Tag Aotearoa New Zealand

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2008 NZ election: garbage in, garbage out

Nov 9, ’08 4:57 PM

In a rep­res­ent­at­ive demo­cracy it’s not democracy’s pur­pose to pro­duce good gov­ern­ment but to pro­duce rep­res­ent­at­ive gov­ern­ment. While I don’t expect much in the way of demo­cracy from rep­res­ent­at­ive demo­cracy1 enough New Zeal­anders voted against their interests on Sat­urday to elect into gov­ern­ment a mul­ti­mil­lion­aire mer­chant banker Prime Min­is­ter and his self-interested fat cat accom­plices, includ­ing some of those who wreaked havoc on the New Zea­l­and eco­nomy in the eighties and nineties. As a res­ult New Zeal­anders can expect, amongst other things, a nas­tier soci­ety, a less fair soci­ety, more crime, more pris­ons, lower wages, more involve­ment in futile and immoral wars, a decline in the envir­on­ment and less demo­cracy. Garbage in, garbage out.2

As you can tell, I’m over the moon that enough New Zeal­anders had, shall we say, the con­fid­ence to vote National (and ACT!) on Sat­urday. They must have missed my memo.

Notes:
  1. New Zealand’s cur­rent vot­ing sys­tem requires the form­a­tion of a coali­tion rep­res­ent­ing a major­ity of voters to form a gov­ern­ment. While this is some­thing to be rel­at­ively proud of com­pared to the more com­mon sys­tem of plur­al­ity vot­ing, which requires only that a group receive the largest bloc of votes to form a gov­ern­ment, we still end up with an extremely lim­ited form of democracy.

    While there are things we could do to improve our vot­ing sys­tem, such as mov­ing away from hav­ing two large parties and get­ting rid of the absurd 5% threshold which can dis­en­frachise hun­dreds of thou­sands of voters, there’s no get­ting away from the inher­ent prob­lems of rep­res­ent­at­ive demo­cracy, such as the tyranny of simple major­ity rules (let alone plur­al­ity rules) and the fact that vot­ing for people to rep­res­ent your interests is the least effect­ive means of apply­ing polit­ical power and argu­ably a con­tra­dic­tion; no one can truly rep­res­ent your power and interests for you. You can only have power by exer­cising it and you can only truly know what your interests are by involving your­self in the attend­ance of them.

    In any case, I don’t think it’s any coin­cid­ence that the self-described demo­cra­cies of the world using plur­al­ity vot­ing sys­tems are some of the least equit­able, the largest arms deal­ers and the largest pol­luters. [↩]

  2. A fam­ous com­puter axiom mean­ing that if invalid data is entered into a sys­tem, the res­ult­ing out­put will also be invalid. [↩]
Comments (1)

I can vote!

Nov 7, ’08 1:58 PM

I thought I couldn’t vote because I haven’t lived in New Zea­l­and for over three years but I was hav­ing a poke around elections.org.nz and, as a cit­izen, I don’t have to have lived in New Zea­l­and in the past three years but just have passed through.

Can’t believe I nearly missed the chance to vote: you can down­load vot­ing papers here if you’re enrolled over­seas and you can fax them home (before 8th Novem­ber, 7PM NZ time).

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Please don’t let our democracy slip away NZ

Nov 7, ’08 2:12 AM

There are a myriad of reas­ons I hope you don’t vote National this Sat­urday, such as their record on selling off the coun­try or their keen­ness to send Kiwi kids off to get killed in illegal wars to curry favour, but if there’s just one reason it’s this: our democracy.

National wants to take away one of the things I’m most proud of about our coun­try, our pro­por­tional elect­oral sys­tem, MMP.

“Rep­res­ent­at­ive demo­cracy,” to my eyes, is a con­tra­dic­tion in terms and one day I hope we put this little step­ping stone behind us and move onto the greener pas­tures of par­ti­cip­at­ory demo­cracy, but in the mean time a rep­res­ent­at­ive one is what we have and the move to MMP has made it enorm­ously more effect­ive as a demo­cracy and given many more people a right­ful say in the run­ning of the country.

It’s some­thing to be proud of and some­thing I’ve really missed while liv­ing here in Bri­tain. I have no doubt that if Bri­tain and the U.S. had pro­por­tional vot­ing sys­tems, such as MMP, the Bush/Blair gang would never have been able to launch a war of aggres­sion — the “supreme war crime” — against Iraq. And they may even have avoided the dereg­u­la­tion that led to the credit crunch.

If National gets their way we’ll go back to an undemo­cratic sys­tem where people who man­age to gain power in parties like Labour and National can impose their nar­row agen­das on the rest of us at our expense. All the other really import­ant things such as the eco­nomy, the envir­on­ment and peace will cease to be mat­ters up for debate. This is why the mat­ter of demo­cracy is so important.

You know what to do. Keep New Zea­l­and demo­cracy safe on Sat­urday, vote for some­body else.

Comments (1)

Vote for me

Oct 31, ’08 12:26 AM

Nice idea: the NZ Greens have a web­site for cre­at­ing your own online bill­boards: voteforus.co.nz

My favour­ites: free­dom to dance, young girl, nat­ive bush, Tuis, lakes, to glide, unspoiled beach, cab­bage trees, swim­ming as kids, romance on the beach, the rope bridge, young lasses, earth, and, my favour­ite, liv­ing in har­mony.

