Posts by Gary Rawnsley
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Norman's candidacy will focus everyone's attention on the shifting orientation of the Greens as Norman will have to articulate what the party stands for post Fitzsimmons' leadership. If that's towards the middle, presumably in hope of having more bargining power with either Labour or National, are the Greens hoping to win a seat to compensate for the potential loss of list seats? Is that seat Mt Albert? Really?
Well, as electorates go, Mt Albert is actually a reasonably good target for the Greens. They got around 11% of the party vote there in 2008, making it their seventh-best electorate, after Wellington Central (21%), Rongotai (17%), Dunedin North (16%), Auckland Central (15%), Port Hills (14%) and Christchurch Central (11%). Sensing a pattern here?
It probably make senses for Labour to help gift the Greens an electorate to try and get the latter an insurance policy akin to Act's Epsom. Perhaps Rongotai when Annette King retires?
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On a related issue: could Gallery reporters please stop blithely asserting that Mt Albert is a safe Labour seat ... and thus that National has nothing to lose?
At last election, Mt Albert was ranked the 15th most marginal electorate (out of 75), if you go by the difference in party vote between the two major parties (as a percentage of the total cast). Put another way, of all the electorates in the country, Mt Albert was in the most marginal fifth.
Mangere and Helensville are what you might call safe seats for Labour and National respectively (where a 45-point lead in the party vote was achieved in both cases). In Mt Albert, the gap was under seven percentage points. Add to that the fact that National is currently ahead of Labour in nationwide opinion polls by around twice the margin it achived on election night (roughly, 20 points vs 10 points), and you would be foolish to consider this anything but a toss-up by-election. Why shouldn't National have a decent shot at overturning a seven-point party vote deficit when its government, and its leader, continue to enjoy a quite spectacular honeymoon?
I keep reading Gallery journalists asking how National could possibly be considered the loser of this by-election. Here's an idea: how about if they lose it?
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Well, Labour will need to be careful with its candidate selection, because it could just lose Mt Albert. Clark's gigantic majority (over 10,000) hides the fact that it's not as solidly red an electorate as you might think: Labour outpolled National on the party vote by only seven points in 2008 (42% plays 35% - albeit with the Greens polling 11%). Given National's honeymoon in the polls, is it not conceivable that National secures a massive symbolic victory here?
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Hey y'all,
Have used my nervous energy waiting for the semi to write a wee burst on World Cup formats...
Any of you seen this interesting discussion from The Australian website, which repeats the oft-stated claim that this one has been too big/too long: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21605535-15084,00.html
In it, The Times' Christopher Martin-Jenkins argues:
There needs to be another change to the format and ... the first decision has to be to reduce the number of countries. Even with 16, Ireland’s win over Pakistan and Bangladesh’s over India were all that was required to produce two unexpected teams in the last eight.
In 1992, generally agreed to be the best tournament since the first one, nine teams played each other to produce four semi-finalists but there were 39 games in a month and rain produced inequities.
The development of second-tier countries such as Ireland and Kenya has been an ICC success and it has gone too far to abandon now. In 2011 there should be 12 nations, playing in two seeded groups of six, the top two in each group going through to a semi-final. A month’s cricket and 34 matches would serve the game better.
I agree that:
-The current format makes it too easy for single upsets to have a disproportionately disruptive effect in the draw, and therefore the 'feel' of much of the tournament can be damaged by such upsets...
-The 1992 World Cup was the best (and not just because NZ did very well).But I disagree with CMJ's proposed solution. I don't like pools moving straight to semis because pools can create biases in the draw (i.e. if you land in a pool with lots of in-form teams you will find it much harder to make the semis than if you land in a pool with lots of teams out of touch: seeding only does so much, because seeds are decided well before the tournament to give people travelling to them safety in knowing the draw...)
My solution for emulating 1992 would be as follows:
1) Eight teams make it through automatically to the main part of the draw. These are selected as follows:
a) The hosts (in 2011, Bangladesh, SL, Pakistan and India; in 2015, Australia and NZ).
b) The top ranked teams outside of the hosts, to make up your complement of 8.2) Eight teams compete in a World Cup Qualifier Series, to take place the month before the Main Event. These teams are selected as the top eight ranked teams who did not automatically qualify. These eight teams play a round robin (so, seven games each), and the two that finish first or second make it through to the Main Draw.
3) The Ten Teams (8 automatic, 2 qualifiers) in the Main Draw play a round robin (i.e. nine games each). The top four teams qualify for semi-finals and then a final.
4) In terms of games in the tournament, the Main Draw would have 48 (compared to 51 this year, and 39 in 1992).
Using current rankings as a guide, the 2011 Main Event would see Australia, South Africa, Pakistan, New Zealand, England, Sri Lanka, India and Bangladesh as the automatic qualifiers; West Indies, Ireland, Kenya, Ireland and Zimbabwe would vie it out with three other minnows for the two remaining places at the Big Table.
