Posts by Idiot Savant
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Hard News: It's not funny because it's…, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Presumably it's bad form to draw attention to the fact that he's also morbidly obese.
Yes, it is. Brownlee has lots of flaws. His appearance isn't relevant to them.
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Hard News: It's not funny because it's…, in reply to Sacha,
The cancelled expressway section was most certainly part of the project - hoping someone pings Brownlee for lying to Parliament.
The Speaker has already made it clear that Ministers can lie to their heart's content in supplementaries, and that it is only primary questions, personal explanations, and other "statements of some formality" where they must be honest.
And then MPs wonder why the public has such contempt for them.
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Hard News: If wishing made it so ..., in reply to Hebe,
Anyone who knows these things: is there any breakdown of the types of illnesses people on the sickness benefit have.
Psychological or psychiatric conditions 41.5
Musculo-skeletal system disorders 15.2
Accidents 7.7
Cardio-vascular disorders 5.3
Pregnancy-related conditions 2.2
Other disorders and conditions 28.2Obviously not as detailed as you'd like.
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And a little more seriously: the relevant page on the website does include some "policy". here is how the government plans to reduce RF:
# provide throat swabbing and treatment to children at high risk
# raise community and health sector awareness of the disease
# improve knowledge of rheumatic fever through surveillance and research
# work across government agencies to address risk factors like housing conditions and hygiene in schools – for example, by ensuring hot water and soap are available.The first bits might do something around detection, but that will lead to more hospitalisations, not less. As for the latter, it seems the government thinks this is about dirty filthy poor people (rather than substandard housing and overcrowding), and that the best solution is for nanny to give them a good scrubbing. I guess the real problems are just too tough and too expensive to tackle.
Meanwhile, here's how they plan to reduce long-term benefit numbers:
# we will work with a wider range of clients to break the pattern of welfare dependence
# we will invest our resources smarter to get the best results
# we will improve the model of service delivery.Which is pure buraucratic waffle. The core problem here isn't poor service delivery, its jobs. Absent a plan to create some, this target is bound to fail (except of course they'll juke the stats so they meet it)
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I think its pretty obvious how they're going to achieve that target: not hospitalise people with rheumatic fever. Duh!
As for how to get medical professionals to cooperate with that, I forsee funding cuts for DHBs not meeting the target. With proper incentives in place, the problem solves itself.
(The problem of course being "stats about rheumatic fever that make us look bad", not the actual incidence of rheumatic fever in the community).
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Hard News: Briefing, blaming, backing down, in reply to John Holley,
National Standards and NCEA are modifying behaviour of school management across the country. Here is an OIA for someone to make of secondary schools in relation to NCEA achievement rates:
How many students, and why, do you exclude from your NCEA results at levels 1, 2 and 3?
An interesting question. But it involves sending requests to 342 schools, 50% of whom won't answer and will require a followup, and 10% of which will need a complaint to the Ombudsman. In other words, a substantial amount of work. And that's without even thinking about data analysis...
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Back in 2010, looking at consultant expenditure was considered important to measuring the success of the Capping regime. Despite not having 30% of the data, they considered it proof that the Capping regime wasn't affecting consulting expenditure.
And I think that's the real story here: just how shoddy Treasury's analysis is.
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Legal Beagle: MMP Review #2: Dual Candidacy, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
Except maybe it did work under first past the post. Maybe the reason National or Labour never even adopted some policy was because electorate members in marginal seats who feared for their jobs spoke out loudly in caucus, in a way that they're possibly discouraged from doing now because those who stand up to party leadership risk having their list ranking suffer?
That's an awful lot to chuck on a "maybe".
I have a better solution: stronger requirements for democratic candidate selection, both for list ranking and for electorate candidates. Let party members vote, and decide for themselves whether they want yes-men or the independent representatives you desire. That's far better targetted at the problem you want to solve, while doing far less damage to other aspects of our electoral system.
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I think you're throwing the baby out to pursue a fantasy.
Firstly, list MPs act as local representatives, just as electorate MPs do. Archaic Parliamentary rules prevent them from advertising themselves as "the MP for [electorate]", but they open offices, do constituency work, and all the functions we expect of geographicly-based MPs. They just choose their location in a rather different way from electorate MPs.
Secondly, I'd argue that not only have we never had "strong local representation" in a floor-crossing sense, but we haven't in the "strong arguments in caucus" sense either. The 80's and 90's prove that. But more importantly, this simply removes the visible whip - the list - for the invisible one - electorate candidate selection. The parties do control this, and while they let us peasants have a bit of a say sometimes, they go to great lengths to ensure that their members do not make the "wrong" choice.
Basically, if you want weaker parties, then legislate for weaker parties. This distorts the electoral system in unpleasant ways (all of which favour big parties - which is why they're suddenly keen on it), while doing SFA to achieve its intended goal.
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Legal Beagle: MMP Review #1: The Party…, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
Also, as I note, I do support not having a threshold. But a lot of voters - not just self-interested elites - have valid reasons for supporting some limit on parliamentary representation, and knowing what some of those reasons are, and recognising the imperatives behind them, it's only reasonable that I should consider how that can be accommodated when reaching a consensus view. Otherwise I'd be acting no terribly differently from those elites you oppose.
OTOH, some of those reasons - "I don't want X in Parliament" - are explicitly anti-democratic. I see no reason at all to accomodate them.
There are only so many waking hours in day. Unless Parliament drastically cuts the amount of work it does (by, for example, devolving a lot more of it to the Government, as occurs in other countries), it will simply not be possible for a single MP to remotely cover everything important to those who elected them.
I was thinking that it could choose to distribute that work differently. For example, debate allocations are curently in ten-miute slots, with allowance for parties to split theirs. Moving to shorter slots (and allowing them to be combined) would enable diversity, while likely allowing better debate. For Question Time, a modest increase in question allocations would do the same, while increasing accountability. There's not much that can be done about select committees, but I think that small parties accept that they have to focus their efforts in that regard.
And again, I think the only people who can validly answer the question of whether an MP is meeting their expectations of representation are the voters who elected them.
(BTW, I support your general point: the Electoral Commission should be looking at all the options here, and using the past 15 years of MMP as data on what small parties can do. But I also think that some of the things people think are barriers aren't, or rather, should be left to voters to decide in practice, just as we have seem to have decided that we want a diverse parliament rather than the expected 3-party model a lot of people were expecting)