'm in Auckland, like my one did because she happened to be the Prime Minister.
Also, there's something kind of odd about the insistence that I actually should really care so much about the place I happen to be in right now, that I would want to pick someone to take random care of it, and by proxy get a 1/120th share of the executive power of the nation. Apart from my actual house, the level to which I avail myself of the local services is only very slightly more than the level to which I avail myself of neighboring electorates services. I use the CBD more than the local township. Most of my shopping is done out of the electorate. Only the local school satisfies the quality of being something I'm intricately interested in, and my local MP has zero power to do shit about it, because his party isn't in power and probably won't be for 4-7 years. If I want something done at the school, I'd approach the principal, a public servant with considerable power to influence the outcomes for my family. I did this and he helped a lot.
-
The job of representing an actual community, regardless of the various politics of the individuals in it, is something to aspire to.
So is being a philosopher emperor, but that doesn't mean it's a good way to organize society.
It's the poor, elderly and disabled to come into electorate offices looking for help.It's good that there is someone there to try and provide it.
It is, but something about it strikes me as feudal, with a queue of oppressed peasants applying to the Laird's mercy, because the landlord's taxes are too high. Sure, local MPs are powerful people, but why go to them in particular? There's hundreds of powerful people in every electorate. There's institutions for nearly every kind of complaint. There's all sorts of charitable organizations. There's the council, which organizes most of the local services.There's the representatives of the other political parties who are also powerful people. It seems to me that people go to their MP because they can, and if they couldn't, they'd find some other way. It's not in itself a big justification for their existence. It's like some kind of random safety valve, available to such people as have time for such an inefficient approach. I don't see why it has such an enormous influence over our political system, to the extent that half of the people voting for state legislation are drawn from the pool of these people.
I'm not really convinced either way, though. I guess it just seems weird to me that never once in my life have I spoken to anyone who is poor, elderly or disabled who has actually got anything useful from approaching the local MP. Considering the influence they wield, I'd have thought it would have been a common occurrence to hear that someone had achieved something actually useful to them in that way. They're a solution looking for a problem. They'll always find a problem, always be able to point to something good they did, in much the same way that the King of Thailand can, on the odd occasion that he shows clemency to some prisoner or other, applying to have their sentence reduced. But that doesn't really justify their existence.
-
Hard News: The Politics of Absence, in reply to Chris Waugh,
I'm inclined to think parties should focus on the party vote and leave the electorates to independents and representatives of purely local coalitions/organisations.
That would cause a major overhang, I think. Labour and National would never let it happen, it dilutes their power too much. Some of the other electoral systems are quite good at generating independent local candidates.
Personally I don't really give a stuff about the local candidates. It's only because they were traditionally how we elected the government, and now have a small influence on that, and more importantly are conveniently located on the same voting paper, that I consistently bother with them. Local body candidates have more genuine influence and interest in what happens to my local area, and the public interest in them is a joke. You've got to be some kind of wonk to actually make an informed decision about them. Which I've got nothing against, it's just not my thing.
-
Hard News: The Politics of Absence, in reply to Sacha,
But they do have other options to convey why they would make a credible government.
Well, being silent is an option, yes. But I don't think that would work for them either. It would be worse.
Seem to have backed themselves into a reactive mindset despite some good policy and people.
They need to change the people much more than they need to change the policy. I think voters mainly voted to end the Clark government last time around, certainly every swing voter I spoke to had nothing on their mind except for bad things about Labour, and a near total ignorance of anything about National.
-
Hard News: The Politics of Absence, in reply to Sacha,
Who's 'forcing' them?
They're forced by the lack of other options. Also, commentators have been demanding policy elaboration for ... ever. When they actually get it, though, it's something to bash. But I don't expect this to last forever. National does eventually have to act.
-
Hard News: The Politics of Absence, in reply to Stephen Judd,
A: The media are crap and that’s why Labour can’t get traction.
B: If Labour weren’t crap, crap media wouldn’t be a problem.
A: What specifically could Labour do that wouldn’t be crap and would overcome the crapness of NZ news media?
B: That’s not my problem.Indeed. Coming up with solutions is considerably harder than identifying problems. It involves considering many options, some of which are probably total crap.
Far easier is to come up with no solutions, because then you can't make a mistake. That is what National has been doing the entire time it's been in power. It's acting like the opposition party, and Labour is forced to act like the party in power, expected to elaborate in great detail about totally hypothetical situations that they have no power to enact - these are easy targets for National.
It works, but only so long as you continue to do it. The moment National starts to actually do the things that they occasionally float quickly retracted balloons about, they find that the public does not support them. The only real question in my mind is "when will they finally go hard?". Next term? Or the term after that?
-
Hard News: The Politics of Absence, in reply to Bart Janssen,
It exemplified a view that the only worthwhile result of the election for Labour is being able to form a government where they are the dominant group. Anything else is a failure.
I don't think that's an entirely unreasonable belief for a party that has been number one or number two for over half a century. It would be failure to become the number three party, and could herald the near total destruction of the party.
The only dispute is over the level of dominance. If they just give the Greens their corner, and try to capture the center back from National, they might actually detach completely from what they traditionally stood for. I think Curran is right to fear that this could actually happen. I don't personally know what they could do about it. Essentially, their core demographic aged with them and became middle class. Their basic economics isn't far removed from National's, so the shift across wasn't too hard for, say, the denizens of Herne Bay, like my parents, who went from being starving students to millionaire property owners in one generation. I doubt my folks have or ever would vote National, but they are often dismayed by how many of their friends have gradually shifted across, or even become outright ACToids.
-
Hard News: The Politics of Absence, in reply to Russell Brown,
It didn’t make sense, but I’m not sure it warranted the acres of furious, and sometimes vicious, online commentary it reaped. Curran’s a soft target for everyone, it seems.
Yes, I thought that it was quite OTT how furious people got about her saying something that amounted to "We are losing our traditional constituency to the Green Party, and that's part of the reason our direction as a party has totally lost coherence. We should move to reclaim it". It's not the only strategy possible, the obvious other one is to try to take the votes from National, which would be the only way to actually win an election, but it is some kind of answer to the criticism that Labour no longer stands for what it used to.
Somehow, that got lost in the throwaway part of the point, which was firmly latched onto, that Curran somehow thought that the working classes are owned by Labour.
I think Curran wanted to have a discussion about this, rather than to treat it as a message to the public. But that's what it became, because that is what people expect from politicians, and it's the reality of political discussion involving actual political actors.
Seriously, how can the senior politicians avail themselves of public debate, if they can never actually have a discussion that doesn't end up becoming a caricature, with a hero and a villain? In these circumstances, it's pretty easy to see why National sticks to focus groups and private back room discussions. The episode actually made a mockery of the internet as a place for discussion, at least for people who actually could influence the world. Discussion must be carried on in private - that is the message the Curran episode delivered.
-
Hard News: The Politics of Absence, in reply to Peter Martin,
Is this two elections away? If the polls hold up, the only Labour MP's about after the upcoming election will be the ones folk don't want now.
Important point, that. The one thing Labour are the most unwilling to change is the one thing people least like about them.
Last ←Newer Page 1 … 509 510 511 512 513 … 1066 Older→ First