Yay, obfustication

[grassangel]

Okay, so at the library today they had a little display stand up concerning the election and how you can enrol before the 8th of October to vote.
Now, since I go to school, I automatically got a little form to fill in this year AUTOMATICALLY enrolling me the day I turned 18.
But... my birthday is on the 9th of October. So I headed over to the website to check if I was enrolled or if I'd get a special letter saying that yes Chloe can vote but she won't be on the printed electoral roll.

Had to jump dozens of hoops to GET to the page where it tells me my details but... I think I'm fully enrolled? It had a place where my details had been updated and it was like the tenth, so I assume that yes, I am enrolled.

But anyway. I also wandered around to all the parties standing for election and opened all their party pages.
Some of them are very scary.

Like LibertariaNZ. They want to totally get rid of state funding for everything and hand hospitals and schools to the community WHO VERY LIKELY DO NOT KNOW A THING ABOUT HEALTHCARE OR EFFECTIVE EDUCATION.

But I almost want to vote for the Legalise Cannabis party. Almost.

Also, I believe that a lot of the minor parties (and, presumably the major parties as well) intentionally obfusticate where their policy pages are. I had trouble finding most of them. Some had them all on separate pages so you'd give up halfway through, some had 'tenets' and others had some other weird name for them and barely said anything. *shakes fist*

Anyway, at school tommorrow, I will write up the address for where you can find an entire list of the political parties on the whiteboards.

Comments

[fae-elric.livejournal.com]

Your elections sound a bit more complicated than they do in America. :/ Over here, you're pretty much screwed over in an election unless you're either a Republican or Democrat.

We do have a third party, the Green Party, but it's basically a more radical Democratic party. Because of this, the Republican party ends up getting pushed into power even though more Democrats are voting; more Dems are voting, but their votes are split between the Democratic and Green parties, so the Republican party ends up being the only one with enough votes to win the election.

And of course we have other parties, like libertarian and socialist, but they don't have enough funding to get proper media coverage, so nobody ever hears about them.

[grass-angel.livejournal.com]

It's because we have MMP not First-Past-the-Post. I forget what MMP stands for (I think it's Multi something something) but we have two votes. One for the electorate candidate and one as a party vote. So... our electorate vote doesn't count as the party vote.
It's a system specifically so that everything doesn't end up as a two horse race. Even though, because of the media, it generally ends up doing so. But with like... Labradors running along side too. (But the minor parties are represented more and the government usually HAS to listen to them because of coalitions and confidence and suppy agreements.)
Here's a link: http://www.elections.org.nz/voting/mmp/two-ticks-too-easy.html explaining how it works.
And here's why NZ changed to MMP: http://www.elections.org.nz/voting/mmp/history-mmp.html

[dawnduskdancer.livejournal.com]

MMP stands for Mixed Member Proportional I think.

[tak-johnson.livejournal.com]

I dunno, with two votes it seems like there's less pressure on the voters, because even though the candidate you want may not get into office, you can still have the party you want get put into power. With ours, it's your candidate or nothing. Kinda.


Politics in general are confusing. @_@

(It's still me, by the way, this is my RP account. x3)

[grass-angel.livejournal.com]

But why should there be more pressure on voters? With MMP voters don't have any pressure to choose 'tactically' and can be assured of a more democratic government that represents their interests.
*shrugs* That's what I think anyway.

[fae-elric.livejournal.com]

That's what I thought, and I like your system better than ours. xD

[grass-angel.livejournal.com]

*hugs*

Also, part of the reason I'm only commenting back now is because your handy information came up in our Elections '08 mini-topic meeting thing.

[fae-elric.livejournal.com]

Oh, seriously? Neat. :D *hug* AP Gov class paid off, yay~ XD