Should go back to first past the post …this election clear cut 45 Nats 17 Labour Others 9
Save a lot of bother
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Should go back to first past the post …this election clear cut 45 Nats 17 Labour Others 9
Save a lot of bother
https://thespinoff.co.nz/live-updates/16-10-2023/the-bulletin-business-property-investors-delighted-with-national-win
The Bulletin: Business, property investors delighted with National win
The business sector will be very happy with the election result, commentators tell the Herald’s Tamsyn Parker (paywalled). While “a change in government won’t be a silver bullet for bringing down inflation or fixing New Zealand’s fiscal situation”, business confidence is already on the rise, they tell her, and will be further bolstered by the prospect of National and Act being able to govern alone.
Westpac chief economist Kelly Eckhold says financial markets may be slightly more volatile than usual during the post-election negotations. “However, [the] centre-right’s strong performance on the night will help to assuage some uncertainty.” Also celebrating are those involved in the real estate industry. The prospect of National’s pro-landlord policies such as the reinstatement of mortgage interest deductibility has made property investor Steve Goodey a “very happy camper”, he tells Stuff’s Susan Edmunds, while over on The Kākā, Bernard Hickey says he predicts “the housing market will take off again, from today. I stick with my view residential land prices will rise 20% because of this result.”
There is no question that Muldoon's policies were unsustainable, but my understanding is that the Rogergnomes deliberately and consciously subverted the political process of policy development to introduce a whole suite of neoliberal policies with complete disregard of the damage to the country's economy that a more gradual approach would have avoided.
I understand that other countries managed to introduce neoliberal reforms more gradually, and with better results in purely economic terms.
The social damage that Rogernomics and its daughter Ruthenasia inflicted was even greater in terms of increasing inequality and providing huge windfall gains for a small subset of already very wealthy individuals. Ruthenasia in particular added to rather than subtracted from the sum total of human misery.
FPP would not solve or change our NZ specific special problem with the special votes. The problem is not the electoral system, but the need for special votes and quite arduous procedures to process them. Maybe we should use less no 8 wire to solve problems and use instead sensible rules for voting (like allowing postal votes which need to arrive latest at election day at the election office). Most other countries do it like that, but clearly too hard for us.
But this is probably too easy for us. We do have a very special system for our special New Zealand requirements (whatever they might be) - i.e. we probably should not complain that we are a bit slower than anybody else in deciding the outcome of an election.
Our election rules are just special :t_up: ;