Hamilton City Council Representation Review

August 10, 2012 at 22:11 (Hamilton)
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Below is the body of my submission to the Hamilton City Council’s Representation Review. As some of you may be aware the council recently proposed to change the local government elections from the current two wards and 12 councillors to a single city wide ward with ten councillors. I argue that this proposal will take us in the wrong direction. If you would like to have your say on how council should be elected then you have until Monday on the City Council Website.

Main Recommendations.

I would like the Hamilton City Council to adopt option 4 as presented in the discussion paper of the Representation Arrangements Review. This is the option with 4 wards, 12 councillors and no community boards. I strongly support an increase in the number of wards from the status quo and strongly oppose moving to a city wide voting system.

Discussion

The purpose of the council elections is to ensure that the city council represents the full range of Hamilton city residents, that the council is competent and of a quality that the city deserves and that the council can function effectively. These are the qualities that my submission and recommendations seek to promote in this city.

I believe that the best way of ensuring that the council meets these conditions is to design a voting system that will in time lead to an increased voter turnout and a higher quality of voter decision making. I have assumed that the current FPP/bloc voting system will be retained after next years referendum. If the voters of Hamilton decide to change to STV then some of my recommendations will need to be reconsidered.

Ward System

The purpose of the ward system is to allow the representation of multiple communities of interest on the city council. This is particularly important considering that our city currently uses bloc voting, a multi member version of first past the post. This means that a single, ticket, party or faction can easily gain all the seats offered in a ward. This is often seen in the WEL Energy Trust elections where a single ticket is often returned winning all the seats offered.

This phenomenon is dangerous as it potentially allows a small segment of the cities’ population to capture the city council and ignore the interests of the rest of the citizens of the city. Having two or more wards allow multiple communities of interest to be represented, simply because a different bloc may win each ward. Wards do not prevent a single bloc from winning all the seats in the city but they increase the chances that there will be multiple blocs compared to a single city wide ward.

Having multiple wards also enables electors to make higher quality decisions regarding candidates. To take a hypothetical but realistic example, say an east ward voter in the last election only had two hours of spare time during the 2010 election campaign to compare the various candidates. There were 6 Mayoral candidates and 18 Council Candidates meaning that the voter could only spend on average 5 minutes researching the various candidates before deciding which ones represented them the best. If the city had been a single ward then there would have been 39 Council candidates to evaluate, giving less than 3 minutes per candidate.

In this situation it is much more difficult for the individual voter to make an informed decision about the quality of the candidates and who amongst them will best represent their interests. Correspondingly the increased difficulty associated with making an informed decision will make even fewer people inclined to vote and further lower the abysmal Hamilton City Council elections turnout. This is why I oppose moving to a city wide ward system.

Increasing the number of wards would likewise make it easier for a voter to make an informed decision, allowing voters to select a council that is more representative of the voters and increasing the turn out. Research looking at 30 countries has found that smaller ward sizes do have a significant impact in increasing voter turnout.1

A mix of ward and city wide councillors would be an interesting compromise solution but I fear will not make much difference to the council. I suspect that more often than not the East Ward will return one bloc, the West ward another and the city wide votes will return one or the other of these blocs, adding very little to the council’s representativeness. On the other hand it is possible for blocs which do not have plurality support in either of the two wards to have a plurality of the city at large meaning that this system could theoretically lead to 3 blocs represented in council. I suspect that most often it will be one or two however.

Community Boards

Community boards would be an effective means of allowing communities to explore and develop their own distinct identity separate from that of the city as a whole, however they are an additional cost in both time and money and I believe are unnecessary expense at the moment. However this is not a point that I feel strongly about.

Number of Councillors

There are two factors that need to be considered when determining the number of councillors. The first is the adequacy of representation and the second is the effectiveness of council. Both goals are important and sometimes a balance between the two is necessary, as a general rule smaller groups reach decisions quicker than larger ones, but larger ones can represent more parts of the community and bring more information to the decisions that are made.

Looking at the current council I do not think that we have effectively represented many of Hamilton’s communities of interest. Moving to a city-wide ward would make it even less likely that many communities will be represented on council and therefore I can not support a reduction in the number of councillors while moving to a city wide ward. I believe that the number of wards will prove to be the main determinant of effective representation on council and that if the number of wards were increased it would be possible to decrease the size of council while maintaining or enhancing the current level of effective representation.

