Posts by Rich of Observationz
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The Key government has thus far had a tailwind not of their making.
- firstly the Clark government avoided getting the mainstream banking sector into the sort of trouble that happened overseas, whilst allowing the finance companies to act as a bush league safety valve for that sort of crazy.
This minimised any bailout costs and left the public finances looking pretty straight.
- the main OECD economies zeroed out their interest rates after the GFC. Since the NZD runs at a 3% or so risk premium to those currencies, we’ve in turn had low enough interest rates to deliver free money to middle class homeowners
- up until about a year ago, being China’s farm has been a pretty sweet business and we’re still in the afterglow of that
Nothing goes on forever, and if that all changes, Key might look a lot more seedy.
However, I don’t put it past Labour and the Greens to screw up this opportunity. Best case, they’ll probably put themselves forward as managing austerity better. Worst case, they’ll sign up as junior partners in a Ramsay McDonald style coalition.
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Polity: The overconfidence man, in reply to George Darroch,
Which suggests they could quite possibly continue to win all but a handful of electorates (or even all of them) and still lose the election.
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Polity: The overconfidence man, in reply to Grant McDougall,
Bar four (Kelston, Mana, Mangere, Manurewa) (plus all the Maori seats).
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Music players aren't hard. A bunch of files, codecs to understand those files and bang the music out on any output device. Some sort of queue manager. For bonus points, better search/selection.
Leave out glitzy skins, visualizations, proprietary index files pooped all over the filesystem, recoding, and most of all various doomed attempts to extract microcash from the user.
I liked Foobar2000 on Windows, and VLC on OSX is tolerable. I have so far failed to find an Android music player along those lines.
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Cannabis is different though in that the US attempts to prohibit it at federal level (on fairly dubious legal grounds). To get to the situation with alcohol pre-1920, or gay marriage before this week, the US would need to remove these prohibitions, or limit them to real areas of federal concern, such as traffic between states.
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How about a box on each ballot where you could write in your ideas for the governance of New Zealand in 400 words or less?
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I'd also add that such a system would reduce the perceived need for a threshold, because in order to successfully contest an election, a party would need to field a fairly complete set of electorate candidates, which would (absent the Kim Dotcom option of paying candidates a six figure stipend) require a reasonable level of grass-roots support.
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I don't think people would be interested in the level of complication of a multiple voting system in electorates.
With a fair voting system for list MPs, it isn't necessary. Reducing the threshold and removing coat-tailing reduces the ability to game the system.
I still favour a single vote MMP system, where the party vote goes to the list of ones chosen electorate candidate, which is:
- even simpler for the voter
- provides an incentive for parties to run effective electorate candidates and campaigns
- removes pretty much all avenues to game the system, in particular the "pseudo-independent party" scam of Dunne and SeymourYes, it removes the ability to hedge ones bets by split voting, but why is this an essential feature of democracy? That option is only available to a small minority of voters, anyway. For most of us living in safe seats, the candidate is entrenched and how we vote at electorate level makes little difference.
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Polity: Government votes not to improve MMP, in reply to linger,
Parliament isn't (mostly) a committee. Parliaments with five times as many members work fine (and there is a good argument that the less "efficent" parliament is, the better the laws that come out).
Also, if you have more MPs, you'll have more competent ones. If a party doesn't want to select competent people, or can't find any, then that's their problem.
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I don't see how a threshold change would necessarily reduce the proportionality of parliament.
It would depend (assuming no change to votes) on:
- number of votes for parties with no electorate MPs and 4-5% of votes
- # of votes for parties with no electorate MPs and 1MP quota (0.6%?) -4% of votes
- # of votes for parties with electorate MPs and 2MP quota (1.3%?)-4% of votes
- # of votes for parties with electorate MPs and 4-5% of votesThen you've got possible changes to voting habits if people think a vote will or won't be wasted.
In general a 4% threshold/no coat-tailing system would certainly be less arbitrary and wouldn't favour concentrated over broad-based support as the current system does?