Please take the time to vote...

My Gran once told me about when her father was very old and sick and living in a rest home, the election came round, and when she went to visit he told her that he'd announced that morning that he wanted to vote, and the Matron had pooh poohed the idea.  But he insisted and made a fuss and after a bit some of the little old ladies that lived there also announced that they'd quite like to vote, too, so my Gran had to go out and arrange a special booth to be set up there so they could have a turn.  Later, after all the fuss was over, my Gran asked my Great Grandad who he'd voted for, and he said: "That's my business!" and went to sleep, and he died later that night. 

Please remember to vote!  It's important and you don't have to deal with an obnoxious Matron or anything - just go down to your local polling birth and take ten minutes out of your Saturday.

National Party promotes crime, prostitution

Here's another bit for the 'law and order' ticket: make it harder for people with problems to get benefits, specifically people with drug addictions and who are in trouble with the law.  I assume this is intended to be a big club that will magically make everyone who lives on the margin suddenly law abiding, fragrant smelling, and all round wonderful citizens, but I don't think that's how it's actually going to work.  I think people who fit in these categories are mostly going to slide away into the other ways to get money if you've got problems - and those are going to have worse societal effects.

But I'm going to give people who disagree with me a G. K. Chesterton quote, because G. K. Chesterton is cool:

"It is true that there is a thing crudely called charity, which means charity to the deserving poor; but charity to the deserving is not charity at all, but justice.  It is the undeserving who require it, and the ideal either does not exist at all, or exists wholly for them."
-- G. K. Chesterton, Heretics, Rockville, Maryland: Serenity Publishers, 2009.

And a happy election to you, too.

Politics 101

Y'know, I get that people care a lot about politics.  I also get that some of the rhetoric out there right now seems... rather less than honest.  But I'd like to put it out there, that if you live with someone who works for a political party, doing ethically dubious acts like defacing billboards isn't going to help your cause.  In particular, it's going to cause big problems for your loved one/flatmate (I'm including that Young Labour guy with the secret tapes from last election in the doofus category), and make the party you like look bad.  It's even worse when they're trying to build a reputation as being more ethical than the others.

Dude.  Don't do that stuff.  Even more - don't do that stuff and get caught.  The only thing worse than being unethical is being incompetent at it.

For the other bit of scandal that's in the news right now, I think it passes the sniff test of being an accident - no politician should seriously expect a conversation to be private in the middle of an election campaign, in the middle of a crowded cafe in which a large number of reporters were specifically invited to film him drinking a cup of tea.  And for all Our John is posturing about having suddenly acquired principles and making threats of police action, it just makes me more curious about what was actually said.  Just a thought.

Spring is here

And in spring, at least every three years, a young politician's fancy turns to thoughts of the election.

And some of the rhetoric is getting kinda ridiculous, particularly the automatic pooh poohing of any idea of another party's, even when you're pretty sure that the naysayer secretly thinks that it's a good idea.  Like, for instance, Labour wants to raise the retirement age and National claims that it's a bad idea.  Isn't this the wrong way around according to their core values?

And another bit of weird logic - John Key has been saying for a while that NZ really needs to sell off half our core infrastructure assets, in order to "pay off debt faster".  Today, we get told that, hey, really it's to build up other assets, like schools and stuff!  Really?  Future spend on school buildings is either:

• business as usual spend that was going to happen anyway - in which case the Future Investment Fund is a meaningless gesture, or
• it's building up new assets, in which case the government debt problem isn't nearly so bad as the National Party is making it out to be.

So which is it?

Another thing that came up on Saturday was political chitchat at Fright Night, after our game finished a bit early and people were hanging out.  One of the guys running the D&D for MMP campaign in and offered to take requests (I totally bought a couple of politician zombies to afflict the party with.  Yay!), but we also had several people there who are either in the Green party, or sympathetic to its ideals, and we got talking about their decision making model.  The thing is, a friend had told me a while ago that policy has got to be set by consensus - everyone has to agree before it goes ahead, and I was curious about how that actually worked in practice.  (Everyone's had an experience of a committee that goes around and around a subject for ever, or That One Particular Guy who always argues, just for the sake of arguing, right?)  So the party member talked about some of the checks and balances that they've got - you can choose to disagree but not block consensus, perhaps for something that you don't like but don't feel like dying in a ditch over; or you can choose to block consensus, and if it's a really important issue, then and only then will the caucus move to a conscience vote.  So it sounds like it could be a slow system on a contentious issue, but also that the group has to at least consider everyone's views before it makes a decision.  And if a group of people have got liberal views, well, there tends to be a lot of diversity of opinion.