(via No Right Turn)

Update: added mine: kayak­ing down the Whan­ganui River and kiwi road sign.

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Why the Maori seats matter

Oct 30, ’08 11:31 PM

No Right Turn on why the Maori seats mat­ter. Quite something.

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National NZ want to go back to majoritarianism

Oct 28, ’08 9:59 AM

I hear the NZ National Party and the NZ Her­ald have been fos­ter­ing the idea that the party with the most votes should lead the gov­ern­ment, even, it seems, if that party can’t form a coali­tion to rep­res­ent the will of the major­ity of voters.

Sup­pose for a minute that we didn’t have two major parties but instead a num­ber of small parties and the party with the most votes won 5% of the vote. What they’re actu­ally sug­gest­ing, in a mod­ern demo­cracy no less, is that this party should form the gov­ern­ment simply because it received the biggest block of votes.

This is called major­it­ari­an­ism, a throw over from feud­al­ism and a very lim­ited form of demo­cracy that 84.5% of voters in New Zea­l­and elec­ted to get rid of in 1993, when we chose the astro­nom­ic­ally fairer sys­tem of pro­por­tional rep­res­ent­a­tion in MMP.

If National is incap­able of co-operating with other groups in our soci­ety to form a rep­res­ent­at­ive major­ity then tough bick­ies. They’re a mol­ly­coddled bunch of bloody whiners if you ask me and their long record of look­ing after them­selves at the expense of the rest of the coun­try should mean they never have their hands any­where near the levers of power again.

No Right Turn has some thoughts on a recent Col­mar Brunton poll on the same topic and Rus­sell Brown responds to the Her­ald:

The Her­ald is free to make an argu­ment that a National-led coali­tion of three parties would be a sounder gov­ern­ment than a Labour-led coali­tion of four parties, but it should do so without mak­ing pre­sump­tions on the pub­lic will. If a major­ity coali­tion can be formed without betray­ing under­tak­ings made before the elec­tion, then by defin­i­tion it rep­res­ents the will of the major­ity of voters.

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NZ Election: Rodney Hide chasing the redneck vote

Oct 14, ’08 8:10 AM

No Right Turn on Rod­ney Hide’s recent com­ments about the Maori Party and its poten­tial to influ­ence the next government.

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NZ election now about trust

Oct 7, ’08 7:50 AM

No Right Turn:

Espiner agrees that the elec­tion is now all about trust, but he char­ac­ter­ises it as trust in eco­nomic man­age­ment. I’d char­ac­ter­ise it dif­fer­ently. Reces­sions aren’t about poor mac­roe­co­nomic stat­ist­ics, but about people - people who are going to lose their jobs, and need to fall back on the state in their time of need. The ques­tion then is who do we trust to care for the vic­tims (remem­ber­ing that any of us could end up as one of them), min­im­ise the dam­age, and ensure they can get on with their lives when the eco­nomy picks up again? The people who slashed wel­fare bene­fits? Or the people who have main­tained them? The people who slashed health spend­ing? Or the people who have expan­ded it? The people who don’t care about the poor? Or the people who do?

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NZ National’s plans to gut the Resource Management Act

Oct 3, ’08 8:41 AM

No Right Turn on the NZ National Party’s plans to gut the Resource Man­age­ment Act, and take NZ back to the Mul­doon years:

How would National change this? Firstly, they would amend the defin­i­tion of “envir­on­ment” to include only “nat­ural and phys­ical resources” — so exist­ing rights to amen­ity val­ues such as peace and quiet, clean air, clean water, or an unim­peded view would cease to exist, while local bod­ies could no longer seek to pro­tect their social envir­on­ment by con­sid­er­ing e.g. the effects of traffic, or the effects of visual pol­lu­tion from excess­ive advert­ising. Secondly, they would aim to pre­vent “vex­a­tious and frivol­ous” objec­tions by allow­ing the Envir­on­ment Court to require secur­ity for costs before con­sid­er­ing any appeal (so no appeals unless you are rich like them). Thirdly, they would replace the exist­ing call in power with a more reg­u­larly used “pri­or­ity con­sent­ing” regime, which would see decisions made by a gov­ern­ment body rather than an inde­pend­ent board. There’s some other nas­ti­ness — remov­ing the Min­is­terial veto over coastal per­mits (so effect­ively the crown won’t own the coast any­more in any prac­tical sense), and estab­lish­ing an “Envir­on­mental Pro­tec­tion Agency” as cover for pur­ging MfE (who National doesn’t trust) — but the driv­ing prin­ciple is to shut local com­munit­ies out of decision mak­ing, and pre­vent any­one — unless they are rich, of course — from mount­ing any chal­lenge. And the net res­ult will be open slather for developers, and large pro­jects fois­ted on local com­munit­ies, just like they were under Muldoon.

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NZ Government arbitrarily ends Treaty claims

Sep 1, ’08 8:14 AM

No Right Turn on the arbit­rary end of all his­tor­ical Treaty of Wait­angi claims.

How can you put an end to seek­ing redress for breaches of a treaty? It’s an absurd con­tra­dic­tion. Either breaches exist and they need to be invest­ig­ated and redressed or they don’t exist. Arbit­rar­ily end­ing the formal pro­cess for these invest­ig­a­tions to take place is like say­ing we don’t need courts any more to invest­ig­ate crimes. In fact it’s like say­ing you can’t even report crimes any more, let alone have them investigated.

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