Posts by Kyle Matthews
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I agree that the centre-left is far from bereft. As long as Labour's caucus has the discipline to manage the leadership transition quickly and cleanly (and I think after so many years of Clark that they will have that discipline) then the way ahead is not so grey.
You'd expect that this will be the role that she's set for herself over the next few months - managing the transition to a new leader and putting herself firmly behind them, before moving her things back a couple of rows in parliament, having Saturday morning clinics in Mt Albert, and thinking about what she'd like to be doing in three years from now.
I think if she sets two strong leaders on the course towards 2011 (not sure who?), it will round off her 15 years of leadership, and 9 years of PMship quite nicely. History looks kindly on people who know when to step back, which she certainly has.
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Win an electorate -- you're in.
No list MPs until your party has has reached 5% threshold.
Party percentages (5% and over) allocated on a proportional basis among the seats available to make 120. No overhang.
This contradicts John.
If you win an electorate, but have less than 5% of the party vote, either your party vote counts (or one MP's worth of it), or there's an overhang.
Take for example Act on Saturday night. Under your scheme, Rodney would get into parliament, but no other Act MPs. He's either an overhang MP, or, 1/120th of the party vote (at least) remains with Act. If Act don't form part of the party vote, there must be an overhang.
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Pleasantly surprised with Peter Williams talking about the Prime Minister designate, and the One News Reporter I next heard, the Prime Minister to be. TV3 had elect, however.
On this basis, Obama isn't the President-elect either.
Voters in the US elect members of the electoral college, who choose the President.
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IF we're going to have a threshold of 5% (or whatever) why should a party that wins one seat (ie, has a concentrated support base) be exempt?
I guess that depends what you mean by the rule.
If you mean "if you win an electorate seat, you get your party vote share of MPs even if it's less than 5%", that would be easy to change to "you just win electorates, no list MPs for you until you get to 5%". All electorate victories however, would be an overhang (unless you wrangled whatever party vote they got and lowered it to be equivalent to 1/120th, throwing away the remainder, which would seem pretty weird).
If you mean "even if you win an electorate seat, you only get in parliament if your party vote gets over the 5% threshold", then the electorate needs an MP. If the winner of the electorate vote isn't it, then what happens?
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Those electorate breakdowns are interesting Giovanni.
I have to feel sorry for the people working at Concord School, Dunedin North on Saturday. Zero votes all day. You'd be wondering if someone played a really big joke on the whole country.
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Man you people have posted a lot since I went to a party last night.
Holograms on TV.
Totally pointless or just a con and a gimmick?What struck me about the pointlessness of it, was that the magic of holograms is that they are a 3d image in front of you. I'm sure it looked incredible for everyone in the studio.
Broadcasting that onto a flat 2D screen. Byebye magic.
Duncan could have said they'd be crossing to everyone, including Key. He didn't. And hey, turns out they've got the first exclusive with him tonight too. Imagine that. Great with a bit of ass-kissing does.
The first interviews are decided by a coin toss. The station that wins the toss gets to choose which leader they interview first, while the other station does the other leader. TV3 won, they choose Key. No ass-kicking involved.
The electionresults site is also using umlauts
You can't force someone to show umlauts if they don't have an appropriate font via html easily. They need to have an appropriate font on their computer.
He expressly said he would not be firing anyone, just that he would 'cap' the civil service at current levels.
It will be interesting to see how this works out in reality. They might shift work from contractors back to employees, while not increasing the number of employees. The contractors would then be out of work, but he wouldn't have fired anyone.
And as long as our population is growing, it's not unreasonable to assume that our civil service should grow at a somewhat similar rate. I guess he would say that its grown faster than population the past few years.
I've heard this as an argument against MMP from the other side as well. The standard argument goes "Oh MMP give smaller parties too much power". It's more the Winnie Peters kingmaker affect than anything else.
My political theory would say that a party on the far right/left supporting a major party inside them, is going to have less influence.
The minor party is going to be happy with most of the things that the major party does, just wish them to go further. They won't bring down that government, because the only option is the other side of the spectrum, which they don't want at all. They get thrown a few bones, but it doesn't make a major difference.