So how are the Greens doing, given that their natural constituency is inclined to have many different opinions, and they want everyone to agree?  Well, you've got to admit that for a small party they've got staying power - their first MP was elected in 1999.  In that time, the Alliance unallied, Winston Peter's personality party got knocked out (but possibly back for another round this election), and ACT, the party for argumentative people, can't manage to keep any of its line up of MPs in the first election since they officially became part of the government.  And the Greens are polling at 10%.  So that's worth thinking about.  The other thing - they seem to have a really good knack at getting their policy into law.  The anti-smacking law, the weatherproofing fund, and making youth rates identical to minimum wage are the three things that come to mind immediately, but there are others, and the now-in-Mana Sue Bradford holds the record for private member's bills by a backbencher to be passed.

Maybe it's worth thinking about consensus more often.

Things I never thought a National government would consider supporting...

Introducing a compulsory savings plan.

I can't wait to hear the howls from the libertarians and the Property Party (ie Act).

Losing the vote

Actually, having it cancelled. Is that a good description? Maybe "from it's mother's womb untimely ripped" is a better phrasing.

To explain, the Region Council of Canterbury (ECan) just got fired so a new bunch of National cronies could be appointed in their place. This process took one day. New elections are going to be who knows when, certainly not this year when the local authority elections are meant to take place. Possibly not ever: the National/Act philosophy seems to be summed up in the phrase: "Keeping Democracy As Far Away From You As Possible."

Yeah, I'm kind of pissed about this.

For your viewing pleasure, some rhetoric from one of the MPs opposed.

Because Drivers Are Dicks

OK, not all of them, but the ones that pass with a bare inch to spare between their wing mirror and cyclists certainly are.

There is a cycling safety petition asking for a 1.5m passing distance written into law here: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/ridestrong/index.html with a press release here: http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO0909/S00251.htm

Climate Change and the Attack of the Wet Bus Ticket!

So, National and the Maori Party have finally come to an agreement about what they want to do with the Emissions Trading Scheme, which is to make a token nod at climate change mitigation while not actually doing anything that will cause behaviour change in the major emitters. Because that would, like, suck. (For them, anyway.) Instead of polluters being expected to pay the cost of their pollution, and the costs being passed on to the beneficiaries of the pollution, the proposed scheme is focused on how to raise money for Kyoto obligations with minimum impact on the people who are actually causing the problems.

Some key points:
- Agriculture, our biggest emitter, stays out until 2015, two years later than currently legislated, and five years later than everyone else.
- Intensity based allocation. Basically, if you pollute more, it's OK as long as you're also producing more and the average amount of pollution per unit stays the same. How this idea is supposed to combine with the need to reduce national emissions given the drive to always 'grow the economy' is beyond me.
- $25/tonne fixed price option. (Currently, carbon prices are currently estimated at ~$22/tonne, although this is likely to change a lot. NZIER/Infometrics considered scenarios with world prices ranging from $25/tonne to $100 and $200/tonne in their macroeconomic impact report to give an idea of the market range that's being considered.)
- 2 for 1 deal. There is a 'transition phase' until the end of 2012 in which polluters only have to pay for half of their carbon pollution. The rest comes out of the tax take (No Right Turn estimates this at $428.5 million/per year). That would pay for a lot of hospitals and schools. Or tax cuts.

And for fun and games, there's been no attempt at reaching consensus with the other big party, so next time Labour gets in, they'll probably change it. Hopefully, in a meaningful, environmentally friendly way. What's also notable is that, despite this being John Key's latest attempt to sell out the country, it's slipped off the headlines of the major newspapers remarkably quickly - because whining about lightbulb standards and the right to whack one's offspring is so much more interesting.

I doubt that those fellows in government actually care about what I think, but just in case: You Bastards.

The Child Beating Referendum

I'll be straight about with my prejudices: I don't like Family First.

I don't like the hysterical tone of their press releases, I don't like their consistent painting of children as non-rational chaotic devils, I don't like that their list of instances where s59 has gone out of control turns out to be a series of incidents where concerned neighbours, CYFS workers and police officers took sensible and considered actions to protect young people. I do respect their right to raise their concerns in a civil referendum, and encourage everyone to vote in it. Preferably voting Yes, so FF will have to stop whining about the loss of property rights over their children, but just voting at all is an important thing: it's a public statement about the way you want the next generation to be treated, which makes it a public statement about what you want the future to be.

The Yes Vote campaign has a bunch of reasons on why you should agree with me, but I also note a handy flow chart for people who are as yet undecided.