With regards to the effectiveness of council it should be realised that the best size for a subcommittee is 3 to 6 people. Council currently having four subcommittees this means that with either 10 or 12 councillors the subcommittees should be able to work effectively and the individual councillors should remain effective. However with 12,000 voters per councillor the Hamilton City Council is already at the upper limit of representation in a study of European Constituencies.2

1Pippa Norris, Electoral Engineering: Voting Rules and Political Behavior (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 162–176.

2Kingsley Purdam and others, ‘How Many Elected Representatives Does Local Government Need? A Review of the Evidence from Europe’, CCSR Working Paper, 2008 <www.ccsr.ac.uk/publications/working/2008-06.pdf>.

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Student Allowance Changes

August 6, 2012 at 20:16 (Uncategorized)

This one appeared in Issue 9 of Nexus this year, from this point on most of what I write are of about this length.

The government has announced that it will make life tougher for all of us who live on a student allowance. The parental income threshold will be fixed over the next four years, meaning that in effect less people will be able to access the allowance. Meanwhile the government will be ensuring that people only have access to the allowance for a short time, in the words of the Minister, Steven Joyce “In practice this means removing access for masters and PhD students and for long courses beyond the first 200 weeks of study”

This may prevent some people from coming to university, most people do not like having to borrow money to live and unfortunately people who come from the least financially secure background will be the least likely to risk the debt.

But since we are talking about debt, this proposal will make debt worse for both the government and current and future students of New Zealand. Joyce is adamant that the money saved from not paying out the student allowance will be spent on more teaching and research. Which means that the extra money people take out on their student loans will have to come from government borrowing in the present, and the students will have to pay this extra money back in the future.

Which by the way the government is making a bit more difficult for graduates, they are raising the repayment rate from 10% to 12%. In effect this is like a 2% tax increase for people with a university education, which is a bit second rate considering the government just finished giving a 6% tax cut for the highest earners in our country.

Of course the government’s justification for this policy is that we are in too much debt at the moment, which not only shows you that they haven’t thought this policy through; but also that they are really just trying to put the costs of the tax cuts they handed out onto the poorer members of society.

So well done National, you have managed to develop a policy to make the government more indebted, while piling more debt onto the private citizens of New Zealand and reducing access to education. I’m not sure, but you must be either an evil genius or truly stupid.

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Healthcare

August 3, 2012 at 18:03 (Uncategorized)

The next article they had me write was on healthcare in New Zealand, only half the size so not quite as in depth as the last one.

So this week it is the health issue, unfortunately most of my knowledge of health and the treatment of ill health comes from TV shows like House. So on House a person wanders into the ER with an array of symptoms and House and the team do a bunch of random tests, MRI scans and risky surgeries to figure out that the person has some weird form of cancer, or STD or whatever. What you will never see on a show like House is a decent cancer screening program, healthy eating and exercise or practising safe sex stopping people getting diseases in the first place. It just doesn’t make a sexy medical drama.

The problem is the idea that the big flash medical equipment and challenging surgeries is the best form of medicine is embedded in our healthcare system. Personally I think it would be more true to call it the most expensive form of medicine that the average person has access to. Our medical bill as a country is huge, around 18% of the money the government spends goes to the Ministry of Health.

The thing is if we were to put as much effort into stopping people getting sick as we do on all the fancy stuff to make sick people better we could still have a wicked good health care system and save a lot of money as well. Look at something like bringing in home insulation, it is cheap to do and people are much less likely to get sick. But instead of bringing in a decent standard of insulation for all homes in New Zealand we spend our money on medicine, doctors and equipment to treat all the people that get sick.

I feel sort of obliged to bring up the Cuban model of health care. Due to the American blockade and general poverty they had to create a healthcare system on a budget. So they focused really heavily on screening to catch diseases early, public education and disease prevention. It turns out that doing things this way gives them a life expectancy comparable to the best countries in the world, which is really amazing considering the American blockade hasn’t allowed much medicine into the country.

According to the World Health Organisation Cubans only spend 11% of their tax dollars on health care. Of course Cuba has a lot less money to spend than us and they don’t have any money going into private healthcare either so in actual dollar terms they are spending a hell of a lot less than us to get results that are almost as good. Which makes it really obvious that we are wasting a lot of money in making people healthy when stopping people getting sick in the first place is so much better.

Which isn’t to suggest that our healthcare system is bad or that Cuba’s is good, both have strengths and weaknesses. I think it makes sense to look at what is working around the world and try to merge the best of what countries like Cuba do with the best of what we do. If we can get a really good public health system going in New Zealand just think of the money that will free up to buy flash new equipment or maybe we could pay our doctors a salary that is competitive with what the Aussies pay their doctors.

