Posts by Matthew Poole
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Legal Beagle: The Northland by-election;…, in reply to sean mahoney,
many candidates ( including Andrew Little ) were rejected at the polls but still in Parliament.
Thing is, there can only be one electorate MP. Jacinda and Nikki, for example, are both clearly very popular but only one of them could win. And look at Pull-ya Benefit and Carmel in 2011 where it was down to nine votes; that was far from a "rejection". Why should someone who was only barely less popular than the winner then be denied a seat in Parliament? Sure, there are electorate candidates who are very definitely "rejected" by the majority of voters, as evidenced by the results in deep-blue or deep-red electorates, but we do actually want elections to be a contest, not merely an enthroning.
And what of the Greens, who stand candidates who they know have no show of winning in what is, largely, a two-party race for any given seat, but by standing a candidate they get to promote the party at electorate debates. Without that they'd be limited to only such public debate time as was accorded to party leaders, and as we saw last year that can be one-eighth of bugger-all.It's a common refrain, but it doesn't really stand up to much scrutiny. Not to mention that even National would struggle to field over 130 candidates should they be forced to run completely separate electorate and list candidates.
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Hard News: Masters of Reality, in reply to Hilary Stace,
Why can’t they just make the committee bigger and have wider representation? It’s MMP after all.
Because the law says it's five members, being the PM, the Leader of the Opposition, two nominated by the PM, and one nominated by the LotO. It's not just a matter of casually re-drafting standing orders to expand the membership, it's a change in statute; and one that would be hard to do, because you need odd numbers on a committee to avoid deadlock and thus couldn't just make forward assumptions about how many parties would be in any future Parliament.
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Hard News: We can make things better here, in reply to Chris Waugh,
trees have the temerity to sit right where road builders want to build roads.
Which is their biggest sin. If the trees hadn't been there, we wouldn't be having this conversation. Bad trees! Naughty trees!
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Hard News: We can make things better here, in reply to Sacha,
Patrick Reynolds is eloquently unimpressed with Auckland Transport’s conduct at last night’s meeting about the pohutukawa
He uses the word "clusterfuck" in the post. Calling that level of furious "unimpressed" is up there with calling Hurricane Katrina "a mild breeze". Nicely done.
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Hard News: We can make things better here, in reply to Russell Brown,
The problem, as others have noted, is that they could have taken the opportunity to build a proper busway.
But doing that in the space of the designation would have meant taking lanes away from general traffic, and we can't be having that!
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Hard News: We can make things better here, in reply to Shaun Lott,
That sentence fills me with rage and despair. Now would seem the perfect time to me, given how much work is going into raising the causeway. It’s long overdue already.
But it would have meant spending money on public transport capital works, all of it coming from the NZTA budget, and we can't be having that dirty, socialist nonsense sucking funds away from the good and worthy private motorist!
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Hard News: We can make things better here, in reply to Russell Brown,
Post Waterview it will make more sense for West-North commuters to stay on the motorway and use the interchange at the city end.
Surely that depends on their destination and origin, once the monstrosity that will be the SH18/SH1 interchange is constructed? If they're on the inner part of the SH20/SH16/SH1 loop it will make sense to go via CMJ, but if their journey points are west of SH20/SH16 and north of SH18/SH1 it would make more sense to go across the top. Roughly speaking, obviously.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
I can’t see that GCSB does anything in the IT security sphere that an overt and accessible agency couldn’t do better. Security is mostly around best practices and tools, and information on these is much better communicated by a normal public body, not a spy agency.
How do you know that it would be communicated better?
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Greg Dawson,
balanced by the limitations of relying only on those inside the trusted circle to point out flaws in your strategy, where others might notice things they didn’t.
The people who will exploit the information are not the sort to tell you what they've found, however.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Greg Dawson,
merging the GCSB and SIS.
Well, that's one way to get around pesky restrictions on domestic surveillance.