Posts by Moz
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
this article on Australian identity has some interesting comments on Howard's attempt to teach civics towards the end. Well worth a look.
-
Speaker: Compulsory voting and election turnout, in reply to bmk,
On the compulsory voting thing - I'm strongly opposed. Why should we compel people to be somewhere they don't want to be?
That's in large part the point of the legal system. You're just not allowed to go wherever you want, whenever you want. Everything from property laws to jails to to the nation-state itself is about "compel people to be somewhere they don't want to be" or "preventing people going where they want to go". I think linking that to compulsory voting is a bit of a stretch.
-
Speaker: Compulsory voting and election turnout, in reply to BenWilson,
I put it to you that the reason people consider jury service that way is that the service itself is actually onerous and annoying
And expensive. There's no recognition that the cost of me being away from work is more than just the immediate wages.And it's arbitrary, it amounts to "we pick a few people at random and tax them a whole heap more".
Despite that objection I think we should do more of it. And since we have agreed to live in a capitalist system, we should recognise the value of the service juries provide by paying them properly.
-
Speaker: Science and Democracy, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Out of habit most scientists are reluctant to state absolutes because we have enough experience with artifacts to know that we can be made to look like complete dicks.
I think it's more that politics is all about convincing people to act more strongly than the evidence supports (a balanced budget is important! Why? Because... I dunno, it just seems obvious). But science is about probabilities and being wrong. There's a huge gap between political truths like "Saddam has nuclear weapons, that's a fact" and scientific truth like "the law of gravity seems to work, at least as far as we're aware, but we haven't been able to test it in all situations". I mean, the current New Scientist reports someone saying that black holes don't exist. So much for the "law" of gravity... some tweaking may be in order. Or maybe not. We don't know yet.
I struggle with this a lot, I'm yet another STEM bloke who can't just say what I need to say without (usually) putting in caveats and exclusions (worse than lawyers, we are). There's got to be a joke somewhere about asking different professions whether the sun will come up in the morning... the astonomer says "the sun doesn't come up, the earth rotates", the physicist says "it's likely to, we think", the statistician says "historically it has done so, p>.9", the engineer says "I think we could fix that"...
-
Speaker: Compulsory voting and election turnout, in reply to Emma Hart,
We desperately need better civics education, though
Definitely. Not just the mechanics, but also why the mechanics are important.
I don't know how to convey this to some people, but I am close to people who literally put their lives on the line for this issue. All of them know people, and often are related to people, who put their lives on the line and lost them, because that was better than not living in a democratic society. I kind of get where the grumpy old war veterans are coming from whith the "I didn't fight fascists so you could smoke pot on my lawn" thing. The idea that they would go through that and then not vote... offends them. They are more likely to organise a lynch mob to attack anti-democratic groups than to decide they'd rather stay home than vote.
I kid you not about the lynch mob. The vietnamese communist party people in Cabramatta are very quiet and very careful to make sure they put their stall next to the police stall at festivals. People go along and harange them about how evil they are. I don't want to explain to my father in law that I could not be bothered voting because they're all just the same. I'm sure he would quite politely point out that the communist party are not very nice and by not voting against them I have offended him... well, hopefully politely.
-
Speaker: Compulsory voting and election turnout, in reply to izogi,
I’d rather spend more effort identifying why so many people are choosing not to exercise their right to have a say in who governs them, and then if possible and reasonable try to adjust things so they’re more incentivised to get engaged on their own terms.
(also in response to Craig). I think this is looking at it backwards. As a participant in democracy you have the obligation to vote, not the right. And let's be clear: by living here you are a participant in a democracy, that's not something you can opt out of. You definitely have the right to vote according to your conscience, that's crucial. But I think making people turn up and explcitly say "I want to be governed by someone else's choice" is important. The whole passive CBF approach hides just how much of a decision is being made.
We're seeing that right now with much of the bought media echoing National's line that we have endorsed Key, Collins and Slater. Anyone stupid enough to say "I didn't vote... and so I didn't vote for them either" is lying about their decision. At best their decision was that what's been done in their name is not worth even a tiny effort to oppose. My belief is that not voting is a more active endorsement - they like what's happening and don';t see any need to change it.
-
Speaker: Compulsory voting and election turnout, in reply to BeShakey,
the majority of voters have (at best) a choice between two parties if they don't want to cast a vote for a party with no chance of winning the seat.
QED. The voting system is sufficiently complex that a lot of people have no idea how it works, or more commonly they know but they're wrong. At best, this is correct with the caveat that each voter gets to keep casting votes until they find an electable party. More likely it's a misstatement.
Every single voter has the choice of multiple parties and their vote for any of those parties has a chance of ending up with that party. Often a very small chance, but some chance - as the voters for the Motoring Enthusiasts Party found out a year ago. The Greens have a seat in Melbourne that they've gained largely through educating people about how the voting system works. A task that, at least in theory, the state should do. But gee, I wonder why the two major parties don't see any reason to teach people that the voting system allows them to usefully vote for other parties?
