Posts by Tim McKenzie
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Under your alternative universe, all those voters would have just voted no confidence in their electorate ...
No, not if they actually had confidence in who they were voting for (which I suspect most of them did in that case). For the record, I wouldn't use the No Confidence option for my electorate vote this time around, but I'd like to have it there as an option.
I'm not sure what no existing MP has to do with it. Most of the fracturing of the modern political landscape in NZ has been created by MPs splitting from parties - Jim Anderton, Winston Peters, Peter Dunne, Richard Prebble etc etc.
Exactly. A successful party apparently has to be launched by a sitting MP. If we run out of MPs who have consciences, then where will we be? Fortunately, we still have a few, like Pita Sharples, but parliament seems to be a good place to have your conscience beaten out of you. Remember Ashraf Choudhary and the Prostitution Reform Act?
If he was democratically elected, then presumably people wanted him to be elected.
Not necessarily. Perhaps they just didn't want his opponent to be elected.
Why would they have suddenly changed their vote from voting for him, to voting no confidence, if that suddenly became an option?
Maybe they would have preferred that option. At the last election, I remember hearing a few voters in Tauranga being quoted in the media indicating that they weren't voting for a candidate, they were voting against one who they thought was more odious. They clearly didn't have confidence in who they were voting for.
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Because if a major or minor party, or indeed all the parties become 'more evil' over time, then they'll lose votes and not get elected. And people will form other political parties that aren't evil and that do get elected and win and be the government.
Unlike the economy, the invisible hand actually makes a fair bit of sense in electoral politics.
Evidence, please? No new party has entered parliament since 1996 without having an incumbent MP. When people are voting for the least evil party, they tend to consider only those parties that they think will get into parliament, so that they don't "waste" their vote. This generally means voting only for parties that are already in parliament, which turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Well if he was democratically elected, then how would no confidence have changed that?
If No Confidence had won the election, then he wouldn't have been elected. At the very least, it would have given people with consciences (and sufficient foresight) a chance to use their vote in a way that didn't make them morally culpable for either his or his opponent's actions, not even by the voters' inaction in abstaining.
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Pick the best person/party on the ballot paper.
It sounds like you would want me to vote for the lesser of two evils (or even 19). You know what? Evil is evil, and I don't want to have any part in it.
... If there isn't one, start one up and find other people to make it happen.
Even if I thought it was ethical for me to establish yet another faction, I have neither the skills nor the energy to do so. And what makes you think I would vote for myself, anyway?
Introducing negative or opt out options goes against the very philosophy of the act of participating in a democracy.
If your electorate had only one candidate, would you want a No Confidence option? What if it had just two candidates: Hitler and Stalin? It's very easy to say that you could have put yourself on the ballot paper several weeks before, but maybe you couldn't have. Maybe you were still under 18 when nominations closed. Maybe you're too ill to contest an election. Maybe you're too poor. Maybe you wouldn't vote for yourself, anyway. Or maybe you were just unaware of the situation until it was too late. In any case, you're now presented with two options: Hitler or Stalin. Do you engage in the "positive act" of voting for one of them? Or do you refuse to be morally culpable for what either of them would do with the power you might give them?
It's worth remembering that Hitler was, in fact, democratically elected. If the SPD and KPD had managed to cooperate, the other most likely outcome of that election was a somewhat communist government. Fortunately, New Zealand is far from having Nazis-vs-Communists-style elections. But if we continue to insist on voting for the least evil party that's likely to win, then what's to stop the parties from gradually becoming more and more evil until we do have such an election in several decades' time?
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Actually only 44% of CA voters voted for prop 13 - that was 65% of the (quite high) 69% turnout at that election - one of the differences between a vote in parliament (or similar) is that turnout tends to be 100% (unless someone's playing silly games)
Actually, last time I watched a little bit of Parliament, the turnout seemed to be appallingly low. The problem is that only about 7 people cast all 120-ish votes, mostly on behalf of people who didn't even bother to sit and listen to the debate, let alone take part in it.
Speaking of section 168 of the Electoral Act, I can't figure out what it means for abstentions. Does abstaining on your party vote (in theory, at least) invalidate your electorate vote? Sectioon 178(5) seems like it might allow partial abstentions, but that sentence is far too long for me to understand before dinner. In any case, I would support introducing an explicit "No Confidence" option on either or both sides of the ballot paper.
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that meant you could divide a pound by 1,2,3,4, 6, 10, 12
I'm too young to have experienced pounds in New Zealand, but didn't the old system in the mother country have a special name for exactly an eighth of a pound---a half crown? A fifth of a pound was four shillings, and if you really wanted a fifteenth of a pound, you could do 1s., 4d. And that's without even getting started on the ha'penny or the farthing.
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First: sincere thanks to Stuart Coats and mark kneebone for showing up to tell their side of the story.
Now: imagine that someone illegally copies DVDs and distributes them by mail. Scratch that. Imagine someone's accused of doing that. Should New Zealand Post be obliged to prevent them from using the postal service? Section 92A is about as feasible as this, and about as fair, too.
Even if someone's convicted of sending death threats through the mail, we might send them to prison, but we wouldn't prohibit them from writing to their MP. Like Russell said, it's a citizenship thing.
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But will I ever buy an entire album again?
Thanks to Jamendo, I may never buy an entire album again ...
the RIANZ folk would HATE me.
... and RIANZ can't touch me. The music on Jamendo is all free and perfectly legal. Some of it's quite good, too. If you feel like it, you can still pay the musicians through the website, but I'm sorry to say, RIANZ, Sony, and Apple don't get a cent.
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Many people have a common sense notion that heavy objects tend to fall faster than lighter ones because gravity affects the heavier object more.
Gravity does affect the heavier object more, but so does inertia, both in proportion to the mass of the object, so that acceleration due to gravity stays the same.
And wasn't Hitler democratically elected at first? Even if democracies don't war with each other while they're democracies, that doesn't seem to prevent them from quickly becoming dictatorships before starting wars.
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... and the Senate chuses the Vice President (which, if you think about it, is how we choose our Prime Minister).
Is there a legal distinction between the US Constitution's "chuse" and the ordinary word "choose"? :)
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The Criminal Procedure Bill, among the many laws our Parliament enacts, doesn't really sound like the sort of legislation to create a small furore – least of all over proposed changes to preliminary hearings in the indictable jurisdiction.
I'm not sure about that; after all, this is the country that had people marching in the streets over electoral finance legislation. I'm not saying that there shouldn't have been a fuss about that, but they weren't exactly renationalizing the rail system. (Not that day, anyway.) I suspect the latter would have induced the political right to make much more of a fuss in the UK, for example. (But I don't really know; I've never been to the UK, so I'm basing that only on comments I've heard people make in passing.)