So moral of the story, just because something is sexy and dramatic doesn’t mean it’s the smartest thing to do, at least not in medicine.

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I’ve been a bit quiet lately/ The State of Education in New Zealand

July 30, 2012 at 20:25 (Uncategorized)
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I’m sure you all have noticed how quiet I have been lately, this is due to a combination of factors. Mainly me not having a lot of spare time for writing for fun, and that this blog became far to popular for my liking for a while. But I have been writing for the Nexus over the past few months so I’ll be posting those articles as the mood takes me and I come up with more ideas to write about. The first is below it is from before the budget and so when it was printed in Craccum a few weeks after I wrote it for nexus and it was well out of date.

 

The State of Education In New Zealand

 

Education is of vital importance to the future of New Zealand. We tend to pride ourselves on being a country where everybody has a fair go at living the kind of life they want to lead and a quality universal education is an essential tool to ensure this.

 

We also want to prosper in an increasingly globalised world, to do this we have to be smarter than other countries. Our competition has more people, more resources, often cheaper labour and is usually much closer to the countries we sell our products to. The good news is that we actually have one of the best education systems in the world. We are a bit let down by our results in maths, but in general our education system is actually turning out a lot of very smart people.

 

But that is not to say that our education system is perfect or that the recent changes to our education system are necessarily improvements. In fact I think most of the implemented and proposed changes are likely to lessen our education system rather than propel us to the number one spot.

 

So here is a fairly brief overview of the state of our education system.

 

Early Childhood Education

I suppose I should start with the beginning in early childhood, this is actually a ridiculously important age in a child’s development. All I can remember of my early childhood education is playing on the playground at kindy, but apparently that was the time that I learned to be the well adjusted, socially competent individual that I, in theory, am.

 

We all know that in the modern world the idea of having a parent staying at home looking after the kids is a luxury only the privileged can afford. So it seems that more kids are going to be raised by qualified early childhood professionals in partnership with parents. And when I say professionals I don’t really mean it, the government has changed the rules so that not all teachers need to be qualified to teach at this particularly formative age, so early childhood teachers might be qualified (also sucks if you are actually studying for an early childhood qualification).

 

There is also the issue of affordability of early childhood education, not that long ago the people of New Zealand were promised 20 hours a week per kid free, but still many parents struggle to pay to send their children to kindy. Recent changes to funding for early childhood centres have led to a number of them increasing fees to cover costs. Which is not ideal when so many people are already struggling.

 

Primary School

But somehow we made it through to the age of five, with only a few emotional scars and in my case a few physical ones and we got to go to primary school. This is the time in your education when you picked up the basic skills that are necessary for surviving in the modern world and for later learning. We do quite well here as well, everything seems to have been ticking along relatively smoothly, most primary age kids could read and write and do basic maths and whatever else they are supposed to learn. But not all kids were as awesome as their peers, so the government brought in National Standards to try and identify these children.

 

Many teachers complained that what they actually needed were more resources for teaching the not quite so awesome kids, and some people said that it was not good for kids future development to be labelled a failure in primary school. But the one good thing I can say about National Standards is that at least the government is trying to help rather than just cutting funding for schools.

 

Secondary School

Secondary schooling is where it all comes together for most New Zealanders, it is the last element of compulsory education for young New Zealanders and funnily enough is often the last many New Zealanders will see of education. It is the place where the average New Zealander is taught the skills necessary to prosper in our modern society, skills like calculus which the average kiwi can not live without.

 

Again we do alright here, too many students drop out or don’t achieve to the ideal level but most people come out the other end being bright individuals on a global scale. The government has one big plan to improve secondary schooling, performance based pay for teachers. This is one of those ideas that sounds good until you think about it, in cities and countries overseas that have brought in performance based pay the overall education of the pupils drops. Why, firstly because teachers are inclined to teach to ensure they get paid well; secondly because a few teachers just cheat and do what they can to rig the tests in their favour, neither of which helps the students much at all.

 

I’ll also briefly mention charter schools here, these are to be trialled very soon, basically these are schools which are run as a business, by a business and the government pays them the same money as a state school. Overseas these have led to quite a few controversies with companies putting profits before education.

 

Tertiary Education

So on to what we all care about, tertiary education. The place where the brightest of the bright go to develop their skills and intellect so that they may lead New Zealand into a new age of prosperity.

 

Except that students generally have to get a massive loan in order to pay for their education, which makes it very difficult to get all the cool things people want to buy. So a lot of them go to Australia to earn more money, inadvertently leading Australia into a new age of prosperity.