Preferential voting is just that. You vote for parties/candidates in order of preference, and if your first preference isn't elected your vote passes down to your second preference, where it counts as a vote just like any other. And so on, right down to the bottom of the list if necessary, before likely lodging with one of the three or four large parties (National, Labor, Liberal, LiberalNationalParty). You really can start with "The Bill and Ben Party" and work your way through to "The Wizard Party" before putting Labor ahead of Liberal and chances are you just voted Labor.
But it means that in theory at least, there's no harm at all in you saying "hey, it'd be great if The Bill And Ben candidate got in, I'll give them my first preference". The caveat is that there's cash for your first preference if they get over a threshold of votes, so every party really, really wants your first preference. Which is another (big) incentive for them to ... allow people to think that the first preference is all that matters.
-
I'm keen on compulsory voting exactly because it negates one strategy of the powerful - discouraging voting. It also makes it harder for the powerful to use US-style techniques of making it hard or impossible to vote. Only providing facilities for half the electorate to vote is much harder to justify if everyone is required to do so.
And the "compulsion violates rights" is near-meaningless. As a resident you have to pay taxes, obey laws, purchase licenses and permits. As a citizen it's even worse, you can be called up to serve on a jury or in the military as well. If you own land it's even worse as you have to pay rates and maintain the land to a minimum standard plus allow access by the 200+ different classes of officious wankers poking their nose into your so-called "private land". And you're worried about being forced to vote every three years? Bwahahaha.
The fine in Australia is interesting, Even for people who don't want to vote and for whom the fine would be a joke the desire to avoid being fined is usually high. Which is all to the good. I'd like more information about the legal options for non-voting to be obvious, but Australia also has a significant problem with the complexity of its voting system that is probably more important. I don't want NZ to go down the path of using multiple variations on a complex voting system (I vote in five elections per cycle, and each uses a different voting system).
-
Speaker: Three times over, and never again, in reply to Russell Brown,
Russel, I'm pretty sure you've published people's pieces on this subject before. I remember reading one before I made a submission to a select committee on this subject. IIRC that report has been put in the "things for the next review to consider" pile. I'd love to be wrong and hear that it's being implemented. But, you know.
And thanks June for writing that.
-
Speaker: The plan against the rebuild, in reply to Philip Hayward,
Pavletich has been pointing out all along, and numerous people obviously have a comprehension problem, that there are cities that are systemically affordable
If you'd rather not address my points it would be better if you didn't post, rather than resorting to snide remarks. I appreciate that you don't have much to say so you're just repeating what you have. I've read the source material you're using, and I don't buy the assumptions he makes. Unconstrained areal growth doesn't work over the long term, and even in the short term (less than 50 years) it only works in specific circumstances.
Many New Zealanders want to avoid those circumstances (mostly the wealth inequality, but also the legal inequality). To make it work we'd probably also need US-style mortgage laws and corporate citizenship, both of which are, again, contentious. Even in the US they're contentious. But they do work very well for rich people like Paveltich.
Few people realise that "Detroit", the bankrupt municipality, is surrounded by fiscally viable and economically sound suburban municipalities.
Much as few people realise that you can make a lot of money breeding unicorns, that's because it's not true. Considering Detroit as an urban area rather than a collection of independent fiefdoms, it's not working very well. If you live in one of the rich enclaves it's great, you can rely on the broader city for supply of labour and jobs as well as utilities, while not having to pay any price for them. It's a win/win/ lose big, situation, where you only get the win side.
Any enclave can work if it can assert legal independence from its hinterland. Singapore is amazing, Monaco is brilliant, Switzerland works damn well. Palestine... not so much. But none of them are successful independent of the areas adjacent to them. Singapore imports food and cheap labour in huge quantities, Monaco is a tax and gambling haven, Switzerland is a coven of bankers. "successful" US municipalities reproduce many of those characteristics - they're full of disproportionately wealthy people who draw their wealth from the surrounding areas. Cut them off and they die. Make them pay taxes and they buy a more compliant government (in the US anyway, less so in Palestine).
In Christchurch we could apply the Paveltich system and it would work really well. Make Ilam a municipality with its own council and tax system. Do the same to Hornsbay and Rolleston etc. Get central government to agree that the regional council (oh, wait, that is run by central government) will not impose regional taxes to fund anything, and let the various new councils run their own water, sewage and public transport systems. I'm sure they'd all happily come to commercial arrangements with whichever council ended up owning the sewerage plant :)
I'm sure the new residents of Rolleston would love their cheap houses and reasonable commute to their jobs in the city. Until there were 50,000 of them and suddenly that single, one lane each way road into the city became a parking lot. And they had to negotiate with the Independent City of Ilam for permission to widen the road.