Posts by Paul Campbell
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I see that National have found someone to replace Worth, hopefully this time around someone will explain to the new guy what being "Minister of Internal Affairs" actually means
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My son's almost the same age - his first vote will be on whether parents are allowed to beat their kids ... he's against it .... we've been talking about how the wording of referendum questions can be made purposely obtuse in an attempt to bamboozle the voters ....
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I have done every one of those things (at least I think I had to clean a rifle during barracks in high school - it was a long time ago).
But I don't get the 'man' thing - surely everyone should be able to do these things?
(except maybe 'bleed brakes' - I'd rather everyone else on the road wasn't doing that for themselves ...)
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he has a rabid following that is apparently dwindling - he's on the radio in most radio markets - in the US almost all political talk radio (with the exception of Air-America, Pacifica and a few local stations) is far out to the right
He has a lot of competition so there's a tendancy to try and out-flank the already edge-of-sanity competition somewhere further to the right - that's why you get people like Michael Savage being declared persona non grata in the UK
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Craig: you know that isn't true, that would be big government, it's ACT policy that all that stuff will be outsourced to the private sector -
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I agree that having the students out of town would be an issue - but to be fair they were polling ratepayers (as were the council's surveys) and few ratepayers are also students and those who are, well, live here and don't go back home for the holidays.
Really though this is a side show as I said any these surveys should have told the council they didn't have a mandate - even after spending a whole bunch of council money funneled through the CST to try and change public opinion (we paid for all that advertising trying to change our own minds, it didn't work and was a waste of our money)
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James: I understand the issue around non-responders - but I think that checking the responders against established demographic data surely gives you more confidence in your numbers - in this case it told us that in fact the pro-stadium demographics were overrepresented in the results.
Mostly though I think the important thing here is that there's a simple way to solve this sort of issue - any of these surveys should have been be useful to a council in that they told them they didn't have a clear mandate - and the simple solution would be to get one by having a referendum. And getting back to my original point that if the council wont have a referendum there ought to be a way for the citizens to demand one (since huge public meetings and marching in the streets obviously doesn't work - I've never seen downtown so empty on a Sat after that last march went through, everyone seemed to join it)
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rich: in California different cities or counties do have different sales taxes (it makes running a business that has to collect them a nightmare!) - for example when they put the BART (train) through Berkeley they chose to add .25% to their sales tax rate to pay for burying it rather than having it run down the main street (now they have a long thin park ...)
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James: the latest survey was done by a University team, partly as an academic exercise, it was paid for by the anti-stadium people, the pro-stadium people declined to be involved although they were invited to help fund it and frame questions. The university group also collected demographic information at the same time - the raw data gave (I think, it was a while ago) a 72% against - the 78% against figure was after correcting for city demographics - which probably means that the pro-stadium people either went out of their way to respond to it to try and skew it their way - or they care more about the issue and were more likely to respond - either way it still shows the pro-stadium people in a small minority.
As far as I know there was only one question (other than the demographic data) - which was something like "do you want to pay for the stadium out of your rates?"
There was an earlier mail-out survey from the city about a year before that asked 3 questions, it collected no demographic data and was only mailed to the first name on the rates bill (which by and large tend to be male) - I think that one was pretty suspect - but even that showed only 50% in favour of building the thing
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Oh I almost forgot - Drinking Liberally Dunedin tonight 7pm, Velvet Underground, Lower Stuart Street