Posts by Rex Widerstrom
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Paul Williams,
Ideally, Labour would have clearly opened up a couple of significant points of difference and they've not, yet.
They could do a lot worse than follow the advice the editorial in The Australian gave to Labor generally, and NSW Labor in particular, this past weekend, quoting from Ben Chifley's famous "light on the hill" speech back in 1949:
the success of the Labour Party at the next elections depends entirely, as it always has done, on the people who work. I try to think of the labour movement, not as putting an extra sixpence into somebody's pocket, or making somebody prime minister or premier, but as a movement bringing something better to the people, better standards of living, greater happiness to the mass of the people . . .
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Nick Kearney,
Yes, which is why I commented (sarcastically) on the absurd suggestion David paid for his list position.
Much as I'd like to think it as that - because I can get my head round it - I've never believed that rumour. But that still leaves me asking... why??
Why would a movement that styled itself "the liberal party" alienate a bloc of its own support as well as commenters including myself (and I'd also consulted to it in Prebble's day), who could see much good in much of what it aimed to do?
Why would it clasp to it's bosom a conservative reactionary whose pre-selection utterance of homophobic prejudice, possibly while drunk on national television, ought to have set off alarm bells?
Garrett's potential as an MP can't have been seen as worth that risk, surely? Which is why it's so tempting to believe in a "brown paper bag full of money" scenario... because the alternative is that Act's senior decision makers have a level of political nous that makes Phil Goff's performance over the past week look like finely crafted statesmanship.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Insinuate Magazine
Off topic but I have to sob someplace. Just got an email from said mag (now in "his 'n' hers" format... welcome to bizzaro world):
In this coming month, we’re releasing a major new book on New Zealand’s law and order problem, written by crime researcher and former police intelligence analyst David Fraser.
It's called Badlands and subtitled "NZ: A land fit for criminals". "With forewords by Theodore Dalrymple and Garth McVicar".
After throwing up in my mouth, I'm now seriously contemplating sticking a fork in both eyes before I have to read some inane lynchmob blog comment or letter to the editor citing this pile of putresence as "evidence" or "research".
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Each of those parties selects their list according to some sort of rules. For the Greens, it's one member one vote, for the others a range of schemes... How is that any more democratic than someone getting elected by less voters who happen to congeal in one place, like Epsom or Belmont?
It's the "range of schemes" that make it less so. Kudos to the Greens, and if they all did that, I'd have much less of a problem with the whole system.
But when they can get away with electoral fraud as NZF did in 1996 (telling the electorate that every member had a vote, then those regional votes determined the votes of an electoral college, running the whole process, then binning the votes and leaving it to Lhaws and Sarah Neems) and have the High Court say that's within the rules because there aren't any rules...
Or the reason Garrett appeared at number 5 on Act's list. We still don't know what quid pro quo happened there.
Or, even if it's done according to the party's rules, that it can depend solely on the judgment of three people in a major party like Labour - which surely has the resources to do better if it wished - as to whether someone becomes a list MP... a "congealed electorate" ain't perfect but it's better than that.
It's the House of Representatives after all. That suggests a slightly larger sample size than three.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
@Sofie
Rex, the man gets out and about, promise. The guy is a workaholic
Hard worker =/= accountable. Or even "willing to listen". I don't know Goff's work as an electorate MP well enough to comment on him personally and so he may well be different, but my general experience of MPs is the safer the seat (or, now, list position) the greater the arrogance.
@Danyl
In the major parties they almost all want to be electorate MPs - so their careers aren't subject to the whims of the leadership
And while they're list MPs they are nothing more than tools of a small leadership cabal and wholly reliant on them for preferment.
the list MPs feel accountable to the electorate that they aspire to, as well as the wider population
I have yet to see a list MP embark upon a significant course of action (or perhaps more importantly, refrain from one) in defiance of their leadership and in response to the wishes of the broader electorate.
OTOH I have seen list MPs act to please the small number of people who smoothed their way into power, in ways that are not in the best interests of the wider electorate - David Garrett and "3 strikes" being a prime example.
Had he not been caught on the whole "dead baby" thing, we'd have the pleasure of his influence on public life for a good decade or more because Act voters were presented a fait accompli - abandon all the other things in which you believe and for which you wish to vote, or vote for them and get lumbered with this fruitcake.
@Russell
Bob Clarkson
Gawd, having had a bit to do with the Tauranga electorate (Winston couldn't even be bothered attending the AGM, for instance, and sent me in his stead) I fear Clarkson may have been doing an excellent job of representing at least the views of the majority of its electors. Just as Lhaws contrived to do with his in Whanganui... only after massaging their nascent prejudices of course.
There are of course electorate MPs who don't feel accountable to their electorates, and that is always a function of the size of their majorities. In an ideal world, they'd all represent marginal seats. However my point is that every list MP can afford, if they so wish, to ignore the electorate whereas only some electorate MPs can.
And thus we should be looking to create a system to enhance accountability, not to retain one that - at best - provides no incentive for it.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Russell Brown,
the idea that a list MP is automatically bad and unaccountable is unsustainable
Okay the Zimbabwe thing was meant tongue-in-cheek. There really needs to be a tongue-in-cheek smiley.
All list MPs aren't "bad", and I'm not saying they are. I'd agree with a few of your picks of the good ones.
However MMP has gifted us everyone from Alamein "flog the furniture" Kopu to David "flog the prisoners" Garrett - not poster children for people in tune with even a significant sctor of the population.
How are any of them accountable to anyone but party bosses?
[Not that I'm advocating for FPP. Far from it. IMO we need a uniquely NZ system built on stuff we can learn from overseas. But I don't wish to digress too far].
