Posts by James Butler
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"White-Anting"
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Hard News: The Public Address Word of…, in reply to David R,
so Ghost-Jobs as Paul mentioned, but with a capital J. Double whammy.
Someone else will have to do the obligatory "You know I can't grab your ghost jobs, Ghost Jobs!" photoshop. I'm supposed to be working.
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Or just "Jobs", for the politicos and Apple fanbois both.
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Or "Treasury Forecast". But that's really a phrase of the last 3-5 years I guess.
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How about "private", as in "private conversation"?
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Hard News: The Next Labour Leader, in reply to BenWilson,
Everything I hear from Labour betrays FPP thinking and the sense of entitlement to power. It’s all about how to grow their own vote at the expense of other parties – the non-voters don’t seem to trouble them at all, and the idea of genuinely, and honestly forging links to the other parties seems virtually treasonous. Which is tactically and strategically very stupid.
I actually think some of this stems from National's relative success in staying a big, monolithic near-majority party for the last three years (and into the foreseeable future) - this election felt to an extent like an FPP party taking on, and winning against, an MMP coalition. Of course there are many reasons why National manages to keep above 45%, eg. John Key, the disintegration of its allies, neither of which Labour should put any hope into emulating. But part of it might also be that National's base, conservative, authoritarian-leaning, is just temperamentally suited to putting all its electoral eggs in one basket. Maybe a united Right and a fragmented Left is going to be a feature of NZ politics for a while. And provided that Labour can get its collective heads around that, it's not such a bad idea really.
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Up Front: What if We Held an Election…, in reply to Emma Hart,
So of course we gave her a takeaway vote – she took the papers out of the booth, and then later on brought them back filled in. That’s completely different…
Tricky. Our polling place manager was getting extremely flustered when the sausage sizzle outside kept setting off the smoke alarms inside the building - because no-one is allowed to take a ballot out of the building, evacuation was going to be tricky when people were in the middle of voting. Luckily none of the alarms lasted long enough to come to that.
Also, a friend of mine - who always takes the trouble to enroll to vote, come to the booth in the morning and pick up his ballots just so he can deface them before putting them in the boxes - was asking me what I thought would happen if he ate his ballot while in the booth. I pointed out that as he wasn't allowed to take the ballot out of the polling place, it could turn into a very long day for everyone involved...
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Where I was scrutineering we had mostly Mt Roskill tables, but the end two could do Epsom and Mount Albert as well - and there was a nice man at the door whose job it was to ask people's electorates and point them to the next empty seat at the correct table. Not foolproof, but it did save some hassle.
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Arse Vote Card
Voting for arse - that might increase turnout!
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Hard News: Democracy Night, in reply to Sacha,
And can you imagine Banks standing up to Joyce when his tongue is so firmly planted up Key’s behind?
I'd... rather not.