Seven more sleeps until New Zealanders get to decide whether we sell or keep our assets.
Red Alert
Posts Tagged ‘General Election’
To MMP or not to MMP
Posted by Raymond Huo on August 19th, 2011While juggling between functions today at Auckland University I got the opportunity to read an interesting article in ‘Uninews’ about the different voting systems which will be listed in this year’s referendum.
A group of researchers from The Centre for Mathematical Social Science have created an election simulator which will help voters understand the consequences of their referendum vote.
The simulator showed that either National or Labour would have won a clear majority while the Greens, with the third largest party vote in 2008, would have had few or none seats in Parliament if recent elections were held under some of the voting systems in this year’s referendum.
The article stated:
These scenarios, and others, can be tested using an election simulator created by researchers at The Centre for Mathematical Social Science to help voters understand the consequences of their referendum vote
The simulator can be used by anyone who plans to take part in the voting system referendum
A lot of descriptive information about the upcoming referendum has been made available to voters, explaining, for instance, that coalition governments are more or less likely under particular voting systems. But as scientists interested in collective decision-making, we wanted to know more precisely what the voting systems would mean in terms of seats in Parliament and we think that voters should have this information too.
I believe the simulator will certainly serve as a dry run to see whether the riding-so-high-John-Key will be able to govern alone or get a stronger mandate than National got in 2008.
The dry run will help the informed voter better appreciate some scenarios of inconvenient reality should the current polls be translated into actual seats.
Some of the voters will be alerted: hey, if they now realise that they would return a Government that will put a choice between borrowing $300plus million a week or sale of our family silver.
If it’s choice you really wanted? What a choice is that? A choice? Yeah right!
Find the voting simulator online at: Cmss.Auckland.ac.na/2011-referendum-simulator.online
The countdown is on…
Posted by Raymond Huo on July 2nd, 2010
The General Election maybe over a year away, but last Friday Phil Goff launched Indian Newslink’s official election page.
As pictured above, a number of Labour MPs were on hand for the launch, including Ross Robertson, Su’a William Sio, Carmel Sepuloni, Ashraf Choudhary, Carol Beaumont and Rajen Prasad.
I think this election page will add to Kiwis anticipation for the election.
Kiwi families are struggling under National’s recent policy and budget announcements.
GST increases and ETS mean that Kiwi families are put under further strain at a time when the world is coming out of the recession.
Kiwi families deserve better. Labour will ensure that tax-cuts are spread evenly over all wage earners and don’t just favour the rich.
After Labour worked hard to make student loans less of a burden on students with interest-free student loans, National has added an additional student loan fee of $40 per year.
This doesn’t give me any hope that National will keep the interest free student loan policy which was a legacy of the previous Labour government.
We’ll see how voters react next year.
http://www.indiannewslink.co.nz/index.php/electionlink/index.1.html