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Russell Brown,
it's a complaint from someone apparently previously very favourably disposed towards Hughes and the party itself
You're not the first person I've seen make this argument, but I still don't follow the logic. While not implying for a moment the complaint is vexatious, the only circumstances in which someone makes a vexatious complaint is to harm someone that has previously mattered to them.
If I'm going to lay a vexatious complaint I'm not going to stick a pin in a phone book, I'm going to seek to vex someone who I feel has harmed or betrayed me in a pre-existing relationship - personal, sexual, business or political. And given that I had a realtionship with the person at some point, I was probably "favourably disposed" toward them in the past.
Similarly, previous positive attitudes in no way affects the possibility of some horrible misunderstanding having arisen; it's irrelevant one way or the other. If the misunderstanding were trivial then tribal loyalty might constrain the injured party, but if signals were mixed in a personal (and possibly sexual) situation, then hardly.
Past political inclinations are, I'd suggest, of no help whatsoever in speculating upon the validity of the complaint.
There's some irony in us all saying "we shouldn't speculate" and then going on to do so, and I'm as guilty as anyone. But we really shouldn't, and all I'm trying to say is assume nothing in these situations.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Russell Brown,
He can't always have been that bad -- he has a very safe seat and an excellent local electoral organisation -- but he just seemed all at sea.
Could that not be why he is so bad? You're a safe seat MP or a list MP, you don't have to meet the plebs or, if you do, give a damn what they think of you. Keep wearing the right coloured ribbon and the mugs'll keep voting for you.
The electorate voted for MMP thinking they'd get better representation with greater accountability. Ironically, the very concept of a list MP is the most unaccountable, unrepresentative politician in any jurisdiction outside Libya. Or maybe Zimbabwe.
When I read something like Graeme's comment that:
...the roles of Party President, Party Leader and Deputy Leader are now filled by entirely different individuals?
If Little, Goff and King were drawing up the list in 2008 maybe Tizard wouldn't have been on it at all.
it just sounds so... wrong. The judgment as to whether Tizard (in this case) or any candidate is an appropriate member of the House of Representatives should not be in the hands of three people, and subject to their caprice, but rather to that of as many as possible of those whom they seek to represent.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
Followed by " recently out of school"
And let's not forget "naked". While DPF is by no means the worst on this topic, I had a headdesk moment over this:
can you politically endure an incident where a naked 18 year old, less than three months out of school, ran naked out of the house
I just had to respond:
Oh, and did we mention he was naked… I mean, totally without any clothes on?!11!!!1111
And how much better does “three months out of school” sound than “two years past the age of consent”, eh?
Given we have an age of consent (a legal construct which, like arbitrary breath alcohol limits, I find artificial and unfair, but probably all that's practicable at this point, but that's another topic) then sex with anyone over that line should have but one issue - that of consent.
There are a vast number of stable, loving, long-term relationships (including my own), which wouldn't make it under the alternate "half your age plus seven" law I saw floated amidst this controversy, and in which the participants' ages are at significant variance. So... bloody... what?.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
M’kay… sounds like there’s some abuse apologist bingo going down at Brian’s house – and his later defence in response to my comment would be funny if it wasn’t so damn creepy.
I can offer a by-no-means-unique but still reasonably rare perspective on this, I think. It's understandly easy to take umbrage at the minimising that goes on round sexual offending, but that ought not to blind us to the fact that untruths are uttered by alleged victims, for a variety of reasons.
In my own case it was a young and thus impressionable young girl* who was alternately threatened and cajoled by police and blatantly lied to (the old "we need you to nail him on behalf of all the other victims" claptrap). They wrote her statement for her, despite her explicitly stating during the interview that the things they were recording had not happened. And there were political (in several senses of the word) undertones, as disclosed to me by some of the officialdom involved.
As an aside, I find the "apologist bingo", relating as it does to Julian Assange - a case with definitie political undertones - offensive in its smugness and certainty given that the evidence against him has yet to be properly aired, let alone tested.
In other instances, a victim maybe be genuinely adamant yet honestly mistaken, as in the case of David Dougherty amongst others. "Eyewitness" testimony, esppecially in the absence of objective correlation, is known to be wholly unreliable yet is trotted out time and again by prosecutors. That unreliability is not due to any malice but because of well-documented perceptual and recall failures, especially under stress.
And then there are the small number of complaints that are motivated by malice. It'd be nice to believe no one would ever use an accusation of sexual misconduct as a weapon, not only because it has a devastating effect on the accused but provides fuel for the apologists, but some do. Spend a day or two in the Family Court and you'll find that "all men are (child) rapists" is less an offensive slogan and more a pro forma starting point for most actions.
Undoubtedly some people who come out of the woodwork at times like this fit your description of "creepy apologists" Craig, but some people, myself included, are particularly attuned to the condemnation suffered by the accused long before the allegations are properly aired in any independent tribunal and the ease with which unsupported allegations can be made against an individual whose life is then destroyed regardless of the veracity. I just hope Darren Huges isn't one of them.
And with all standard trigger warnings in place, Michael Laws is reliably vile – here’s a hint, as soon as he starts using the word “sensual” avert your eyes. Prick.
A "let's be reasonable and let the judicial process take its course" column from the man who only a week ago was calling for looters to be lynched and describing an accused person as a "feral inbred"?!
Does this numpty have any self-awareness left or is his entire thinking process now one giant masturbatory fantasy in which the rest of the world are the people who bullied him at school and he now has the media muscle to exact revenge?
* At 13, as she was then, I think "girl" a not inappropriate description. At 18, "boy" is a description loaded with all sorts of judgments. And I say that as the father of an 18 year old male.