 

Student loans may be huge but at least they are interest free. I was working last year and found out that if the interest on my loan hadn’t been written off, then after giving a decent chunk of my wages to paying the damn thing off I would have managed to reduce the total by all of $100. Fortunately the government recently rejected the idea of putting interest back on student loans, calling it ‘politically unsustainable’. Which is absolutely fantastic, although I wish John Key could have done it without calling students lazy and apathetic.

 

Instead of putting interest back on student loans the government is planning on doing unnamed other things to ‘rein’ them in. So I don’t know, somehow the government is intending to make us students pay more for our education, which will get us deeper into debt, make us more likely to leave the country and less able to be able to live a decent lifestyle and contribute to New Zealand.

 

Student Loans are actually quite a problem for New Zealand as a whole, our total national debt levels are moderately high internationally and student loans make up a small but significant portion of this debt. So the whole student loan scheme not only hurts the students who have to get them but also everybody in New Zealand to a degree.

 

Then there is the big problem with living costs, students are the only part of society that have to borrow money to live. I reckon that around a third of my loan is living costs, if New Zealand actually had a universal student allowance that all students could get it would have done wonders for the size of the student debt and improved our national balance sheet. But instead governments always say that it is too expensive. So instead of everybody paying for it through their taxes, the students pay for it through their loans and everybody else pays for it by having a slightly higher interest rate on debt than they would otherwise.

 

The thing is education is really tied up with the economy, we have high unemployment at the moment, which is a really sensible time for our tertiary education sector to expand so that we can up skill our workforce so that when they get back to work they will be smarter and make our country richer. But instead we are shutting people out tertiary study, not only through the cap on student numbers that many institutions are bringing in but also by putting age limits on student loans and time limits on student allowances. Meaning that people who would have been able to go and better themselves at uni will instead find themselves sitting at home on the dole.

 

Summary

So all in all education in New Zealand is well above average but could be better and doesn’t seem to be improving. But we have one trick up our sleeve that will hopefully do us well in the future and that is the awesome effort that our teachers put in to our education system.

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A quick plug for the Hikoi

April 26, 2012 at 22:30 (Uncategorized)
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 If you didn’t already know there is a Hikoi passing through the Waikato this Weekend. If yo can there will be a big march down Queen Street in Auckland on the Saturday around noon, the Hikoi will then be overnighting in Huntly. At 10 am Sunday the Hikoi will march down Victoria street from the BP – Farming Family intersection, arriving at garden place between 10:30 and eleven. The Hikoi will then move on to Karapiro and Rotorua.

I will be at the Auckland march and hopefully at the Hamilton on as well, this is because I object tot he direction that this government is taking. It seems to me that every action the government does is selling out our future as a nation for short term gains for a small minority. You don’t have to agree with everything everybody says in order to participate but if you feel that the government is taking New Zealand in the wrong direction I urge you to get out and show the government how you feel.

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The Hipster in Identity Politics

April 13, 2012 at 00:27 (Uncategorized)
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The hipster is a much derided sub-culture, they are people who feel the need to be in the avant garde of the cultural products of our society and abandon these cultural products as they become popular, a state commonly referred to as too mainstream.

But as I was reading up on the thought of Herbert Marcuse. I started thinking of hipsters as being a slightly different form of sub culture.

One of the arguments of this Marcuse’s (Frankfurt) school of thought is that as the commodity became more central to human existence during the industrial revolution that commodities became a means to at first express and later define and subsume our individuality.

Of course contemporary capitalism only offers the illusion of choice, with the mass production, promotion and distribution of physical and cultural products under the profit motive we are limited to a number of set sub cultures with which to identify.

Of course I can bitch about how much contemporary capitalism restricts the individual’s freedom to individuality while justifying itself by proclaiming that it is all about freedom of choice. But that has been done before and better than I ever could so instead I will just talk about the hipster as an interesting subculture in the current cultural mix.

Because while the other sub cultures have relatively fixed tastes in cultural and material products the tastes of the hipster are constantly changing. Instead of following a single sub-cultural trend the hipsters instead latch on to the up and coming fashions across many existing and emerging sub-cultures. In a way they assert their individuality by rejecting the set cultural choices given to them by picking and choosing the elements of various sub-cultures that they feel are most authentic.

However, in this picking and choosing I doubt they are really representing their individuality. That would require a substantial part of society to all be on the cultural avant garde and yet all have extraordinary fluid identities that are capable of maintaining their place as first in queue.

What occurs to me though is that the conscious construction of a commodity based identity that the hipster sub-culture could lead to an examination of the constructed nature of identity in contemporary society, and make people wonder who is actually constructing it.

