Posts by Dismal Soyanz
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Speaker: Compulsory voting and election turnout, in reply to bmk,
The compulsion needs to have a clear benefit which I just don’t see.
I assume you mean benefit to the individual. The benefit to society as a whole is pretty obvious.
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Hard News: The sole party of government, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Where’s Catatonic ?
Next to Denial. It looks similar to but has fewer migrants than Flux, which is, course, constant.
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Speaker: Compulsory voting and election turnout, in reply to Richard_Elwin,
don’t imply a right to not participate in a political process you don’t want to be involved in.
Over and above the analogy of taxes – which you have no right not to pay (and funnily enough the same people who say this is an infringement on their rights are also the same crowd who believe tax is theft) – the idea of not wanting to participate is equivalent to giving up your democratic rights in every meaningful way. If you don’t want to participate even when there are “no confidence” or “don’t care” options on the ballot paper, then you don’t even want to send that signal to the rest of society. In other words, you really don’t care what happens. And you then want to complain about your rights?
ETA: The thing that sells compulsory voting to me is the that it sets up an expectation that every voter will cast a ballot and that will eventually form part of the the collective psyche so that kids turning 18 will actually see voting as the default setting. If you want to opt-out, there are ways and means of expressing your opinion with the ballot paper.
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Hard News: The sole party of government, in reply to Mike Graham,
in many respects the pattern hasn’t changed much from the previous election.
The leftward rotation of the Labour electorates is very noticeable. Great graph.
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Hard News: Five further thoughts, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
What price/benefit is put on simply living in your own home, post mortgage…
I remember reading an article a few years back that said the average time a household spent in one house was only 5 years. Churn and earn, folks, churn and earn.
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Hard News: Five further thoughts, in reply to Amanda Wreckonwith,
I also think it’s a good idea but it shouldn’t be viewed as a source of revenue – more as a way of changing investment behaviour.
Ben and I kicked this around a bit here. It's not a given that behaviour will change but personally I quite like the idea that homeowners stop seeing the housing market as a one-way bet.
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Hard News: Five further thoughts, in reply to Martin Hermans,
Yes and no.
Labour did not have a simple, easy to understand platform that was well communicated. So, yes, if they had that the netizens of Trade Me would have been able to get it (whether they believed is another matter).
But the rout went much deeper. I’ve been looking at my electorate’s data (and it would seem others are similar) on the electorate/party vote schism. There must have been a big chunk of voters voting the Labour MP but party vote National. While some may have done that in the past, it was glaringly obvious this time around. That doesn’t occur by only failing to make Josephine Average understand the message. It suggests that she actually dislikes the message (or what she perceives as the message).
What ails the Labour Party now is much worse than the Democrats failure against Dubya in 2004, IMO.
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Hard News: The sole party of government, in reply to David Hood,
Average turnout in electorates won in 2014 by a National MP 0.703
Average turnout in electorates won in 2014 by a Labour MP 0.644That in itself tells a story. If higher turnout works against the right, then this really reinforces (not that it needs to) the disconnect between Labour and the electorate.
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Hard News: The sole party of government, in reply to David Hood,
Cheers.
Something doesn’t quite gel here with 77% number in the summary page versus those you’ve got. Could the difference be specials?
Eta: I see that there are specials in there but is that the final final specials?
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Hard News: The sole party of government, in reply to David Hood,
Wow.
What was the source for that, David?
Compared against 2011 for Wellington Central (85%) that's a massive drop!