Posts by Kyle Matthews
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Having said that, while I think Labour’s move is an admirable one, we shouldn’t fool ourselves that it is going to be easy in practice. It requires a couple of tricky judgment calls:
I'm curious as to how they do it practically, but in reality in terms of end results, list order only matters for about 10 places. At that point there might need to be a bit of male/female/male/female going on to ensure that if their vote goes up or down by 2% that the overall % doesn't change too much.
But the top 20 places? You could list the top 11 male and next 9 female and be guaranteed that those places fulfill the 45% requirement. Depending on how much party vote you get you could fill the top 22 with males and the next 18 with females and know that the % is right.
Obviously there's a lot more politics and all that involved with list rankings, but in terms of the quota the top 40ish slots don't matter in terms of which are male and which are female, as long as enough are female.
And electoral seats. There's probably 5 electoral seats which are very marginal and which could reasonably affect the outcome. The rest you could be pretty confident about.
But those electoral results only matter if those candidates aren't listed in the top 40ish list seats that you know Labour will win based on your polling. So it's probably only one or two that can actually make a difference to achieving the quota - the Labour candidate that stands off the list and wins the West Coast etc.
Okay, I’ve done the quantitative. Now to take issue with the qualitative.
It's hardly ever going to be true, but it's not an unreasonable assumption to make as a median. And in lieu of some brilliant method to select 'merit' in a non-sexist way in a sexist world.
The Oakland Athletics?
Except can females even play in that league? I mean if a female baseball player was good enough to be drafted or contracted could they select her?
If not, is there even a valid comparison to be made to the Labour party?
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Colin Gavaghan, who teaches criminal defence law but is an expert in emerging technology law, has gotten frustrated enough to blog on the topic today:
‘Roast Busters’ are criminals – and we don’t need new laws to make them so.
OTOH, the underage sex punishment does seem really harsh to me, were a 10 year sentence handed to a 16 year old having consenting sex with a 15 year old, so perhaps outside of the intention of the judicial system an appropriate punishment could be levied.
The police actively use discretion here, and won't charge if it's a healthy, consenting relationship involving two young people. If it's a 30 year old and a 14 year old however...
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Chuck them a twenty. Then you can tool around on the internet debating hypotheticals all day in good conscience.
I'm not normally a big donor, but done. Rape sucks.
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Arguable (in terms of clarity of the victim’s age) evidence of under-age sex? Totally. Evidence of rape? Please do explain, in light of Ben’s observation about the need for explicit failure to give consent or clearly be incapable of giving consent, how you are so sure that there would be reasonable grounds for believing that such evidence would be found.
I think Russell's argument is that at the stage of doing further investigation/seeking warrants they don't need an open/shut case for rape or anything else. Just sufficient evidence that something has likely taken place, and that further investigation via a warrant or other means may solidify a case which they can then charge. Seems like fairly basic police work.
It's concerning if (rightly or wrongly) the police felt they couldn't be more active in protecting future victims based on what they had in front of them.
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I get that the evidence as it exists probably wouldn’t result in a successful conviction. But if the police thought that these guys were selling and/or distributing drugs they’d put them under surveillance and try and secure convictions. Doesn’t the alleged serial gang-rape of minors warrant that kind of investigation?
Exactly. I get that with no formal complaint from a victim and only some material on facebook etc to go on they might not have enough for a conviction. But they clearly have enough to be all over these guys so that at the very least they move on, but hopefully they gather enough evidence to take them to court.
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What do you think the penalty for taking upskirt photographs should be?
ah no, that wasn't a comment on the length of the sentence for that part of the crimes act. That was a comment on the police knowing about these activities for two years and just sitting and waiting for a 'brave girl' to come lay a complaint.
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To quote one of our criminal lawyers:
"Leaving aside that what is being described here is very clearly rape, it seems pretty clear that it's also making an intimate visual recording without consent in terms of s 216 of the Crimes Act."
Also, honestly, two years? At some stage the police wouldn't want to get a little proactive and put some weekend surveillance in when young women are being raped? Even if it didn't lead to convictions, it might have had a preventative measure - excuse me sir, just before you go any further, can we talk to the young woman and you? Oh she's smashed, I think she can come with us and not with you. Thanks.
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Consult most teenagers about how they see it.
My son basically never watches TV on the TV. But he probably uses about a gigabyte a day of internet and loves Big Bang Theory, Mythbusters etc.
It may have something to do with him being a teenager and being in his room is just the thing of course.
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When did that happen? The government was making drought payments last summer wasn’t it?
Well I don't particularly think the government should do that either. An industry wide fund which provided relief when a region was suffering under some sort of weather would make sense to me.
But one-off drought relief isn't the same as ongoing subsidies on everything, which is what farming used to get 30 years ago.
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And there’s a cool video …
Hullo Dunedin Sound! Where you been hiding...
Great stuff.