Posts by Michael Meyers
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Hard News: The sole party of government, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
Election web site tells me here that there were 2405652 votes including specials yet to be counted. Your population estime for 2014 was 3378138. That’s 71.2%.
In 2011, it was 2257336 votes and population of 3326842. This is 67.5%
Even if you only include the known special votes and exclude the overseas specials you’ve still got 70.0% turnout. You can only get down to 62.5% by only counting the election night votes which isn’t comparing like for like.
The known special votes are 254630 according to this page and overseas specials estimated at about 38000.
I’m pretty sure that I’m correctly understanding how special votes work here so I’m still thinking that turnout on a population basis went up.
Edit: I think I've got your population figures all wrong so YMMV. I can't find your 2014 population figure and I'm typing this on my iPad so it's a bit too hard to fix it up. Maybe 70.7% as a rough estimate?
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Looking at these graphs in the comments of votes, there are two thoughts that struck me.
People are complaining that a smaller percentage of the electorate voted for National yet apparently the voter turnout went up. This doesn't tally up for me and I wonder if maybe the special votes have been forgotten about.
Also, those who didn't vote are irrelevant. Sure it'd be good if more of them voted but they didn't. And it's likely that a good portion would voted National anyway. So your missing million includes half a million National voters.
I voted but as a general policy I don't vote in local body elections. I just don't care enough to be well informed about council elections . Is it really such a crime not to vote?
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Hard News: Privacy and the Public Interest, in reply to Russell Brown,
the "left has its own attack bloggers"
Part of the reason I come here is because of the interesting posts but also because of the interesting comments. Whenever I have tried looking as Whale Oil, or Kiwiblog, the content is bad enough but the constant ad hominem comments just get really tiresome and add nothing to the discussion.
The left wing blogs are nothing like the nastiness on the right.
No idea what's going to happen with this court case. Every day since Dirty Politics has been interesting for a different reason (and it was only three weeks ago). Even if there is an injunction, it's not going to stop the madness.
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Hard News: Why we thought what we thought, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Cunliffe should actually have known his own policy (and one IIRC he developed while finance spokesman before the last election) well enough to zing Key right back
While this is true, I don't see why the CGT gaffe has become the most important thing in the news today. We have had a two hour debate and the most important thing was that DC didn't have a rehearsed answer for a question about family trusts and CGT? Really??
More important points from the debate for me were that JK was stating that we already have a CGT on investor profits on house sales (interesting rebuttal to CGT), and that I now know more about JK's mum than about the Nat's policy.
Also, JK has got a lot of praise for condemning Cam Slater during the debate but it was a pretty limited censure of Slater's behaviour, only related to the SFO. This seems to have been lost. Overall it looks like news doesn't do subtlety.
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Hard News: Why we thought what we thought, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Hooton ahem... oops. Won't get that one wrong again.
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Hard News: Why we thought what we thought, in reply to Joe Wylie,
The economy thing annoys me. National has claimed credit for all the good things in the past 6 years, blamed all the bad things on the GFC, and conveniently everything before the 2008 election was Labour's fault rather than the GFC. I'm surprised they have got away with that spin.
I'm not saying that National have handled the economy badly but it feels like any muppet could've take the NZ economy out of recession following global financial crisis.
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Just read the personal statement from Matthew Hooten.
It reads a bit like an example of Stockholm Syndrome. National and Act have both been naughty but he's voting for them anyway.
Although it got me thinking: it feels like there just aren't enough credible centre-right parties around. If I had wanted to cast a blue vote but decide that National is too tarnished by these allegations, what other options are there? Winston First? The Peter Dunne Party? Conservatives? None of those are particularly credible either.
So if a right-leaning voter such at Matthew Hooten were to defect from National, where's he going to go? He's not likely to cross the fence to Labour or the Greens, is he?
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With all these increasingly absurd denials from Key and Malcolm Tucker this week, I'm starting to wonder if Phil Goff was ever actually briefed, as he originally claimed. All we've got is a note on a briefing paper which could easily be faked for a bit of embarrassment.
It also amuses me that this weird issue of Israeli spies escaping NZ after the earthquake can have an effect on two successive elections: once for the blue team and once for the red team.
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While I can accept that "I notified the Prime Minister" might be construed to mean that "I notified the Prime Minister's Office", but talk of a "discussion" can't easily be spun any way other than a discussion with the actual prime minister.
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Hard News: We can do better than this, in reply to Alfie,
Once again the comments are open.
I sense a bit of a conspiracy theory building about the Herald comments. As far as I can tell after a scout around their site, comments only seem to be open on “opinion” pieces rather than “news” pieces.
I’m not sure if this is a recent change or not. It doesn’t appear to me that it’s solely about stifling debate on this “left-wing conspiracy theory”.
Update: I emailed the Herald to ask. The response is "Hi Mikey, we don’t allow comments on nzherald.co.nz news articles. That’s a long-standing policy. Our regional websites do allow comments on most stories."