Posts by Idiot Savant
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Graeme: not that different, no. Plenty of people on both sides of the fence seem to regard it as unseemly to reward your donors (though it will be interesting to see how many of them are consistent about it in future - and how many oppose the transparency regime of the EFA which makes such scrutiny possible).
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Or trying to extract themselves from having to criticise National in future if they award honours to their donors?
The aristocratic tone of that editorial is also pretty horrifying. We need a group of public-spirited wealthy men to guide the state and political parties, lest they be forced to seek the support of ordinary voters. Quelle horreur!
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There's a distinct undertone of contrition in the Herald's editorial on Owen Glenn this morning ...
And yet they're saying explicitly "people should get gongs for giving scads of cash to political parties".
If our honours system is going to be a rich boy's club for political cronies, then I vote for its abolition.
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Which is why those who perhaps really deserve it are nicely awarded by the other party.
Or by the community, and bugger the politicians.
As for the Herald, read it online with an adblocker.
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I have to disagree on Glenn's honour. No matter what he's done, it just looks unseemly. And I'd rather see good people go unrecognised than undermine the integrity of the process and see our honours called into question in such a way.
At the same time, it's worth pointing out that this is also a victory for electoral transparency. With National's donation laundering, there'd be just no way of knowing whether they were rewarding their donors or not.
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You forgot Mithras (video from QI, which I watched this afternoon). For the curious, there's a bit more here, but it sounds like its rather more in dispute (but so is everything when academics start looing at it :)
Funny, his only other knowledge of gods comes from Astérix: "By Toutatis!" is a new and regular exclamation around these parts
That's kind of cool. But is he worried about the sky falling on his head?
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Deep pockets ... limited to spending not the $120,000 in the Electoral Finance Act, but the $50,000 in the Citizens Initiated Referenda Act.
They really should have brought those figures into line...
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Graeme: I'm working off the 3R draft of the divided bill on the Parliamentary website, the law not having appeared yet on legislation.govt.nz. Section 84 (1) of that reads:
Where a party is listed in the part of the ballot paper that relates to the party vote, the party's election expenses in respect of any regulated period must not exceed the amount of $1,000,000 plus the amount of $20,000 for each electoral district contested by a candidate for the party.
So, those saying "we'll just form a party" will need to go beyond that, and actually run candidates. otherwise, non-contsting parties are treated as third parties.
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And I'd say this is another debate that would have been better served without the evangelical self-righteousness of large parts of the left.
I may be self-righteous (who isn't, when it comes to democracy?), but at least I can read a statute properly.
The blunt fact is that this law does not do what you claim it does. it will not affect your ability to campaign on issues one iota. It will only affect you if you intend to spend large amounts of money in an effort to influence the outcome of elections. And like most democrats, I don't have any problem with that at all.
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I don't see why the hell people like DPF and I can blog our fingers into stumps in favour of (say) amending the Marriage Act to give same-sex couples full equality before the law, and encouraging people to vote for candidates who feel the same... but if went out and raised funds to run a series of full page ads in metropolitan dailies doing the same thing that's 'electioneering'?
It's not "electioneering".
The Act only affects advertisements which explicitly encourage people to vote or not to vote for a party or parties (s5 (1) (a) (i)), or encourage them to vote or not to vote for a party or parties described or indicated by their positions (s5 (1) (a) (ii)). Ads in support of full equality don't fall under either category, unless they say "don't vote for bigots" (and Destiny is running candidates).
Really, this debate would have been a lot easier without the constant FUD from the right. The law doesn't affect issue advertising in any way. What it does affect is attempts to circumvent spending restrictions by the rich, of the sort we saw in the 2005 election campaign.