So could the hipster’s be a movement towards a more radical social change? Possibly, until radical social change becomes too mainstream.

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Why I Hate Networking

April 8, 2012 at 20:45 (Uncategorized)
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Some of the people that know me well will know that I absolutely hate networking, it is an activity which I will avoid if at all possible. Back in January I even avoided going to a conference that looked really interesting because the timetable included a few periods of networking which I would have struggled to avoid. Well that and it would have cost me $20 and was in Auckland.

There are multiple reasons why I dislike networking, but I think I will share one or two with you all.

I simply find the whole process of networking awkward and somewhat troubling, firstly it starts with some random person coming up to me and saying hello. Considering I don’t really like talking to people this instantly puts me on edge, that also why you will very rarely see me going up and saying hello to stranger.

But then the experience gets so much worse, it almost instantly descends into what you do and more horrifically what you can do for me. Which is supposed to be the power of the process, it gets people to the heart of what ever collaborations they are able to do currently or could potentially do in the future.

But this is not something I am comfortable with, I am not used to viewing the people around me as an object to further my own desires and I really do not like people viewing me in that way. In fact I have a history of actively sabotaging networking opportunities just so that what ever person is trying to network with me will think I’m a waste of time and go talk to someone else.

I would like to think that I engage with people on a more humanistic level than the materialistic networking level but I suspect that it would be more accurate to describe me not engaging with people at all.

The thing is it seems to me that I’m expected to network more and more and I simply can not bring myself to do it properly. It just seems to me that it is the product of a sick society that actively makes people objects to enrich others. Every time I see someone get excited when they think I might be worth something to them or disappointed when I convince them that I am not I can’t help but thinking that this person has been socialised to have a completely perverted view of humanity.

So networking reminds me that the world is terrible, and that people are unnecessarily cruel to each other. That some people will use any tools to hand to use a person to satisfy their own desires. Of course this doesn’t just apply to business relationships, so many people seem to decide they want something from someone else and will lie, bribe, manipulate, coerce and cheat to get what they want, be it sex, money, love, friendship, prestige, titles or any of the myriad other things that people value.

But can we really blame these people for treating people like shit when treating people like shit is placed at the centre of our economic system and our economic system is becoming an increasingly dominant part of our life. Almost from day one we are competing, the people around us are at first obstacles to and later tools for our ego.

So in short I hate networking because it reminds me that the world is full of cruel ego driven fuck heads and that their behaviour is rewarded by society. And also because it involves talking to strangers.

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Submission on the MMP Review

April 4, 2012 at 23:10 (MMP, Uncategorized)
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I realised yesterday that there was only a very short amount of time left to write my submission for the MMP review if I wanted to be heard in person. In fact 5pm Thursday is the deadline, if however you would like to make a submission after this date you can make a written on up until the end of May and there will be a second round of consultation later in the year.

Below is my submission, all a bit of a rush and not as well researched as I would have hoped and some bits of it I hadn’t actually given any thoughts to until today. But I will ponder it overnight an submit it tomorrow.

I am currently a student at the University of Waikato. My experience relevant to this submission is my involvement in a variety of political groups including standing as a candidate in the 2011 general election. Provisionally I would like my submission to be heard when the hearings are in Hamilton.

Threshold : Strongly recommend removing the threshold

I believe the threshold should be removed entirely. I think that this is the fairest, most democratic and simplest way of ensuring representation in parliament.

I believe it is fairest because it effectively eliminates the problem of having an electorate MP carry a few list MP’s into parliament with them, while a party with a larger share of the vote will get no representation, such as ACT and New Zealand First in the 2008 election.

It is the most democratic because in essence if a party gets enough votes to win a single seat than they will get a seat. I find it disheartening that under the current system we are effectively telling people that everybody gets an equal say in parliament unless your views are unpopular (not shared by at least 5% of the population). This would still be present in a parliament with no threshold but less people would go unrepresented and it is a more natural way of representation than an arbitrary threshold.

I think this is the simplest method of dealing with the threshold because we would only need a single, the electorate seats would no longer have any significance for determining list representation. Because of the non-arbitrary level of the threshold it would also be much easier to explain to people.

Having said all this while I do have a strong preference for removing the threshold I would look upon any reduction of the party vote threshold positively as an improvement in the current situation.

List MP’s Standing in By-Elections: Oppose

It is my feeling that list MP’s should not stand be able to stand in by-elections, there are two reasons why I argue this, the first is due to the proportionality of parliament and the second is because of the interference with parliamentary business.

