Posts by Matthew Poole
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Am I the only one who sees the revelations about how the Chuang saga got released as a distinctly nasty turn in NZ politics? It's the true-blue arrival of the dirtiest tactics of US politics.
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Hard News: The non-binary council, in reply to Matthew Poole,
And now it comes out that Chuang really was holding out on providing the evidence that Slater (in what remains of his pretence to journalistic professionalism) needed to support a full outing, so there goes my theory.
That Chuang's father had an affair really does shoot down any suggestion that she wasn't in this with her eyes wide open. The Wewege revelations are pretty damning, too.
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The answer to "Why not sink Brown before the election?" occurred to me this morning. Being the mistress has backfired on Chuang, entirely predictably, and that backfire would have hit her before the election, too, which is a problem when you're standing for an elected position. Waiting until after the election conveniently avoids putting a person standing on a sympathetic ticket into the cross-hairs.
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Hard News: The non-binary council, in reply to Stephen R,
“Why did she go public?” – not just the timing, but at all?
On the timing, can't helping wondering if, with her having failed to get elected, the calculus has been "In three years' time when it's time to campaign the mistress will have been forgotten, but if we can get Brown to resign or, at the least, shred his credibility, then we've got a big political win on the back of not actually winning."
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Hard News: The non-binary council, in reply to Stephen R,
it rather looks like the NZ Herald doesn’t like Mr Brown very much
Bernard Orsman, who Russell mentioned in the OP, certainly doesn't, and he's senior editorial staff. Orsman supports sprawl, loathes public transport, and is generally against everything for which Len Brown stands. He doesn't make any secret of it, but it does give Granny a rather unhealthy editorial bias.
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Hard News: The non-binary council, in reply to izogi,
the mere existence of a reasonably accessible list which matches votes to voters
That’s actually one of the easiest things to tackle. Separate lists of login tokens and votes cast, burned directly to write-once media by computers that don’t have read access to that media. Those disks can then be stored with appropriate security, and in the event of a court order being issued they can be retrieved and the two databases compared by whatever criteria are required to track down the malfeasance.
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Hard News: The non-binary council, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
The negation test for platitudes: if the inverse of a phrase is ridiculous, it’s a platitude:
"The present National government are unethical and incompetent."
Is that the kind of thing you mean? ;) -
Hard News: The non-binary council, in reply to Chris Waugh,
The system ain’t broke, so why fix it?
Pretty much. We get preliminary results before midnight on polling day, final results within a fortnight, and it's bullet-proof in terms of simplicity and verifiability. We don't have arcane, error-prone systems like in the US, with private companies champing at the bit to install the latest whiz-bang piece of hardware which can corrupt an election in no time flat.
Just because I think it can be done doesn't mean I think we should. Addressing the reasons for chronic voter disengagement should be a much, much higher priority, starting with getting through to the concrete-headed clowns who currently occupy the Beehive that their behaviour as both politicians and elected representatives does precisely nothing to encourage faith in the democratic process. -
Hard News: The non-binary council, in reply to izogi,
it’s guaranteed that nobody can ever verify whom they voted for
That's not guaranteed now. In fact, it's explicitly disallowed. Non-trivial to determine, and involves officials digging through the ballot boxes and comparing written records from voter roll books, but our voting is not completely, irrevocably anonymous.
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Hard News: The non-binary council, in reply to Russell Brown,
Just over half of New Zealand’s population growth since the last census occurred in Auckland.
And most of it courtesy of sprawl, if one looks at where the growth occurred (the outer edges, for those unfamiliar with Auckland's geography). This city just cannot keep on growing outward. John "Build a second CBD in Manukau and starve the inner-city one" Palino's failure to get elected gives some hope, but the campaigning of the likes of Denise Krum has not done anything good for halting the sprawl.