Posts by Graeme Edgeler
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Legal Beagle: MMP Review #1: The Party…, in reply to Idiot Savant,
But surely that’s a question for voters, rather than self-interested political elites, to decide?
And given that there is likely to be majority support among voters for a threshold, we may be doing just that.
Also, as I note, I do support not having a threshold. But a lot of voters - not just self-interested elites - have valid reasons for supporting some limit on parliamentary representation, and knowing what some of those reasons are, and recognising the imperatives behind them, it's only reasonable that I should consider how that can be accommodated when reaching a consensus view. Otherwise I'd be acting no terribly differently from those elites you oppose.
he onus is on parliament to change its Standing Orders to allow them to be effective representatives, not use those arbitrary rules as an excuse to constrain voter choice.
There are only so many waking hours in day. Unless Parliament drastically cuts the amount of work it does (by, for example, devolving a lot more of it to the Government, as occurs in other countries), it will simply not be possible for a single MP to remotely cover everything important to those who elected them.
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My next one won't be as long, I promise :-)
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About an hour. I'm reasonably happy with that. But now work out how long it would take to do this over all the other aspects of the bill (about which I'm less certain about the current law) :-)
Edit: least popular thread ever :-)
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Legal Beagle: It's (almost) never that simple, in reply to Euan Mason,
Irrespective of whether it was worth something to the station, Key got free radio time; something his party would normally pay for.
Actually, no. Radio time is something National is legally forbidden from paying for (which is why Radio Live will be in trouble if Police get around to charging them this week).
After all, companies don’t donate to the National Party out of the goodness of their hearts. They clearly expect a policy return, yet what they pay is a donation.
I don’t think that’s clear at all. I suspect most people who donate to a political party do so not because it will adopt policies it might want, but because it already has, and they'd like it to win an implement them.
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Hard News: The real problem with the…, in reply to Ross Mason,
Are conversations between a reporter and the ‘client’ now deemed private if one person does not know it is being taped?
No. There was an issue in this case because neither knew. As long as one party to a conversation knows, it's fine.
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Legal Beagle: Police: "Ambrose not guilty", in reply to Keith Ng,
… or are you saying that regardless, they shouldn’t say anything because charges weren’t laid?
I assumed the latter. Seems a sensible line in the sand.
There is some authority for the proposition that any public statements about guilt by any part of the state (e.g. police) prior to conviction are a violation of the presumption of innocence.
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Hard News: The real problem with the…, in reply to Sacha,
Don’t our courts make that sort of determination, rather than the police?
No. They make it as well, but if police don't think what you've done is unlawful, they won't charge you, so they have to answer that question.
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In the view of police investigators, the recording was “most likely” on purpose, but at the least “reckless”.
There's your headline:
Police: Ambrose Innocent
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In my first post on the case, I noted that The Dominion Post had published a story under the screaming headline ‘Napalm bombs found in anti-terror swoop’. Those bombs were presumably lost again, because they formed no part of the evidence presented in court.
I have no idea, but something like this could easily be ruled irrelevant because the only evidence about napalm applied to one of the defendants against whom the charges were dropped. If none of these four was charged with anything to do with napalm, evidence about someone else's napalm proclivities would be unnecessarily inflammatory.
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Hard News: A storm in any port, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Why? What is the real figure and what are the assumptions? I’m guessing the median is lower and I’m also guessing it includes an assumption of overtime which is also unreasonable.
I understand it includes the cost of non-cash remuneration such as health insurance provided by the employer.