Posts by Keir Leslie
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That bit of Berlin is fucking creepy. There's von-Karajan-Strasse right next door, which, you know, given von Karajan's fucking Party membership seems almost impossibly tasteless.
(and a really nice Serra. Which is real nice.)
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Speaker: Properly Public: It's our information, in reply to nzlemming,
That's not a prohibition on fishing expeditions:
The term “fishing expedition” appears to have received general recognition in the vocabulary of those concerned with making decisions on requests for information. It should be clearly understood that this term is not recognised in the Act as a withholding reason. If the information requested meets the test of due particularity it cannot be refused simply on the basis that it is considered to be a fishing expedition.
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Um, pretty sure the OIA doesn't preclude fishing expeditions.
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It wasn’t a cash transaction, but that doesn’t mean the barter wasn’t a fair trade.
(What follows is not perfectly formed.)
Yeah, that's true. The problem I have is that on Key's side, he was doing it in order to get free publicity. He wasn't giving anything up in order to appear on Radio Live. (After all, he probably would have been willing to pay in order to do it, if that wasn't impossible.) So the idea that it was a barter seems a little off, no?
The suggestion is that Radio Live swapped an hour of radio for an hour of the PM's time, right? And that because there was a swap, it's not a donation. But I don't know if I agree that the PM's time works like that.
I'd agree that Radio Live did commercially well out of it. But I don't know if that's enough to make it not a donation.
(This is all pretty half-baked on my end, and I am pretty convinced by your argument. But the whole things feels fishy.)
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But Key wasn’t engaged in any kind of commercial transaction. So that’s a problem. (It’s asymmetric. You can imagine on the one end, a real commercial transaction, where the National Party needs some cash, and so rents out Key on business terms to radio stations. That certainly wouldn’t be a donation.) But this situation seems different.
(After all, if this was a commercial transaction, isn’t it possible for it to violate rules on the PM taking outside employment?)
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NZ had alliances under FPP*. The National Party, after all, was originally a coalition, as you can tell by the name. And yes it might, but in fact overseas it doesn’t seem to have, even in cases with more parties. (In fact I suspect Opposition terminology becomes more entrenched as a way of distinguishing when there are multiple opposition parties.)
* As have Canada, Australia, the UK, etc etc. FPP doesn't produce a two party system at a national level, just at an electorate level, and in fact is arguably more conducive to stable three or four major party systems than MMP is, which generally tends toward a left/right system.
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What does `legal validity' mean? It is conventional to refer to the largest bloc of non-government MPs as the Opposition. A journalist who uses that terminology is not being lazy; rather they are using a long standing, and entirely accurate, principle of Westminster democracy. Parts of the notion of the Official Opposition have legal connotations, the office of Leader of the Opposition being the most prominent in NZ. It is absurd to think that the thing that Shearer leads includes Hone, Peters, and the Greens, none of whom had any chance to vote for him.
Now, there's not much attached, in New Zealand, to the role of Opposition. We prefer the term opposition parties, because it is more useful. But that doesn't mean the Opposition doesn't exist.
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Yes: the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly. Further, the Canadian Parliament has four major parties (BQ, NDP, Cons, Libs), Westminster itself has three major (LD, Lab, Cons,) and half a dozen minor (SNP, Plaid, UDP, SF, etc) parties. New Zealand is hardly unique in not being an entirely two-party system.
Wikipedia has a pretty good summary of the concept.
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Well, of course members only speak for their parties. The point is that one of those parties is also the Official Opposition with a capital O*. It is a perfectly fine usage to refer to the Opposition spokesperson, and also perfectly fine to talk about the opposition parties.
* This is the case in almost every Westminster system, and many of them also have multiple opposition parties. The rule holds.
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Eh, that's really not true. There's a specific formal role of Opposition, which is different from opposition. And it does fall on the Labour Party,