Posts by BenWilson
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Gio, I would indeed say that. I'd also mention the large error ratio. But in absence of information, and wanting a prediction, what other result would you pick?
I don't think we're not trusted with the information. I think it's more a case that most people are not so picky about the details.
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Keir, I guess calling it a 'king's court' is a bit rich when cutting off his head was on the agenda, but the place was still a constitutional monarchy at the time of the coinage of the word. It's evolved a lot, of course, since the American right is not full of royalists, and Labour doesn't look much like the Montagnards. I think our Queen's head is relatively safe. The first Left were believers in laissez-faire capitalism - so I guess it's come a long way since then. I don't think either Labour or National would have felt comfortable in bed with either the Left or the Right in revolutionary France.
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gio I'm not sure if we're talking at cross purposes. When you take a poll with the intention of trying to make a prediction you have to extrapolate the missing information. You should of course say your margin of error, and other details about how the poll is taken, but ultimately it's about making a call on the final numbers, not 80% of the numbers.
For instance you don't say, "Well, only 1000 people answered the poll so we really don't know anything about what the other 4.x million people in NZ think". You extrapolate their answers to the entire population. That's a perfectly acceptable thing to report. It's not misleading, it's just a prediction that could be wrong. The outcome of the election is of course THE most wanted prediction.
I don't know exactly how they could make such an extrapolation that would be more accurate because I don't know exactly what data has been kept on the movements of the undecided historically. In the absence of information, the assumption that the undecided will mirror the decided in proportion is not a particularly bad one.
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You can always list them as undecideds, as they do in the US of A.
Right, but if it's your intention to predict an outcome, undecided is not one of the options selected at the polling booth by those kind of numbers, so you have to work out how to project their behavior. What other way is there to do it than split them on proportion? Their numbers should definitely be noted and reported though, I agree.
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that was my thinking. undecideds can jump any old way - I think that to just lump 'em in proportionally is very odd.
Not sure what else you can do - they just form part of the margin of error calculation. Is there data on what undecideds have historically done?
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Speaking as a person of the left, that's a bunch of crap. The distinctions between left wing parties (the Alliance, Greens) and right wing parties (Act, Libertarians) are pretty fundamental, both in practicalities and philosophies.
We aren't talking about the minor parties. They would not be in a grand coalition. Nor would they be in coalition with each other. They disagree on most issues. But Labour and National do not. They disagree on a small number of issues, to a small degree.
Your critique of my comparison to the German system seems to focus on a time 40 years before I was born rather than the time when they formed a grand coalition using MMP I'm referring to, which is their current government. I really don't think it requires WW3 to enable the idea that 2 parties could form a coalition despite historical opposition.
Now I'll give you it's not likely. But the reasons are not because of ideological differences between the parties. They're simply because the idea of loyal opposition is deeply entrenched in our psyche - we see the opposition itself as more important than what the opposition is actually about (which is fair enough since it's often very little). Like people who simply can't agree, because that would involve losing face rather than because it would imply any particularly unpalatable course of action.
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Greg I tend to agree. If an overhang makes the government against the proportions, it would not be something I'd be proud of, even if I'd generally prefer Labour over National. But it does seem that close calls are built into MMP since a Labour/National alliance is unthinkable to most. That means the third parties can and will push as hard as they can, preferring the situation that the big party is held in by only a few votes. Any time a government is getting cocky on account of it's large coalition, some piece of that coalition will flirt with opposition to keep the partner 'honest'. Naturally no honesty is required of themselves, although purely ideological ones like ACT and Greens will tend to be anyway. But the creepy personality based ones, and the race based one, can and will flip into power at whim.
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The only potential for it to work would be in a time of national crisis - war or major economic meltdown, where one or both parties agree to drop their oppositional status and work together.
In the case of Germany that's clearly totally untrue since they were not facing any particularly severe crisis when they formed their grand coalition using MMP. But even if it were true, we are actually in an economic meltdown right now. If ever, now would be the time for such a coalition.
Can parties from the left and right (whatever the hell that means and why ever the hell most of us would care) cooperate? Hell yes. That is EXACTLY what our government looks like ALL of the time. It is exactly what the parties look like internally, and they don't fall apart under the strain. Ideas are proposed by some elements, opposed by others, modified, resubmitted, and eventually approved or abandoned. Most likely the coalition agreement would outline what kind of support was guaranteed, probably confidence and supply much like our current coalition. It would only fall apart if either party went too far.
I don't think the right/left divide is as mutually exclusive as you make out. It's mostly a bankrupt term used to find some pathetic distinction anyway. There are multiple (potentially infinite) dimensions to measure a party along, and left/rightness is only one. It's only survived from it's inception (describing where various nobles stood in a King's court) because it changes definition continually. Hundreds of thousands of voters swing from one position to the other every election.
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Classic even better one: "Rates were C*&$ in the Bush years". Also Freudian.
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McCain said the c word on live US TV.
Priceless. Perfect Freudian slip, the Credit C*&@.
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