The only potential problem I see with this system is that it could still be described as too long: you'd have a similar length of tournament (in terms of games) to this one.
Well, I don't think that's necessarily a problem. You could easily compress these 48 games into a month by playing two games a day, like in the Football World Cup during its round robin stage. This would give the tournament the impression of busyness and constant activity - the very things this one lacked.
While simultaneous games could create problems for broadcasters, almost all major nations screen their World Cups on muli-channel pay TV outlets. So, viewers would be able to flick from one to the other. You could make it easier for them: Have one as a day game and one as a day-nighter so that they climax at different times (viewers would then only need to flick from one to another in the few hours of overlap). Countries that broadcast the World Cup on free-to-air outlets would simply select their preferred game each day.
Would this be do-able for the players, in terms of workload? Well, those in the teams that automatically qualified would have to play 9-11 games in the space of a month, or a game every three days. This is a similar workload to the annual tri-series in Australia, and many other, similar one day tournaments. Why can the best players cope this workload year-in, year-out, but not at the World Cup?
In fact, this workload would allow teams to feel like they're on a usual one-day tour, able to build momentum, and not lie idle with days and days of dead rubbers, or watching from the sidelines. (Admittedly, the two “qualifiers” would have to play 16-18 games in two months. A more daunting task, but considering that many of the early games would be against the likes of Bermuda and Canada, I can't see this being a problem…).
So, to conclude:
My system:
1) Is less likely to have big names ejected early, causing lots and lots of boredom-inducing one-sided games.
2) Will produce very few horrendously lop-sided games in the Main Event.
3) Is fair in determining who makes the semis, because everyone in the main draw plays everyone once.
4) Still allows ICC to "develop" the game with emerging nations, by staging the qualification tournament just before the main event, and by giving them a route (though a difficult one) to make that main event.
5) Culls the tournament from 7 weeks to a month, but still requires the team that wins to play all the other test-playing nations at least once on the way to their title.What do you reckon?
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Not quite the same as Labour - who thought it was acceptable with the party logo too.
Graeme - the key word in the Sinclair quote is party vote logo. I don't think even Labour thought a party vote logo was okay.
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I sense that, for the Nats, the devil will be in the details: you can bet the Labour and NZ First research units will be trawling every last word of the book for evidence of dishonesty and hypocrisy. I have found a gem in the footnotes.
The Dom Post lead story yesterday related to a National postcard being paid for with Parliamentary funds - exactly the kind of "mis-spending" that National has crucified Labour for these past few months. National is spinning that this was an "honest mistake", and that the invoice was eventually forwarded from the Parliamentary office to the Party.
But the footnotes in the book expose that National's understanding of the Parliamentary spending rules was exactly the same as Labour's - i.e. that everything except explicit soliciting of votes and/or money was okay. Brash aide Bryan Sinclair writes of the postcard to National racing spokesperson Lindsay Tisch:
We [Parliamentary office] could produce our own flyer outlining our racing policy, seeing as HQ won't fund the postcard. As long was we don't put 'vote, donate or support' on it, and we don't use Party Vote logos, it's a valid constituency communication.
A "valid constituency communication"? God, the 'pay it back' campaign was even more audaciously hypocritical than I thought...
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Fascinating David. A very socalliy consiervative voting record indeed - against prostitution reform, against civil unions, in favour of explicitly defining marriage as between one man and one woman, in favour of raising the drinking age... How will this play in urban liberal voterland?
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Yeah, Plunket was strangely sympathetic. When Brash said, “I’m not proposing to resign today", I expected Plunket to reply, "So you'll be thinking about resigning tomorrow?" But he let the comment pass completely by... In any case, Brash is clearly readying himself to jump ship. Question is: Will Key be left unscathed enough to remain the frontrunner to be the new leader?
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what McCully might usefully tell us is quite why if you were desperate to find the identities of people who "stole" your emails, you would ensure that no one can ever publish them, which presumably would be a give you a good place to start in identifying who has them. also if this is all about the right to privacy of personal emails, why did Brash tell NZH that he sent very few personal emails from his work address.
Grant: Don't assume the _interim_ injunction will remain in place. Assuming that a publisher and/or media organisation(s) are poised to go public any day now (which is what the rumblings in the media would suggest), one would expect one or more prominent legal challenges to the injunction in the next few days, followed by publication (assuming public interest outweighs privacy, in the Court's mind).
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Well, a victory for the pollsters I reckon.
Based on the final suite of polls, Electoral Vote predicted a 51-49 win for the Dems in the Senate - which is the probable exact final result (CNN has just called Montana for the Dems; and it's hard to see the Republicans over-turning a 7,000-vote deficit in a Virginia recount).
It also predicted a 239-196 win for the Dems in Congress, or a net gain of 39 seats. The actual net gain will be 30-35, pending a few remaining recounts.