To legally avoid the name and address visible disclosure I suggest following the practices of food labelling. How hard is it read what is on the can? It can be made very difficult to read by choice of background, placement, colour and size. S.64 requires a statement setting out the name and address, an address is defined in S.4 but the format has not been defined. The power to make regulations about format is limited to road safety matters.

Does a blog need to be regularly updated to remain a blog? (or does a lazy blooger not remain a blogger after a certain period)

Does it need to accept comments? (No-Right Turn would fail this test)

To me it seems that if Andy could have EXACTLY the same content and links but shifted it to say wordpress with comments disabled (and not publish anything else for the rest of the year) then he would be seen as a blog, exempt and not have to publish his address.

If this is the case then the law is making a judgement on the format of the site which seems wrong.

So now the call for a ‘proper debate’ becomes the next attempt to put out the fire? How reasonable of you!

What do you think of some of the criticism/rationales I have posted today about why I think the EFA is a bad law?

The real debate should have happened before the legislation was passed, but Labour sent to great lengths to make sure that the usual means for this were denied to the public and to Parliament.

What – suddenly after a process whereby the legislation was stitched together behind closed doors, based on legal information from Val Sims which is even now being challenged before the courts, the door closed on proper cross-party consultation, and based on a Select Committee process that used mostly the testimony of Nick Hager for its support, while refusing to acknowledge criticism from the Law Society and the Human Rights Commission – now we should be having ‘the real debate?

My point about Helen Clark’s comment is just that it is indicative of the quality of debate whe allowed over this legislation, and supports your view. But you are slectively applying your views (again) and filtering out all the other stuff because you think you are on safer ground discussing these nebulous concepts about what a real debate is, rather than debating the EFA, which in my opinion, for many reasons, some of them stated here, and above, is a bad law.

“I’m not usually going to be convinced of something simply because someone says it is true (I hope I’m not alone in that), whereas I can be convinced by someone stating the reasons they believe something.”

the statement ‘It’s to stop people like the Exclusive Brethren and John Key rorting the electoral system.’ would qualify?

It looks nothing like a blog – it is simply a website. Blogs are exempt, other websites are not.

It is a ‘blog – the statements on there are statements of individuals; that there are also statements on there of other individuals is irrelevant. Just because the opinion of more than person appears on blogspot.com doesn’t mean that opinions on it aren’t the opinions of individuals. Just because kiwiblog includes the opinions of you, and all the other commentators here, doesn’t mean that the opinions of DPF aren’t his opinions, etc.

To the extent, if any, that public address is commercial (and thus falls outside the ‘blog exemption) it is news media which is also exempt (and Russell Brown has a Qantas Media award to prove it).

So does say publicaddress lack exemption and if so does it just mean that all it has to do is publish a name and street address? Or is there more?

Um, for most of us the electoral roll is public information though I would not be pleased at all if the concept of a secret ballot went out the window.

Ah, yep, I know the roll is public – but what I meant was what if the roll showed your votes (in other words: no secret ballot as you say).

My point being that having your residential address published along with information that allows unhinged individuals to make wild extrapolations about your ways (ie: prefers National so therefore eats babies, supports slavery, etc) can have a chilling effect.

This would particularly be the case where individual took a position on a subject where strong views are held, wanted to have their say, but felt uncomfortable attaching their family’s location to that statement.

No, not true. I would try to examine it on its own merits.
There are any number of quotes from Nietzche I can agree with, but it doesn’t follow that I am a proto-nazi (I hope).

This is getting back to the ‘political myopia’ charge – In my opinion, the baby-boomer generation hasn’t woken up to the fact that it is now ‘the system’ and that it dominates ‘the instituions’ it still likes to imagine itself to be the left-wing radical it was in the late sixties, but actually, increasingly it is becoming as ‘right-wing’ as the old intitutions it set out to topple.
To use a couple of Clarkisms they have not ‘Moved on’ and do not realise ‘What has changed.’
To quote the NME about the band Jesus and the MaryChain “They set out to smash the icons of rock, but ended up kneeling at its altar.”

When you see a system up to its elbows in taxpayer cash to promote its policies, and as well using its ministerial power to plant sympathetic writers or supplant unsympathetic ones in government departments, then on top of that allow untrammelled union publications in its support during election years while talking about the evils of parallel campaigns for the oppostion, followed by laws which exonerate previous illegal practices, and favour encumbents, while intimidating private indiduals who want to express the opinion ‘Don’t Vote Labour’.
What else do you call it?

Left-wing? I’m sure Chomsky would have an opinion about it, and I guess I might even agree with him.

Of course this doesn’t apply to stating the reasons for someone believing something. I for one am always interested to hear the reasons someone has for believing something that I think is false (that’s why I’m here). But what has usually been happening is a quote from someone saying what they think (admittedly in a very eluqoent way), but not giving the reasons.