Posts by Moz
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Hard News: These things we must now change, in reply to Neil,
Behaviour change. Not just less racism, but more (much more) willingness to condemn racism especially when it's their own party doing it.
One thing I would love to see is National offering pairs for the rest of the term if Labour boot their racist coalition partner. As a statement that their shit is not on it would be incredibly powerful and also fairly low-cost for National, at least inside parliament. Outside... well at least we'd get to see who is an absolutely committed racist and who's just along for the ride.
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It's been really good to see mainstream media giving voice to people who normally struggle to get published, and specifically articles that amount to mea culpa's from that media - talking about the racism and hate those media orgs normally publish. Hopefully there will be some actual change.
I'm still bemused that antifa have such bad press, and are so widely denigrated not just by the far right, but by mainstream politicians and media. They are the white people you're most likely to see fighting racism and fascism on the ground, and some of the people I saw outside the mosque when I rode past on Friday. But they're also the focus of sustained police suppression and harassment.
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Compulsory voting might be a different way to get a useful result. Having lived with it for a while I think the advantages very much outweigh the disadvantages. But combining it with allowing 12 year olds to vote if they want to might be problematic. On the whole I favour lowering the age more if we only get to choose one.
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Legal Beagle: The climate strike and the…, in reply to mpledger,
Perhaps, it's pretty close to a wash.
I suspect there will be more kids who vote climate emergency or other long-term issues than their parents do, across the "left-right spectrum" that is the only one our pundit class seem capable of understanding. The environmentalist-nihilist spectrum is incomprehensible to them, but even simple stuff like authoritarian-anarchist or monetarist-socialist don't seem to occur. Kids often lack those limitations.
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Legal Beagle: The climate strike and the…, in reply to Stephen Day,
I'd love to see the voting age abolished altogether. If someone has the desire and the ability to go into a voting booth, tick a box and express their opinion, all power to them.
I agree, but I'm willing to support any step in that general direction.
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Legal Beagle: The climate strike and the…, in reply to Walter Nicholls,
I've often wished that people had to answer a test of general political awareness before they are permitted to vote.
Australia has that to a larger degree than NZ, by having a less trivial voting system. Further up the list is the USA with their complex and biased voting requirements and ugly, locally-designed voting papers and FoK vote counting systems making it a challenge to ensure your actual vote is likely to be actually counted. Even beyond that are places like Nigeria and Sudan. "political awareness" in the latter meaning "can work out how to vote without getting killed".
In Australia we have the stats you'd expect. The "duh wot?" vote is typically between 2% and 10% and the "donkey vote" ("put 1 in the first box, or number 1,2,3,4...") is another 5% or so. A related form of stupidity gave us David Leyonhjelm from all the morons who put a 1 in the first box that said Liberal.
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when the law says you have sufficient cognitive abilities to...
That's good enough for me! Full support.
Now, if only I was sufficiently opposed to the striking kids to come over and vote for the party(s) that favour this change.
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Speaker: What almost everyone is missing…, in reply to ,
the sale doesn't cover the mortgage?
that's the one. The term is "negative equity" and apparently about 20% of Sydney homeowners are in that position right now. I'm not. Yet.
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It's worth noting that when the government (or the market) lowers the price of residential property and people do lose money on their properties, the ones who lose most are people who live in the house they own. To an investor the drop in price is a taxable event, so the government/taxpayer is covering a third to a half of the loss (this is another reason the government want to quarantine losses to the property that incurs them). But if you live in the house that's all your money.
And for people like me who earn less than the $100,000/year my house is dropping in price even the current "slow fall" is not good news. I could easily go bankrupt if there's an actual crash. Along with most of that half of Australia who have mortgages.
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I wonder how much damage the fires in Nelson are doing to the pot operations? I imagine it's a bit tricky to get hold of a helicopter in Nelson right now. And the area that's burning isn't a huge dope area so there's no corresponding loss of crops.