Since the proportionality of parliament is not being determined at the time of the by-election and the party lists and public support could be as much as two and a half years out of date it seems unfair to me that a new list MP should be added to parliament.

I feel that it is not in the best interests of the New Zealand public for a list MP to spend time away from parliament to campaign for an electorate seat when the net effect of this campaigning will possibly be the addition of a different MP. I believe that it is fairer for a party in that situation to put forward the next person on their list and let the List MP undertake their parliamentary work.

Dual Candidacy: Support the Status Quo

I strongly support retaining the status quo regarding dual candidacy. Speaking as a former candidate it is my belief that by removing the possibility of dual candidacy we would see a dramatic decline in the quality of electorate candidates and a resulting loss of democratic competition at the electorate level.

It is my belief that without dual candidacy serious, quality candidates would not put themselves forward for the most electorates which were not considered safe for their party. These seats would be effectively uncontested which would further erode the significance of the local campaign. For many people the debates between the local candidates are still an important tool in their political education and I believe that the overall quality of debate and democracy would decline if dual candidacy was removed.

Party List Ranking: Strongly Support making party internal list ranking more democratic, moderately support making the party lists open to the parties voters.

It is my understanding that in any system of list ranking, either open or closed the parties will present still form an internal list to present to the public. For me the main focus of any changes to list ranking should be to make this more list a true representation of the opinion of the parties membership. I would like to see a tightening of the rules around what constitutes democratic list ranking to ensure that every party member has an equal say on the list and that any criteria regarding gender, region or factional representation has to be decided at an AGM and made known to the members before list ranking.

To a lesser extent I would support making the party lists open as ultimately the list MP’s are elected to represent the people that voted for the party not the membership of the party. I would strongly recommend making this process as simple as possible, I quite like the option used in Finland for this reason.

Overhangs: Moderately support removing overhang seats and instead subtracting the last few list candidates elected.

It has to be recognised that a mixed member system is always going to have difficulty managing to ensure both systems of representation work effectively. In the case of a party wining more electorate seats than total seats they are entitled to I would support retaining the parliament at a size of 120 but decreasing the number of list MP’s by a proportion equal to the number of extra seats won.

In the current system every party is sightly under-represented in parliament to compensate for the over representation of one party. Under my proposal one or two or occasionally more parties will be significantly under-represented to allow this one party to be over-represented, the only advantage is that parliament will remain at 120 MP’s in all ordinary circumstances.

Demographic Changes: Support removing the South Island quota for electorates. Or increasing the size of parliament to reflect population growth.

Proportionality is the key principle that ensures that our version of democracy functions in a fair manner. I think that steps need to be taken to ensure that proportionality is maintained throughout future parliaments. I think that ensuring at least a 70-50 split is very important.

As such I believe the easiest and most popular solution will be to remove the restriction on the number of South Island electorate seats and instead make every electorate represent about 1/70th of the population. I don’t feel that the argument that electorates will get too big can really be maintained when we have electorates like Te Tai Tonga. Although I believe it will be less popular and therefore less desirable I would also accept setting a fixed population per electorate and increasing the size of parliament to maintain the 70-50 proportionality, this can be done with or without the South Island quota.

Other matters- Preferential Voting: Support Preferential voting for candidates and possibly for parties depending on the other recommendations of the review.

I find the idea of preferential voting attractive in electorate contests. Although I think that the effects will largely be marginal sometimes preferential voting can yield significantly different results than plurality voting. This can be seen in the 2010 Wellington Mayoral election. I also feel that this will enhance the power of local voters and make them more likely to vote for their favourite candidates as opposed to their preferred candidate out of the leading two.

In terms of making the party vote preferential I would support this under the status quo, however if the threshold is eliminated I feel that a lot of the reason to have preferential party voting would be removed. I also feel that if an open list system is adopted then the party vote would simply become to complicated for voters to effectively engage with the process. I would prefer open party lists to preferential party votes.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

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The Direction of International Development

March 30, 2012 at 11:30 (Foreign Affairs)
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The other night I was talking with an intelligent and diligent friend of mine about the nature of community development programs. She was telling me that although she had originally felt that community development programs were more about making communities a effective part of the capitalist order but she was starting to see the potential for self sustaining communities becoming an alternate power base to the state.

We then started talking about who gets to the determine the goals of the development project, usually it is the state and in that case the result is not to make the community more resilient but to make the people in it more efficient cogs in the capitalist social order. Obviously we felt that community development projects needed to be community led and for goals that were determined by the community.

