Posts by Kyle Matthews
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there isn't any information available, or the information provided is skewed based on the author's prejudices (on the Internet anyway-I assume you're not suggesting people trawl through hard copies of parliamentary voting records, etc.) It would make more sense for there to be a required level of detail for all local body biographies, rather than the current regime, which actively benefits individuals like Christine Rankin or Brian Neeson, who have name recognition but aren't required to list all the things they did to gain their notoriety in the first place.
I'm not sure how this differs from general elections, where all the information is skewed based on the author's prejudices.
Requiring previous political positions to be listed would lead to lots of silly stuff. So and so has to list that they used to be an MP - well that looks impressive. Person over there who might have had just an impressive job doesn't get that listed because it's not political. No reasonable electoral system is going to allow that through, it will bias in favour of some people.
Also people who no longer believe what a political party that they used to work for are still going to be tagged with it.
In the end there's plenty of information out there about candidates, any candidate who doesn't provide information (such as the one person who didn't supply a blurb for my voting booklet) are going to suffer as a result, and it's an election in which voters have an obligation to find out a few basic things before ticking the boxes.
If people don't know that John Banks used to be a minister in the national government, they're an uninformed voter and putting that at the bottom of his blurb ain't going to fix the problem of them being uninformed.
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Candidates should be required to declare previous formal political associations and positions held at the very least, as well. Ideally I'd like to see brief biographies written by independant auditors made a requirement
If the primary piece of information provided about Richard Prebble and Roger Douglas was that they used to be in the Labour Party, that wouldn't help much would it.
You're expecting higher standards of information than that provided in general elections - substantially more, given that in local body elections you get a blurb and photo of each candidate, in a general election you just get party lists with their names on it.
Would it be unreasonable to expect voters to actually take an hour or two to find out a little information about the candidates before they vote? Read a little media, attend a candidates meeting etc?
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Interesting is one way to descibe how many candidates describe themselves as "independent" rather than acknowledge long-standing affiliations. Dishonest might be another..
Some political parties don't allow their members to stand under their banner at some levels, so there isn't a lot those people can do about that.
It also wouldn't be paticularly honest to put your name under a political party when most of them don't have local body policies developed for local body elections, like they do for general elections - you'd be standing for a general idea or something that you were several years ago, rather than something you're going to be over the next three years.
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Those people didn't earn enough to afford the houses they bought at the prices they were sold for. The financial fix for this didn't work - what's actually needed is a system that lets ordinary people have a decent house with secure tenure.
Well you need to look elsewhere than the current financial system, which still has largely the same regulations in many countries as it did four years ago.
Making money by any means necessary and getting out before it all falls over seems to be the purpose of the system.
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I don't buy that. The concepts are not that hard (obviously they're quite impossible to a politician or journo who scraped through school cert maths only by the efforts of their top decile educators).
The basic concepts aren't too hard. The implementation as we see it in the global financial markets are very complex. It's not a simple system, it's a very complex system.
The current financial crisis seems to result in part from that complexity - the bundling of bad debt together and credit rating it was deliberately made complex as that's the only way people couldn't or wouldn't look inside it and see it was bad.
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I have always wondered too about the reason ballerinas have to stand on their tippy-toes. Why don't they just get taller ballerinas? :-)
Or chop most of the feet off and just run the stumps down to points.
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I don't see the current Fiji government doing a lot for the struggles she champions
Local communist parties have really struggled to make sense since COMINTERN stopped sending out political bibles each year that contradicted last year's instructions.
Sadly neither Marx nor Lenin commented on what to do about Fiji so they're just making it up as they go along.
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I'd like to hear from/about centres besides Auckland and Chch. Is there a mayoral race of any kind in -- for example -- Wellington, Dunedin, Hamilton, Tauranga ... ?
Dunedin is largely having an election about the stadium, with rates rises and debt tagged along behind.
Major mayoral candidates are existing mayor Chin, and opponents Dave Cull and Lee Vandervis - both from the council. There's going to be some strong voting along pro/anti- stadium lines. The anti people are very vocal and active, I'm not sure if their votes will be enough to knock off Chin when he's got two substantial candidates opposing him to split the votes.
We're also STV voting for city council, which makes it quite a bit of work. My large ward has 11 seats, but 39 candidates so you can put up to 39 numbers. I gave up at 16 or 17... after that they were either unelectable or I didn't have enough information to differentiate between them.
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So whose do they pick?
I'd be surprised to see a bank trying to use that when the bank got in trouble. For one thing it wouldn't work - because it would start a run on the bank if one already hadn't happened, and savings and internationals loans would be pulled out faster than the bank could recover mortgage lending.
I'd imagine the clause is in there for when the bank knows something about you and wants to get in as fast as possible to recoup. Like you're going under and they know that a month from now every other creditor is going to have gotten their hands in - worth trying to get in first and calling in the mortgage so you might get the title of the property and come out OK.
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Karl Varley
Independent Citizens
...He has gained international acclaim breaking a Guinness World Record by kicking through 30 Baseball bats in under 60 seconds.He needs to work that into a 'cutting through red tape' advert. Money baby, money!