Posts by Idiot Savant
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Boscawen et al have to do a bit more than start a political party to access the higher limit: they also need to run candidates and/or contest the party list. Not that that's a Bad Thing at all.
(See s84(1) of the Electoral Finance Act. Cthulhu, I love saying that. Electoral Finance Act. Electoral Finance Act. Take that, plutocrats!)
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well I think Bill Clinton qualified in that category and The World at the time was full of talk about evil America was. So maybe this time round with a Dem pres the world will be ready to ditch all the crap about imperialism.
I think that very much depends whether they behave like an imperialist or not.
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Bugger - another one bites the dust.
And to add to the chorus of offers, you can always guest-blog at No Right Turn if you want to vent your spleen (and I can imagine that working in Geneva, you're going to want to).
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Multi-seat STV is far better, and roughly proportional within constituencies (though disproportionate overall due to the threshold effect). But I still prefer MMP, with the crufts of no threshold and possibly PV for electorate votes.
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Moz: it's worth remembering that Australia's House doesn't use STV, but PV, which isn't a proportional system at all.
As for the Senate,that is much better, but at the same time it has some quirks - notably that they've fixed the system to encourage party ticket voting by having "above the line" and "below the line" votes. If you vote above the line, you tick some tickets box, and your preferences are distributed accordingly (and this part is so far a good cruft). But if you vote below the line, and start individually numbering canidates, you must fil out a full preference list, with a number next to every candidate, or your vote is ruled invalid. And when there are up to 70 candidates on a ballot, this really encourages party ticket voting rather than a real individual choice between candidates.
Fortunately, NZ's implementation of STV seems to be a little smarter than that, and allows incomplete preferencing.
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I want the old style ocker politician back.
That is like asking to live in Interesting Times.
Uninteresting times may be boring, but they're a hell of a lot safer.
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As I said, Idiot/Savant, I think reasonable people in this country don't regard women in politics as some delightful novelty. Dare I say it, perhaps we even take women seriously enough to judge them on their performance rather than their gender?
Over here, yes. But looking at Australia, they're quite a way behind us. What a difference a couple of women Prime Ministers makes.
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Another feature of the new government will be the performance of of the deputy leader Julia Gillard. Isn't it great to see a woman close to the apex of federal leadershp in Australia? I think it may even be a first. They've had women state leaders but not in federal politics as far as I know.
And predictably we saw the same sort of nasty misogynist smears directed at her that some still direct at female politicians over here. Unfortunately there are knuckle-draggers on both sides of the Tasman who have yet to enter the Century of the Fruitbat, let alone that of the Anchovy.
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I should add that in a perfect world, we wouldn't be doing things this way. In a perfect world, we'd have listened to the Royal Commission on the Electoral System back in 1986 and implemented third party controls and proper transparency a long time ago. In a slightly less perfect world, National would have accepted that the problems exposed by the 2005 election were real, and worked with the government and every other party in Parliament to fix them. Or set up a royal commission or citizen's jury back in 2006, when the Justice & Electoral Committee reported back on the election, to look at solutions, and promised to back whatever they came up with. But instead, they were too busy howling and screaming about pledge cards and turning Parliament into a toxic sewer (something Labour didn't exactly help on either; OTOH the level of vitriol from the opposition benches was unprecedented). There was no political agreement then, so there's no political agrement now, so we simply have to do it without them (but with the support and input of practically everyone else, who did recognise there were problems).
Fortunately, once this patch is applied, we'll have a chance to have such an inquiry into the broader issues and the general shape of our electoral law. I favour a citizen's jury on this, because it's our electoral system, not the politicians', but I can live with a royal commission (well, other than the name :). But regardless of its form, I have no doubt that a fair and reasoned look at the issues will come to the same conclusions as the 1986 Royal Commission into the Electoral System did: that there must be transparency, that third parties must be controlled to prevent exactly what we saw in 2005, and that there should be public funding of political parties to ensure a level playing field.
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I/S - If the government is so scrupulous on the EFB, why didn't the select committee travel to Auckland to take submissions there as well?
Because despite its pretensions, Auckland isn't the capital.
Select Committees sometimes travel to other centres to hear submissions, but its relatively rare, and there's no obligation to do so. Holding committee hearings elsewhere is a huge expense, and so even on important legislation, the vast majority of submitters are expected to travel to Wellington and present their submission there.