A few days later my thought turned to what this means for international development. In previous centuries (and far to often today) development of underdeveloped countries was often used as a justification for colonialism with the primary agents of this development being the church and the colonial governments.

Now we are supposed to be more enlightened, development is done through a combination of NGO’s and the IMF/World Bank etc. The problem with these organisations is that they do not always develop the undeveloped countries in a manner that the people in those countries would desire. The IMF and World Bank in particular are often credited with using economic blackmail to force countries to alter to their economies so that they become more like the North.

However even the NGO’s are more dependent on the North than the people of the South. Their finance comes from the wealthy countries and they need this money to do the good work that they do, to get this money they have to present their programs as being something their funders want. The most obvious example of this phenomena is the Bush government demanding that family planning NGO’s in Africa not promote the use of contraception.

In a more theoretical sense there is also the question of what development means. It often means modifying the traditional social institutions to make these societies more like the North, even if the NGO’s do not do the large scale economic blackmail of the IMF their objectives are sometimes still about bringing underdeveloped communities into the international market. When the people are thrown on the mercies of the more powerful economic entities around them and hope for the day something like Fair Trade can be become the dominant economic paradigm.

However many of the development NGO’s do very good work and improve the lives of people living the the third world. I just feel that this development needs to be directed by the people of the countries that want development. Sometimes this could be government, although in many third world countries it is really apparent that the government is separate from the people and follows its own interests rather than that of the people. More often I think the primary decision making agency has to be the communities directly involved.

The chances of this happening on a large scale though are probably quite slim, the people that fund these programs would demand what they see as being appropriate development, which will not necessarily be what the communities want. In a world where NGO’s have to compete with each other for the money the ones that value the people of the third world more than the funders of the first will struggle to survive

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Competition in the Real World.

March 23, 2012 at 16:47 (Consumer Affairs)
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 We all hear a lot about how competition is an essential part of the way the free market operates and ultimately leads to a rapid development of products that consumers want. Theoretically products that people want are purchased while products that people do not want are not purchased and the companies that make them go under. I have always thought that this simplistic model of how competition actually works does not accurately describe how things happen in the real world. In this post I will try and explain some of my concerns through looking at the computer software over the last 20 years, primarily the browser wars.

Lately I’ve been playing around with software on my computers. Two weeks ago I had a Desktop computer running Windows Vista (gah!) and a laptop with XP (which was really slow and I never used) I used Firefox and Thunderbird on both for my Internet and e-mails respectively. Then on Friday I got a bit bored and decided to finally upgrading my Desktop to Windows 7, I had a quick look at the windows 8 beta version but decided that it didn’t really look like my sort of thing. Then the big news over the weekend was that Google Chrome became the worlds most popular web browser for a day, more on that later. Then on Tuesday I finally got around to buying a new laptop, which I intend to mostly use for uni work, Blogging and Skype. The first thing I do with it is install Ubuntu, a Linux based Operating System, alongside the pre-installed Windows 7. Which has enabled me to do some interesting speed tests, from the OS selection menu to opening Ecosia (my default search engine) takes 90 seconds in Ubuntu and 113 seconds in Windows 7. Perhaps the other interesting thing to note is that to upgrade from Vista to Windows 7 requires 2GB of downloads while Ubuntu was 600MB and included Firefox and Thunderbird. the Windows 7 upgrade took 4 hours while the Ubuntu install took 45 minutes.

Long story short I like Ubuntu, it is also much safer than any windows system the only (huge) downside of it is that developers often do not make products compatible with Linux based systems.* The huge upside to Ubuntu and other Linux products is that they are free, while Windows products are not.

So I suppose the first point that should be discussed is why the free (and faster/more secure/less memory intensive) Linux systems have not come to drive the costly Microsoft systems out of business? The truth is that in some areas they are highly competitive, on servers Linux systems have over 50% market share, on supercomputers it is over 90%. Competition seems to be working in these markets with sophisticated buyers, but in the desktop computer market Linux based systems are around 2% of the total. The reason why this should be is apparent to everybody who has purchased a computer recently, Windows comes pre-installed. The main reason windows products are usually installed by the manufacturer is mainly because Windows is so well known to people, which ultimately traces back to manufacturers choosing to use Windows over MacOS back in the 80′s and early 90′s.** Most people don’t really feel the need to change OS and so windows continues to dominate.

