Posts by Ben Austin
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Maybe not - we've grown quite a bit since then right? But people tend to look at raw numbers
Perhaps part of the problem is that central government is so far removed from those who live outside of Wellington that it is hard to really understand what they do. Or is the cetralisation of the Civil Service also a misconception?
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Key is just tapping into what a lot of people believe. The "too many civil servants" comment is a pretty common one when discussion politics outside of Wellington, if my recent travels in NZ are anything to go by. To counter that one can mention the starving of the civil service in the 1990s, the type of work these people do etc, but at the end of the day there are a lot more civil servants in Wellington now than 10 years ago and that worries a lot of people.
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All these CCTVs are useless without intelligent monitoring software - they could never afford to employ enough people to monitor all the cameras and make them useful tools of halting of crime as it happens.
Perhaps Skynet will be tougher on crime than our current representative democracy?
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I've always had a soft spot for turning the country's regional authorities/iwi into more of a canton like system in order to a) make some efforts as to sharing sovereignty (so much as it can be in a place like NZ), b) build a central government that better represents the various regional/communal interests of NZ and c) stronger regional governments might be better able to ensure their communities develop. So the cantons/regions/communities would become the constituent unit of the state - the country would be a collection of such cantons rather than whatever it is right now.
Each Canton would be based on either a regional/unitary or Iwi unit, depending on demographics, cultural or geographical boundaries, so there could be a Canton of Auckland as well as a Canton of Tainui. It would be quite a complicated exercise to determine these cantons initially I imagine, possibly too difficult.
Questions - 1) Would each Iwi get a canton, or would they be given what is effectively a local Maori/Iwi electoral roll in each canton where they are not a super majority? 2) How would the Canton relate to the district/borough councils? 3) What type of powers should a canton have? Should each canton have the same powers?
Each canton/area would be given a number of seats in a new upper house - this Upper House would be more like the German Upper House (Bundesrat) rather than say the US Senate in that the members would be elected or appointed by the Canton government (although I don't like the idea of immediate recall). This would give the Canton a real stake in the central government and ensure that regional interests are properly represented in government.
Questions to be answered here would be 1) Should each canton get the same amount of representatives, or should each canton get a share based roughly on their size/power? 2) Should the Upper House get to vote on everything, like the US Senate, or maybe just some things, like the Bundesrat? 3) Should each canton be roughly of the same size, or should it be more about communities than operational effectiveness (for an example of the former see the land of the Swiss)
The potential problem with any federal system is that it can make the central government too weak and in a small country like NZ that would be a bad thing I think. Conversely a federal central government can become too strong. However since the cantons would control the Upper House we could retain a strong central government that would still be accountable to the cantons.
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Allegedly someone in the UK recently described Hayley as the perfect example of Celtic womanhood but for the life of me I can't remember who.
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Well it could be worse you know, I've just been informed that garfield minus garfield is blocked in China.
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It kind of makes me sad that mysterious Parliamentary posters don't make some attempt to tricky, aside from not using their real name. It really detracts from the "faceless bastards in the Beehive are controlling our thoughts" meme.
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I remember a friend who worked for Vodafone telling us about a person had signed up for global roaming for data then went overseas and proceeded to download over a gb of data (auto updates?), this back about three-four years ago when data roaming charges met the definition of horrible. Apparently the initial (before negotiation) bill was several hundred thousand dollars.
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I do love the idea of the Safari live screen capture feature but aside from having made myself a gmail window for Dashboard I haven't found a use for it either.
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Right, but on the other hand if put to vote one should support it, even if one agrees with McCain - even if the vote is just a symbolic gesture