Posts by Idiot Savant
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Family Fist's Bob McCoskrie on the referendum:
“The question ‘do voters want to retain MMP’ is confusing because a voter wanting change in the Electoral system will have to vote NO,” says Bob McCoskrie. “It's a pretty weird referendum when yes means no and no means yes.”
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Others might say that ACT getting half as many votes & any seats other than Epsom was the unfair bit. Depends how you look at it I suppose.
Indeed. It particularly depends on whether you take an expansive view of democracy or a narrow one.
Pretty obviously, I'm in the former camp. Excluding people from our political system is undemocratic and unjust. While I hate Rodney / Winston / Tamaki / insert preferred hate figure here, their supporters have as much right to democratic representation as I do. The only limit to that representation should be the implementation detail of the size of parliament - not arbitrary restrictions designed to exclude, marginalise, and silence.
People who think there should be greater restrictions on representation need to explain why they are deserving and others are not. Good luck with that - because to me it just looks like special pleading and an aristocratic claim to greater moral worth than others.
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There being a second referendum rests solely on whoever is elected to govern (and has a legislative majority in the House) at the next election deciding to honour any pre-election pledge to follow what the public wanted.
This suggests an obvious political strategy: Protect MMP, de-elect National.
The problem is that Labour isn't too fond of democracy itself.
It's not hatred of Winston, but dislike of ACT :-)
Either way, its no justification for effectively taking the vote off people. After all, I don't like either Phil Goff or John Key. the electoral system should therefore be stacked so that the votes of Labour and National supporters do not count.
It's ludicrous and undemocratic - but its what threshold advocates are special pleading for.
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get rid of the 1-seat exception to proportionality.
Why?
That makes the system less proportional, not more.
Sorry, but hating Winston isn't a good enough reason for effectively removing the vote (and that is the pratical effect) from supporters of small parties.
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Meanwhile, our own Speaker thinks that freedom of speech applies to some, but not to others...
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Though if bad writing were the trigger for bookburning, then the collected works of Dan Brown would be making a huge contribution towards global warming.
No they wouldn't - paper is carbon neutral.
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But How To Eat Fried Worms?! Do people really think children are so stupid and/or unevolved that a book will cause them to override basic biological principals such as the idea that if something tastes bad, you're probably not meant to fry it up with your eggs in the morning?
I read that as a child. Clearly, its the reason I am the way I am today.
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Are books ever removed from the banned list? Or are censorship decisions made in the 1960's allowed to stand in the very, very different Century of the Earwig?
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I'd really rather that Bill English was giving his full attention to the economy, rather fire-fighting over the relatively small sum at stake in his accommodation expenses problem.
I should point out that to most people, $42,000 a year is a substantial sum of money.
It's more than the median income, for Cthulhu's sake.
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Insert a clause fining a private prison every time an inmate reoffends and maybe the profit motive could actually be helpful :-)
a) contract prices would simply go up to cover it (plus profit margin, of course).
b) that would set a dangerous incentive for prisoners with a high chance of reoffending to have "accidents". And remember, corporations are legally obliged to behave like sociopaths.