The smaller centrist party is more powerful. They are much less likely to support everything that the major party wants, often they won't want change, or will want change in the other direction. And they can possibly bring down the government and go to the other side.
So Act will get probably one major ministry, one or two minor ones. We just have to feel sorry for whichever area gets a yellow jacket at their head - a bad few years for the people in it.
how were people supposed to know how close things were and that voting tactically could have rid them of Dunne?
It was my understanding that Dunne's seat was a lock. If I'd been in it I would have thrown my vote somewhere else based on the understanding that it didn't matter. I did the same thing in North Dunedin - if I'd ever thought it was close, I would have taken my electorate vote seriously.
I suspect it's an electorate seat which might see more of what you're asking for next election, now apparently it's not Dunne's god given right to win.
Also, I think you assume that people who voted for the Green candidate wanted Green in government. I suspect a sizeable portion of them didn't. They might have just ticked a random box, they might have voted for any of the other parties but thought he'd make a good MP. A lot of voters don't double tick with one party.
Wouldn't it have been much simpler if the Greens had not run a candidate in Ohariu and then encouraged Green supporters to vote Labour?
Greens should run a candidate in every electorate. There are advantages to having electorate candidates which flow through to your party vote.
I will say, what really disgusted me about Roger Douglas's appearance on the Saturday night coverage was how contemptuous he seemed.
I remember him being positively gleeful when he came to campus and explained the Fourth Labour government in the mid-90s. It was basically "Yeah, I screwed you. Tough shit". He's a scumbag, and not worthy of sitting in the house.
To me the most interesting thing to come out of the election is the potential death of a couple of centrist parties - NZ First and United Future. If that leaves a sizeable space in the middle of the political spectrum, how will it be filled? A split from National or Labour? Surely by 2014 there will be a new party in there.
And Turia said this will be her last election. If MP and Labour get together, and Labour give MP the seats, and MP tell the voters not to give their party vote to MP, that's 7 free seats to add to your Labour-MP coalition, probably 8 next time the Maori roll option comes around.
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Wait, who was first on the Bill & Ben party list?
Cause for one, sure let's have no threshold. The other... meh, not so much.
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Dodgy.
Well it was offered to my daughter, not to me.
And they had it hidden behind something, so I suspect it was there to offer to kids if their parents agreed.
Man, sounds like Islander's is the place to watch the results come in tonight, I'll be roasting lamb for my girlfriend and I with a plan to eat just before 7pm.
And, having just checked the mail. Act's personally addressed letter and A3 brochure arrived in today's post, a couple of hours after I voted.
Can someone get a message to Rodders? "Your material arrived late and I voted green already. If you can get my ballot paper back from the box, I'll change my tick to yours."
(Act, clearly not organised enough to front up a Minister)
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I voted at the local College of Education, taking my 2 year old daughter along for her first election!
I ticked the boxes (Green Party, Victor Billot from the Alliance for electorate, know him a bit from when he was Critic Editor, and figure he should get some small reward for his work when Pete Hodgson wins one of NZ's safest electorates) because she was a bit young to do more than scribble all over the paper.
However she got to put the ballot paper in the big box, and we turned down the snake lolly we were offered on the way out (my daughter has more food allergies than there are types of food) and went home where she's now having a 2 hours (and counting) long nap.
No queue, only one other person in there.
I'm looking forward to tonight. The US election was exciting in that it was a landslide and the result was great. You could tell within a couple of hours that your thoughts beforehand were going to be confirmed. I'm thinking this election will be closer and we're likely to finish the night unknown, and that's the interesting part of politics. And I'm going to two parties and for a very rare night out, not driving, so it'll be staggering home at 2am under the influence.
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Seems to me it is just that a win by a woman would have been much less historic. If it had been Hillary she may have been the first woman to lead the US but Golda Meier was elected Prime Minister of Israel in 1969 and Thatcher of the UK in 1979. So, not exactly new territory for the rest of the world.
I think there's some Kenyans running countries around the world already. In Kenya, for example ;)