Posts by Kyle Matthews
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Evidence, please? No new party has entered parliament since 1996 without having an incumbent MP.
Changes in the political parties over the past 12 years have included:
Greens splitting from Alliance and successfully going it alone, while the Alliance died a painful death.
Creation of progressives.
Creation of United NZ/Future NZ whatever Peter Dunne is leading this week - which has been a significant player in forming the government.
Creation of Maori Party, which had long been predicted would happen with MMP but which was successfully done, and now might hold the balance of power.The Maori Party is pretty basic proof of voters using their power at the ballot box to change the political landscape in NZ. Labour got tagged by Maori voters with one big issue, an MP broke away, formed a party which now looks possible to have 7 MPs and hold the balance of power.
Under your alternative universe, all those voters would have just voted no confidence in their electorate, which would have given them a re-election with the same parties, or... no MP.
I'm not sure what no existing MP has to do with it. Most of the fracturing of the modern political landscape in NZ has been created by MPs splitting from parties - Jim Anderton, Winston Peters, Peter Dunne, Richard Prebble etc etc. It's still a new party offering something new on the ballot paper.
If you go back further, there's this whole Labour Party which sprung up to meet the voting needs of the public.
If No Confidence had won the election, then he wouldn't have been elected. At the very least, it would have given people with consciences (and sufficient foresight) a chance to use their vote in a way that didn't make them morally culpable for either his or his opponent's actions, not even by the voters' inaction in abstaining.
You miss my point. If he was democratically elected, then presumably people wanted him to be elected. Why would they have suddenly changed their vote from voting for him, to voting no confidence, if that suddenly became an option?
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They'll join a National government, be linked with that governments abuse of Maori and others, and lose much of their support. In two or three parliaments, they'll have gone the way of Mauri Pacific, NZ First, United Future, the Jim Anderton Party and all the other vehicles-for-personal-pique that have briefly sullied NZ politics.
I suspect if they do go with National, they'll get burned, but not to extinction. Turia would lose the leadership, Sharples might take over, and they'll be attached to Labour come the next election. Labour won't gift them the Maori seats, but their candidates there will campaign more for the party vote than the electorate one.
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Kyle, there could be 5% of wasted votes (Winston plus Kiwi, Family etc). So 47.5% = 50%.
I was meaning after they eliminated that lot.
And yes, I know a couple of polls are showing National at about that level, but I think they'll get 43, maybe 44, which will become 46 after the very minor parties are eliminated.
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If your electorate had only one candidate, would you want a No Confidence option? What if it had just two candidates: Hitler and Stalin?
Well, none of those options occur here.
In fantasy dictator election land, I can see how a no confidence option would be useful.
In NZ it would just encourage people to turn up and then effectively not vote. In which case, it would make more sense for them to stay at home.
But if we continue to insist on voting for the least evil party that's likely to win, then what's to stop the parties from gradually becoming more and more evil until we do have such an election in several decades' time?
Because if a major or minor party, or indeed all the parties become 'more evil' over time, then they'll lose votes and not get elected. And people will form other political parties that aren't evil and that do get elected and win and be the government.
Unlike the economy, the invisible hand actually makes a fair bit of sense in electoral politics.
It's worth remembering that Hitler was, in fact, democratically elected.
Well if he was democratically elected, then how would no confidence have changed that? That's a problem with people voting for an asshole, not what is written on the ballot paper.
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That was followed by an anonymous text and several drops of further documents from someone calling himself Batman.
Isn't there a political LARP game these people could play, while adults get on with, y'know, running a country?
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Russell, I've been trying to find the time to catch up with the TV show online, I'm 4 or 5 weeks behind.
I find the youtube page is the only one that works well for me, but it's a mess. Could someone pull together a page which lists the shows, their you tube components, and links to the right pages? Or is there such a page somewhere? Otherwise I'm going to end up watching them all out of order.
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the Maori Party "going with" National (probably means abstaining and allowing, but the nuances won't let them off the hook)
That will be interesting. If you assume that Maori Party get two list MPs (plus overhang electorate MPs), and Peter Dunne and Jim Anderton are both overhang MPs, then those two balance out. If Maori party abstain you have 120 MPs left. In order to form that government you need 61 votes. Peter Dunne is 1, Act is 2, maybe 3. National needs 57, maybe 58. That's 48% of the party vote, I don't see that happening.
If that's the case, in order to form a government, National need to the greens to actively vote for them.
Or have I missed something in my in-my-head calcuations?
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It’s not so much that Mike Williams always seems to get involved in stuff like this.
It’s the fact that he always gets caught.
You think they'd pick someone who actually has demonstrated some ability at doing the job well.
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he explicitly stated that the statistical low ebb for "promise-keeping" was the 4th labour government...
Some of my friends and I blame everything on the 4th Labour government. Eg.
A: "This beer is warm."
B: "Fucking 4th Labour Government!"It helps pass the cold Dunedin nights.
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Doubt if Miis Clark has ver even done a small deal like this, well with such a big down side for her!
One suspects that being Prime Minister for 9 years, is fairly good CV filler for... being Prime Minister for another 3 years.