Posts by Kyle Matthews
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Clark and Turia were quoted on National Radio this afternoon about the entrenchment.
Clark pointed out that she was happy to entrench, but it didn't mean anything, as it wasn't possible to entrench the entrenching clause.
Turia said she wasn't sure about that, she'd have to go consult her lawyers.
It seemed quite obvious to me, perhaps if she read the members bill that she supposedly has ready, and thought about how she'd repeal it, it would become clearer.
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gio I'm not sure if we're talking at cross purposes.
I think Giovanni has it right.
To me, by divvying up the undecideds and apportioning them out appropriately, they're throwing away a useful piece of information.
If candidate A is on 43%, and candidate B is on 40%, candidate B is close. But if the number of undecideds is only 3%, then they need them all to fall for them to draw even - impossible. Or have candidate A outed as a paedophile, so that people who said they were going to vote for them change their mind.
Yet if the undecideds are 12%, they need to get 3/4 of them - difficult, but not impossible. Keep the paedophilia card in your pocket!
In NZ we throw this information away. To me, it'd be interesting to know, at this point, how many people replied "I don't know". If that's 12, 15%, wow, good moves by Labour could make this thing really close. If it's 5%... not so much. Then their only hope is the fact that it's a poll, and not an actual election, and coalition moves that they make afterwards.
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At the risk of exposing poor taste: I read _The Redemption of Athalus_ by David Eddings.
David Eddings did two 5 book fantasy series: The Belgariad and The Malloreon.
The first was a rather average series, short books, easy to read in a weekend.
The second series was a repeat of the first series, which a couple of characters changed, taking place on a different continent, with many of the same things happening. Rather terrible.
You're not allowed to bitch about LOTR unless you've read truly bad fantasy. Tolkein might have been a boring old prude who took 100 pages to talk about a party and 50 ancient ancestors of no consequence, but at least he had command of the English language and had a basic good story in his head. Other fantasy series fail on both those counts.
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I don't see why this would be contentious, except due to the natural desire of opposition to use any hold they can grab against the government.
If it wasn't contentious, then I wonder why it needed to be passed through under urgency. Is there a time limit on how long an MP can hold a seat when they're not allowed to?
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I wasn't sure if they had penalty tries in league. Do they get to take the kick from in front of the sticks?
From wikipedia:
In both rugby league and in rugby union, if the referee believes that a try has been prevented by the defending team's misconduct, he may award the attacking team a penalty try. Penalty tries are always awarded under the posts regardless of where the offence took place. In rugby union, the standard applied by the referee is that a try "probably" would have been scored. The referee does not have to be certain a try would have been scored. In rugby league, the referee must be left in no reasonable doubt that a try would otherwise have been scored before a penalty try can be awarded.
Yes to under the posts. Interesting to see in rugby union the rule is "probably have been scored", in rugby league "definitely". Maybe that's why you see less in league.
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Take, for example, putting the House into urgency to pass legislation without extensive debate or select committee scrutiny.
Yeah, you won't get any argument from me on that matter Craig. I think parliament shouldn't move parliament into urgency for political convenience. Legislation that urgently needs to be passed, OK, but that's a much smaller list.
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In the case of Germany that's clearly totally untrue since they were not facing any particularly severe crisis when they formed their grand coalition using MMP. But even if it were true, we are actually in an economic meltdown right now. If ever, now would be the time for such a coalition.
Which would be great if you were talking about Germany, but you weren't, you were talking about NZ. Germany was turned upside down and broken up as a result of WWII, it's political system was reconstructed.
We just changed the way we vote, most of our system is still very Westminster 2-party oppositional, and shows no signs of changing any time soon.
And the current economic meltdown is bad, but a little perspective on history should be kept. Millions of people died during World War Two, and whole economies and labour markets were nationalised and retooled for war.
Doesn't really compare to financial markets and banks falling over, and governments throwing billions of dollars at them to stop the boat rocking.
Indeed, the depression in the 1930s was a fundamentally political time, which we still feel in these times. First election of the Labour government, creation of many elements of the welfare state, a little thing called the New Deal. These were strongly contested ideas at the time, there was no consensus about how to deal with the crisis.
I don't think the right/left divide is as mutually exclusive as you make out. It's mostly a bankrupt term used to find some pathetic distinction anyway. There are multiple (potentially infinite) dimensions to measure a party along, and left/rightness is only one. It's only survived from it's inception (describing where various nobles stood in a King's court) because it changes definition continually.
Speaking as a person of the left, that's a bunch of crap. The distinctions between left wing parties (the Alliance, Greens) and right wing parties (Act, Libertarians) are pretty fundamental, both in practicalities and philosophies.
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And when people complain about "gay" being a perfectly good word ruined by the Sodomites
One suspects we can forgive them because:
1. They paid a heavy price for their sins.
2. Gay as a word came about early in the last millenium (from French and Germanic sources most likely), post-dating anything that God did or didn't do to the Sodomites by quite a few years. It didn't start to have a sexual meaning until quite a bit later. -
I did yell at Ricky Stewart (well at his image on the TV) about the boots up slide by Billy Slater.
The commentators at the time were interesting.
"Well that should be a penalty, it's dangerous."
"Not a try though."
"Well if it's a penalty that prevented a try being scored, shouldn't it be a penalty try?"
"Well, good point."
"Guess it depends if what he's been told in the NRL carries over to the international game.""Oh 20 metre restart. Well that's silly."
It really is stupid. We're just going to wait until someone gets kicked in the head by the fullback, and then we'll ban them for 20 weeks, rather than just telling them not to do it now, and then backing it up with an ordinary penalty/penalty try if they do it.
Talk about ambulance at the bottom of the hill.
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Tom, sure can explain. It's pretty simple - the differences between Labour and National are a lot smaller in many cases than their differences to the other parties.
Like Tom said, there are philosophical differences. While the practicalities between the two parties might be relatively close to each other, in philosophy and how they perceive themselves, they're not that close at all.
Also there's a political problem. Labour are on the left of the bell curve, National are on the right. The reality of NZ laws and policies largely lies in between them.
Labour in the most part wants to pull that reality to the left, National in the most part wants to pull it to the right.
A government of the two parties would be pulling in both directions. A national minister would come to cabinet proposing something, and all the Labour ministers would vote against it. You couldn't successfully negotiate a coalition agreement between the two. It would fall over within minutes. The only potential for it to work would be in a time of national crisis - war or major economic meltdown, where one or both parties agree to drop their oppositional status and work together.
Coalitions, at present anyway, in NZ will only work if they are largely on the left of the spectrum, or the right of the spectrum.
Until we develop a large centrist party, which we don't have, that's the way it's going to be.