Which is a very important point to consider in the browser wars. The first of these wars was in the mid-late 90′s between Netscape Navigator and Windows Internet Explorer(IE). Netscape was founded in 1994 and by 1995 the Navigator was dominating the browser market, navigator was based of a (slightly) older mosaic browser and was offered free to non-commercial users. However Microsoft also licensed mosaic and in August ’95 released Internet Explorer 1.0. This came packaged with Win 95plus, which was of course came installed on most computers. Navigator now had to fight an uphill battle, Microsoft had essentially made IE the default browser, Navigator had to convince people to switch. They also had the problem that Netscape had to make a profit of Navigator while Microsoft was able to give IE to everyone for free because they were making so much money from Windows. It comes as no surprise that ultimately Navigator fell and IE came to dominate the browser market. However this probably did not have much to do with the quality of the respective programs, both were based of mosaic and were fairly similar, when one browser got a new feature the other one was generally not far behind.

Which brings me to a point I want to make about competition, the ‘market’ is not a simple monolithic thing, nor is the company that produces the product. Microsoft had an advantage because the browser market was structured in a way that benefited them. Also companies like Microsoft that produce more than one product have an advantage over companies that only produce one. Microsoft was able to use the money they made from windows to essentially sell IE at a loss, making life even more difficult for Netscape.

But Microsft and Internet Explorer would not remain unchallenged, in 2002 Mozilla Phoenix rose out of the ashes of Navigator, this was shortly renamed Firefox, The Mozilla foundation was set up to be free and open sourced from day one, the Mozilla foundation made their money from donations and did not need to make a profit out of Firefox. Gradually Firefox’s market share began to approach that of IE eventually reaching it’s peak in mid 2010 with just over 30% of the browser usage market. But this time the browser wars had a third significant contender, Google chrome was released in 2008 and has rapidly come to overtake Firefox and is now the second most common browser on the market.

There are differences between the three browsers, Chrome is without doubt the fastest and suffers the least crashes (although since I use Firefox I feel obliged to point out that it is still fast enough and I can not recall it ever crashing on me.) Firefox is the most customizable and the least memory intensive of the three, provided you don’t add on to many features. I can’t think of anything nice to say about IE except that it is popular. Personally I don’t think there is too much to choose from between chrome and Firefox, I tend to buy cheap computers and run them for a long time so the low memory usage of Firefox is handy (as with Linux) but the main reason I use Firefox over chrome is because I prefer the way Firefox looks.

The more interesting point to consider though is how Chrome only took 4 years to do what it took Firefox 8 years to do. I believe the reason for this is similar to one of the reasons Microsoft was able to beat Netscape, where Microsoft was able to promote IE via Windows, Chrome has been promoted off the back of Google. Firefox is the leading product of the Mozilla foundation with Thunderbird being a distant second, this meant that Firefox essentially had to promote itself via word of mouth and rely on their superior product and people’s frustration with Microsoft to win people over to Firefox. From day one however Chrome has been able to promote itself via the very popular Google search engine, this has also had the interesting and unexpected (to me) effect of Chrome seemingly taking a lot of their market share from IE. Since 2010 Firefox’s usage share has only decreased slightly while Chrome has increased rapidly and IE has plummeted so that now all three browsers are between 25% and 40% of the browser market. Presumably this is because people are who are not willing to seek out an alternative to IE may give it a go when it is put in front of them.

Unfortunately I suspect that ultimately Firefox will be squeezed out of the market. This has nothing to do with the quality of the product, as I said I still use it. But is entirely due to the fact that Mozilla doesn’t have a base to build from while Microsoft has their OS Empire to promote IE and Google have their online empire to promote Chrome.

But again we see that competition in the real world is not just a straightforward battle of products. Microsoft and Google are both promoting one product off the success of another. This certainly makes this round of the browser wars more interesting than the last but it also means that the strength of windows as an OS and Google a a search engine could ultimately decide which browser comes to dominate the online world.

I also feel the need to mention Opera, a much smaller competitor which users seem to regard quite highly and is often very quick of the mark in getting new features (it had tabbed browsing 6 years before IE) but has never had much in the way of market share.***

So 1500 words later I will finally come to my point, competition in the real world is not a straightforward contest to see which product is superior. The finance sources and the other products companies produce impacted immensely on the popularity of browsers. There are also issues to do around the advertising capacity of companies and the visibility of features to unsophisticated buyers that impact on competition. The end result of which means that the best product is not always the winning product in a competition.

*A big part of which is because relatively few people use Linux, so it rarely makes commercial sense to spend time developing a product to sell to them. Opera sometimes has the same problem with websites.

** As far as I can tell mostly because Windows/MS DOS were compatible with IBM standard hardware, while Apple continued to use hardware that was not IBM standard and design MacOS around this hardware.

*** I might actually go and download opera now to try it out.

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