Posts by Keir Leslie
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Hard News: The sole party of government, in reply to BenWilson,
Well yeah, Dyson wins Port Hills by winning the swing National/Labour voters you need to win to win an election. That's not a bad thing. Also Dyson is not on the right of the Party so the suggestion it is National voters voting to keep Labour right is not very powerful I don't think.
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I mean I don't actually have a sophisticated analysis of why that vote split happens. But it does and it's probably pointing towards something interesting and useful to understand.
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People like Goff, Mallard, King, Dyson, but don't like the Labour Party. So they'll vote for those MPs, but not the Party. It's a big problem for Labour.
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I don't think many countries ban internal polling, just the publication of those polls.
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It's not a push poll --- it would be a complete waste to do a push poll that lasted more than 30 seconds.
The point is to produce product that can be fed to the National party campaign committee. In lots of ways polling can be compared to sigint, actually, in terms of a technocratic way to create product with a perceived authenticity.
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Basically every complaint is about something that I really don't actually give a shit about
Er you don't care that Assange is an alleged rapist? I mean, I think Assange's appearance was a pretty classic example of the flawed genius of the event, and I think that inasmuch as this was a party political event put on by people who want to run the country it's pretty relevant to look at the guest list in political terms.
I mean, this event was a massive pitch for votes. That's what it was. And the critiques you're dismissing are pretty relevant to the question "should I vote for Internet/Mana?" They might not be relevant to "what's the GCSB up to?" but that wasn't the only thing going on in the Auckland Town Hall last night.
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People always seem to find solutions to low voter turnout in other people, never in themselves. If you want to increase turnout, make sure all your friends and workmates are enrolled and vote --- you can vote early, which makes it easier to chase people up. It's the most effective way of increasing voter participation: direct contact from someone they know.
And if you want to scale up that kind of intervention, there's ways to do it.
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Also it's not like Jordan Williams was a misogynist "in private". Like if he was otherwise utterly blameless and pro-equality and a total ally but it turned out that occasionally with personal friends he indulged in offensive sexist banter, well, ok, that's one thing.
But here's a guy who's apparently a creep, who writes misogynistic content for WhaleOil, and here he's being a misogynist with one of the guys who enables his public misogyny & is a horrific public misogynist himself. It's not a separate private thing, it's part of his public horribleness.
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Also: how's it not in the public interest to know that the Taxpayer's Union spokesperson also ghost writes highly misogynistic content that seems almost designed to put women off involvement in politics, acts in misogynist ways in public, & then also discusses women with his political allies in precisely those terms? It seems to me that it's pretty directly in the public interest to know that.
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If we had stricter lobbying rules a lot of what Slater did when acting under pay would likely have had to have been made public, which would have defeated the purpose.
I also think that we need to ditch the idea that Ministers are responsible to the Prime Minister and emphasise responsibility to the House. Not that it's a panacea, but in an MMP environment it might mean more meaningful scrutiny.