Posts by Angus Robertson
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Her most recent effort is dedicated to Sarah Palin, working-class hero, and incorporates sycophantic "letters" from fans, real or imaginary. The actual Salon reader letters are here.
For comparison to the Salon there is a good debate about the ongoing Sarah Palin is Evil hatefest phenomena at this feminist's site.
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Josh,
Craig surely you realise the purpose of a private member's bill half the time is to raise the awareness of an issue - either to pressure the government into adopting the bill (unlikely in this situation) or to just simply raise the public awareness of the issue (which clearly worked).
Public awareness being that Labour thinks 'referendums are A-Ok'. Great, y'know who else thinks referendum are A-Ok? Act do. And the big difference between Act and Labour right now is that Act are in the government.
Act have cooked up a great new and effective addition to the ways of enacting democratic change within NZ - enforceable referendums in local councils. This has some negative issues, revolving around the financial insolvancy of damn near every American state that has tried this sort of crap. So it would be a big risk for Act to introduce the concept in the face of any sort of competent opposition. Luckily for Act we do not have a competent opposition, we have Phil Twyford and friends who like the idea so much that they introduced this private members bill to do the same damn crap.
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Graham,
Oops - I meant:
Graeme,
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Graham,
Act/National are right wing political parties - they support empowering taxpayers to limit taxes. Labour are a left wing political party - they support empowering communities to protect council assets. Is it hypocritical for them to behave in ways 100% consistent with their political leanings?
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And i'll even provide a moral, no additional charge.
There is a time and a place for MPs to endorse innovative and by all accounts highly effective vehicles for agenda driven policy. The time is in the first term of government and the place is from the Treasury Benches. Because when these two factors align you can drive your policy agenda through effectively and innovatively.
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It reeks of way too cute politics and it is destined to fail.
And this is a more obvious way to point out Act's hypocrisy.
About that, the charge of hypocrisy is going to be what? I mean the Labour party is arguing that it is perfectly okay to place barriers in the way of councils operation.
Interestingly, I asked Phil on the panel at Locally Left tonight whether he'd be happy with something like a council supermajority requirement (eg: 75%) to achieve the same goal -- making asset sales hard -- and he said that he would.
See, on principle Phil has no problem with erecting democratic barriers to council operation.
What happens when Act/National places a barrier on council operation? Hypocrisy possibly doesn't mean what you think it means.
The only possible gotcha is that you get to point out that they are acting like right wing parties and instituting a cap on taxation. And that when it comes down to it is very piss poor, because the public actually knows that Act/National are right wing parties, in Nationals case we have known this for half a f#%king century. All the failure of this bill delivers is that National are not prepared to place barriers favoured by left wing parties on city councils - this again is absolutely the f#*king opposite of news and/or hypocrisy.
Newsflash to the dense and possibly braindead Labour Party - the public of NZ is aware that National and Act are right wing political parties, have done for a while now. Nevertheless we voted for them because they promised to be centrist and not sell any of the family silver and they offered tax cuts.
Short story - if Labour had wanted to prevent the passage of the rates cap they should have objected to the very notion of referendum driven direct government - based on the copious evidence presented by the collapse of California. Instead they have gone with Phil Twyford's notion that referendum are 'A-Ok with us'. So we are looking likely to have 5, 8 or 11 years (depending on how efficient Labour are at recapturing the treasury benches - I am not hopeful) of rate caps on city councils. When Labour recapture the benches in 2020 Phil Twyford will be able to stick this bill thru quicksmart and prevent the sale of the one remaining public library/sewage works in NZ.
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But you're taking his 'unreconstructed Nazism' personally, so you get to just slag people off with no basis, yes? Charming.
Max sold 100 years of F1 TV rights to Bernie for about the same amount of money it would take to buy 2 years of NASCAR TV rights. 5 years later Bernie sold 75% of those rights for lots more to a highly leveraged hedge fund. So 75% of every cent that every F1 fan on the planet pays (through the f@#king nose) is being used to pay off debts of the same people who have just wrecked the worlds economy and 25% goes to Bernie.
In a effort to contextualise this I'll use a local example. Kiwiblog contends that Dr Cullen paid Toll ($655million) twice what the Railways are worth and DPF cites this as an example of gross incompetence amongst the previous government, general political misrepresentations aside it looks kind of bad. To come close (in levels of shear pathetic-ness) to the financial ineptness of Max our finance minister would need to have paid about $25billion for the railways (and then spent the next 8 years attending parties as a guest of Toll Holdings).
And the really funny thing is that Max did not appear to do this for any other reason than a lifelong ability to cavort around the world in a series of F1 parties, as president-assumed-for-life of the FIA. It does not appear that he has been paid off in any sort of bribe, he did not benefit financially, so why did he do it? why was the deal he made so pathetic?
He likes getting beaten up by prostitutes.
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I think the date of women's voting rights in Switzerland (1971/1990) I mentioned on the previous page pretty clearly reflects that...
In 2003 they allowed for the grandchildren of immigrants to naturalise as Swiss if born in Switzerland.
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kong,
But there are a lot of things to be said for Switzerland so it's hardly the knockdown argument against direct democracy that Angus seemed to think.
The Swiss are the European byword for "conservative" politics and yes it works well within their direct democracy. Depends on how you view conservatism in terms of it being good or bad politics as to how much of a knockdown that is.
But the nice thing about what's happening in California is that the people don't have anyone to blame but themselves, so with any luck a lesson may actually be learned.
And the lesson learnt will be that they must be more conservative, like the Swiss? I think that for direct democracy to work the electorate would need to tend more conservative.
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Don't referendum systems inherently favour conservative politics? They provide legal means to enforce the status quo public position.