Posts by Keir Leslie
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
. Being on the Evil Commie end of the spectrum, I don’t really believe in all this wishy-washy co-opted-hippy HR-speak about everyone being enabled and empowered in employment relations, because most businesses are fundamentally hierarchical and motivated by profit.
Here I am suggesting that management in NZ isn’t very good at making money. This is a problem in that most businesses are fundamental hierarchical and motivated by profit etc etc.
(In fact of course there’s management beyond admin: do we hire two new engineers this year, or spend the money on marketing? Do we hire a tech writer, or keep making Jim who did half a degree in Eng. Lit. handle it when he has the time? How many product lines should we have? And so on.)
-
Educate more people in science and engineering. This would mean that future middle managers / Managers / Directors would be able to know what the hell is being talked about.
Why? Is NZ's problem actually a lack of engineers (or the quality of said engineers)? No. It's incompetence at the management level. We need to start training managers who can actually manage, as opposed to more engineers to be incompetently managed.
-
It's not the story, certainly, but in the context of the regime's near-total shutdown of electronic communications, it is a story.
But this is business as usual. Close the borders, seize the presses, control the telephone exchange etc. You try and control all possible means of communication, and realistically most of them won't matter, but the cost to you of doing so is very low.
-
In NZ’s case, most of what’s been radical has been of very, very arguable benefit, especially when it’s been shoved through under urgency.
The First Labour Government made a whole bunch of radical changes that have been of huge benefit to the country.
I can see no evidence that Upper Houses improve the quality of law; instead, generally, they allow a different group (or groups) a veto point.
-
The Aussies seem to be doing OK with their bicameral system.
Gough Whitlam would disagree; I also don't think that the Australians have a generally higher quality of law than we do. Obviously this isn't something you can test objectively. In general upper houses seem very civics, and not particularly useful.
-
And, er, would an upper house actually lead to substantively better policy outcomes? After all, I have to say, the other countries possessed of Upper Houses don't really look like they do this stuff any better than we do.
-
We agree that National could, if it really wanted to, pass with ACT a law re-introducing the death penalty. However, while you appear to think they have a mandate to do this, I do not.
I think that if the National party & Act were willing to pass that law they should be able to do so; I also think that the Opposition would be well within their rights to call them deceitful, barbaric, cowardly, and so-on. I don't think that you need to introduce a concept of the mandate here. It also seems to me that we don't need to suppose that the lack of mandate will hold back the National Party in this instance; rather what holds them back is the fact that they don't approve of the death penalty, that introduction of such a policy would be infeasible on a host of other grounds.
And, yes, if they'd run on it then it might go through; but that wouldn't be because they had a mandate to do so, but rather because they had demonstrated that people wanted it, and you'd be daft to fight hard against popular policy.
The notion of a mandate seems mainly metaphysical, and to be honest, it seems as if it can be left to the electorate to judge at the next election.
I should note that I do endorse the `don't lie' theory of electoral politics, which looks a lot like a mandate theory when dealing with election promises, but also has the nice feature of working well between elections.
-
But we don't vote for policy, we vote for people. John Key said: we won't raise GST. Then he did. But John Key also made other promises. And he decided he couldn't keep all of them, and so the one about GST had to go. But that doesn't mean that he didn't have a mandate to make that decision (& what does a mandate mean anyway? How do you propose to enforce it?) nor that there's any restriction on the Labour Party attacking him for saying one thing and then doing something else.
The voters' judgement of the 1984 Labour Government, when asked, was that they deserved another go at running the country. And, of course, the reason that there was no manifesto that year was Muldoon's alcoholic snap election. I am sure that there were people who cared, and they got to express themselves at the 1987 election, and they lost. It wasn't the fact that the Labour Party's policy preferences weren't outlined in a nice document that I think offends democracy; rather it was the problem that if you didn't approve of neoliberal policy prescriptions, you had no-one to vote for.
-
Another problem with granting a general right to try and form a government to the largest party, or the most-winningest: it produces an incentive for a Green supporter, who wants a left-wing government with a strong Green presence, to vote for Labour, in order to ensure that it is Labour making the first round of offers. In conjunction with the threshold, this could lead to a very odd set of behaviours if the Greens hovered around the 5% mark. One possible result is the re-imposition of a FPP mentality, except this time at the national level.
You have a mandate to form a government if you have the votes in the House; you have a mandate to pass laws if you have the votes in the House --- or at least, as far as anyone under heaven, or outside the polling place, cares.
-
But the recourse we have to people breaking promises is simply not to vote for them. There is no question of rightness or wrongness about it; each voter is allowed to decide for themselves whether or not they trust the party asking for their vote.
If you want to introduce some concept of mandate, you have to introduce some other concepts about how to enforce that first concept. Otherwise, it's toothless, and really I think meaningless.