Posts by Deborah
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Well.... the franchise needs to be limited in some way. The US and Australia limit it by citizenship, NZ by residency and / or citizenship linked to occasional visits to the homeland.
I'm guessing the thinking is that once you have made a sufficient commitment to a country to become a citizen, then you get to vote.
A beautiful piece of writing, Jolisa - thank you.
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Lovely story, Jackie.
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I'm with Danielle on the great worth of Persuasion and Anne Elliot, but Emma, Danielle - don't you know the basic rule of Austen netiquette? Don't start a flame war about Fanny Price.
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(i knew that would draw you out)
I raced back home between tutes, to cook some chocolate sponge rolls for the vegetarians who are coming over for dinner tonight, and said to myself that I would only look at PAS, I wouldn't post because I didn't have time....
I plead extreme provocation.
I'm going back to my much more reasonable first year ethics students now.
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__ Anything by Jane Austen.__
right on.
the films are worse. a bunch of foofy tosh.
Philistines.
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But would you start reading one that began "It was a Thursday my Grandmother exploded"?
Just to be pendantic for a moment, the actual sentence is:
It was the day my grandmother exploded.
As for feeding the people of Gondor, contrary to the bleak portrait of the Pelennor (the plain around Minas Tirith) painted by Jackson, Tolkien gives this picture:
Pippin could see all the Pelennor laid out before him, dotted into the distance with farmsteads and little walls, barns and byres...
<Hangs her head in shame as she admits that she spent most of her angst-ridden teenage years immersed in Tolkien.>
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Yeah, right.
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The idea that any party that reaches over 50% of the vote can be kept out by a group of small parties is one I have real ethical difficulty with.
Maybe they need to make a bigger effort to make friends then, so that they will have someone to play with in the big house.
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If any party ends up with over 50% of the vote but can't form the govt due to the overhang I am going to be extremely pissed off.
I wrote a long post about the Maori seats a couple of days ago, for the Australian blog Larvatus Prodeo, where Idiot / Savant and I are blogging the NZ election for the benefit of the Aussies. I put it up at my own place too: Are the Maori seats undemocratic?
Here's what I wrote about the overhang:
Alternatively, you could argue that overhangs frustrate the will of the electorate, as expressed in the party vote. They are a bug in the MMP system. However, I don’t see them so much as a bug as, if not a feature, simply a consequence of being committed to ensuring that people from diverse communities in New Zealand are represented in the parliament. Further, our electoral system is not designed to reflect exact proportionality - we would need to have many, many more MPs in order to do that, or a parliament comprising the whole population. The system is designed, like other voting systems, to come up with a fair and defensible and it comes up with about the right result. (This is exactly what’s going on with STV in Australian elections: it’s fair enough, and defensible, and achieves around about the right result.) Not perfect, but jolly well good enough to be part of a democratic system.
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@ Mark - YES!
It occurred to me that if Labour and the Greens between them have more votes than National and Act (a reasonable possibility, given the TV3 poll, which was the more accurate poll last time around), then the Nat/Act supporter simply can't complain if Labour/Green become the government, given their protracted efforts to characterise the Greens as watermelons.
Re undecided voters: polling companies normally assign undecided voters to parties in the same proportions as the decided voters: that is, they use what is known to predict the unknown.