Posts by Moz
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Access: The Universal Basic Income and…, in reply to Hilary Stace,
They argue that having parents who are married to each other is better for preventing child poverty.
Correlation is not causation, as we all know. In this case it's likely that people not in poverty are more likely to marry ... or maybe the registry office gives a bale of cash with the marriage certificate?
I still think it's a pity they canned the child allowance.
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Hard News: Friday Music: The Music Story, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
elsewhere even, you might say...
I was half expecting a BaseFM reference, but you went one better.
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DJ Kush Boogie's "eBooks" has this really annoying printer-like noise in the background. I'm certain it's a deliberate inclusion, but it sounds like an unhappy laser printer so I keep looking round at our (old, sad, much-abused) laser printer to see if it's dying. https://marginslabel.bandcamp.com/releases
Also, seeing Grahame Reid in videos is weird. I feel as though I should know him from reading so much of his work, but then I see him and go "he doesn't write like someone who looks like that". My mental image of him is way off base.
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Hard News: Friday Music: The Music Story, in reply to Russell Brown,
Also: lol, the kids and their cassettes.
Remember DCC? Coulda been a goer. I would have preferred DAT, and a housemate actually had a DAT tape deck in the early 90's, but OMG the cost.
In the middle of re-hearing Moana and the Moahunters as I read this, so here's a reminder:
(well, until I got distracted by Bob's suggestion above. Ooops)
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Legal Beagle: Geoffrey Palmer has…, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
Sir Geoffrey was asked about social and economic rights. He noted he was a conservative on such issue
The Treaty includes a number of rights that today are considered economic (in English, anyway), like fishing and forestry. Leaving those out of the constitution would raise eyebrows, regardless of the rationale.
Which reminds me, is the proposed constitution subservient the the treaty (which is after all our founding document), or superior to it? I'm kinda curious, because the legal status of the treaty is something I haven't really researched.
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Hard News: Things that do us good and ill, in reply to Russell Brown,
Ian notes, it's better done by email.
I keep forgetting that your "email" is actually a form on the website. An increasing number of recipients block my actual emails because I have my own domain rather than using a major host (viz, gmail/yahoo/MS/apple). Including my workplace.
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I'm also thinking of various decriminalisation campaigns, and how it would probably be difficult to add new rights as opinions change. Which can be a good thing, but also nasty if you're on the wrong side of the existing law. I mean, homosexuality is all very well, but if prostitution and abortion fall on the wrong side of a right, changing that could be a nightmare.
Abortion is a useful example, I think. If a fertilised egg gets human rights there's going to be a heck of a fight to keep abortion legal even under the limited circumstances we currently have. But if slavery is outlawed, abortion before viability is hard to argue against, and right up to the moment of delivery could reasonably be supported. Competing rights in 3...2...1...
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Legal Beagle: Geoffrey Palmer has…, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
I will note however, that the alternative, not have an entrenched bill of rights, isn't much of an improvement from your perspective.
Entrenching would be a huge step forward, I agree. I would like to have constitutional rights, and generally I don't.
I'm just cautious that we don't entrench foolish or awful things. I have significant respect for our man Sir Geoffrey and his abilities, but I'm also aware that he's going to necessarily aim for a consensus position rather than a philosophical one. There's a risk there that people won't see the point of having a few existing rights guaranteed, where they might be more inclined to support a more ambitious suggestion.
Plus, to many people the rights currently under attack aren't real - any talk of a right to privacy or security from surveillance marks you as paranoid. The right not to self-incriminate is likewise being actively pushed towards "anything you can keep silent about while being tortured". In a way it's misleading - many people think they have rights that aren't in fact acknowledged by government, don't realise how government already tramples those imaginary rights, and would be unhappy if they knew. Others, of course, want those rights not to exist (many of whom imagine that only other people will be affected).
Perhaps if the proposal was a list of rights, with a few marked as "you already have these", and rest marked from "you sort of have this, sometimes" to "hahahaha", people might be more inclined to support extending the list. Especially when it was pointed out that it only takes 50% of MPs to remove most of those rights.
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Legal Beagle: Geoffrey Palmer has…, in reply to bbrooks,
It's an or, not an and
The way it's written above I think either 75% of parliament, or 50% of the population can strip basic rights, and it requires both other groups to be stronger to resist since either avenue can succeed independently.
Viz, if 80% of parliament want to change the constitution but 60% of the population don't, those right are gone since parliament can pass the change (and prevent a contrary referendum being held). Contrawise, if 60% of the population want a change and 26% of parliament don't, the parliamentary vote will fail but a referendum vote will pass and the referendum succeed.
If 51% of MPs disagree, some of those MPs first have to be unelected and replaced with more compliant MPs before the referendum enabling bill(s) can pass, even if all that's required is funding. Referendums designed to overrule an uncooperative parliament are very hard to do.
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Interesting article in Oz about how Treasury forecasts have systematic errors. Does cover how the growth that does occur is often not available to the great majority of the population, and how it's often not related to anything happening in the country, but mostly it's about how those forecasts generally bias high. There was a better one that I can't find, but with a nice graph of forecast growth compounded vs actual growth, giving a pretty two sloping lines showing that if Treasury had been randomly wrong over time we'd have an economy two or three times the current size (or their estimates would have been more accurate, whatever).