Posts by Bart Janssen
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Hard News: The Day After Tomorrow, in reply to linger,
this could allow some strange minority views into Parliament; but giving everyone a chance of representation is really the point of a representatative democracy, isn’t it?
Absolutely!
The idea that we exclude some views from parliament because less than 5% hold those views is just wrong. 5% is 150000 out of the 3 million odd voters!
By contrast ACT has 11000 voters.
The coat-tailing is stupid
But the 5% rule is simply wrong
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Hard News: The Day After Tomorrow, in reply to linger,
Several caveats
Believe me I'm very conscious of those caveats and you are absolutely right to point them out.
It's exactly the kind of problem you see all the time in genomics where more data points makes rare events almost certain and it's all too easy to make up stories to explain why gene X might affect trait Y, when the only reason gene X looks interesting is because you examined 20000 genes so of course some would correlate with trait Y.
That said, the same principle that applies to genomics applies here - the data gives you a set of possibly interesting data (genes). Now go out and use some other method to disprove or support.
We already have some of that data in the form of some of the people who said they switched to TOP from The Greens but that data is suspect as well. If I were in The Greens and really wanted to know, I'd take this data for some electorates and go and do some door knocking to try and actually understand first IF the data is real and second nail down the cause.
PS thanks to whomever fixed my flub with the quote :).
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Hard News: The Day After Tomorrow, in reply to Katharine Moody,
How else do you explain the 10% drop??
This authors analysis suggests some of it was in part a move to TOP;
Annoying and frustrating. It looks like a whole bunch of salaried educated Green voters threw away their vote to TOP. If you were a cynical conspiracy theorist you might even suggest that that was the intent of TOP in the first place.
To some degree I understand their frustration with The Greens, I feel it myself. The Greens are the only party with real climate change policies and real commitment to environmental values. But there is also a bunch of woo in The Greens. I love the social values and the commitment to equality but I can also see why some folks would rather see that policy not be the primary focus.
There really is probably room for a second Green party in NZ, but the 5% rule means that such a party will never evolve.
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Hard News: Media Take: The selling of…, in reply to Sacha,
two track dirty politics
but this time it only needed one track - which most media obediently followed.
Our expectation is the media has the role of bringing truth to bear on the state.
Sadly there are few media now where that is true and for those who did stand up for the truth often it was too weak and too late.
Some of that is fear of the law, but much of it appears to have been more about maximising ratings.
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In some ways it's nice to be reminded that those here are indeed a good group of human beings. The contrast is obvious.
When someone comes in and displays a lack of empathy and self serving dishonesty it's a healthy reminder that our society has problems that in many ways are more difficult to solve than the obvious inequities that can be, to a large extent, dealt with by redistributing wealth to where it's needed most.
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Speaker: The Government lost the election, in reply to Katharine Moody,
That's a good idea.
It does seem like a simple way to help people vote.
Just need someone like Edgeler to test it for bugs - it seems too simple a solution.
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Speaker: The Government lost the election, in reply to ,
So how do people of no fixed abode get enrolled to vote? And do overseas citizens have an electorate to vote in if they don’t have a current address here in New Zealand?
Bearing in mind this is just an idea and might be horribly flawed ...
I don't see any reason to need a fixed abode at all to vote for a party. You'd already be enrolled assuming enrollment was automatic at age 18 or say when you got residence.
You'd only need a fixed abode if you wanted to vote in an electorate.
My guess is voting in electorates would drop significantly with this system and that might cause issues.
And overseas voters would automatically get a party vote. I'm not sure they would need and electorate vote would they? I guess if they owned a home they were planning on returning to they could nominate that as their address and electorate if they wanted to do that.
Does that make sense?
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Speaker: The Government lost the election, in reply to Emma Hart,
And you know where they live how?
(I support everything else mentioned there, but not this.)
What if you didn't need to vote for an electorate - then where you lived would not really matter at all?
Sure if you WANT to vote for an electorate you could enroll for that electorate.
But since the most important thing is the party vote and that's calculated nationally anyway why not automatically enroll everyone for the party vote at 18?
Effectively that would mean two rolls
One in which everyone is automatically enrolled: to vote for a partyAnd the other electorate roll where you have to be enrolled with an address: to vote for a local candidate.
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Speaker: The Government lost the election, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
But I'd suggest the media grow a spine
I did say slightly fair.
Frankly I think our media has been hugely responsible for maintaining this FPP mentality. They like having a simple story to tell because they can tell it in the 25 seconds between ad breaks.
It's been left to media like The Spinoff to actually do real journalism.
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To be slightly fair to the MSM Labour and National refuse to share the stage with the "minor parties".
If Labour believes in MMP they should flat out refuse to ever do a two party debate again.
But in the main you are bang on - the NZ media have behaved irresponsibly this election.
Journalists love to believe they bring truth to power and that they serve society. This election campaign we saw the reverse, a media only too happy to bury truth underneath a mountain of pointless polls.