Rex, Ever thought of joining Act?

Yes, along with a few other parties including some not in Parliament. I’ll admit that maybe my cynicism is unjustified, but I’m at a point where I’m forced to conclude that the desire to be elected to office is the singular distinguishing factor which indicates without a doubt the unsuitability of the candidate for that office.

We could try to undo what’s wrong with NZ’s electoral and Parliamentary systems but there are so many vested interests it’d be impossible. That’s the reason I championed the NZ Electronic Electoral Trial in 1999 and remain a passionate advocate for binding CIR, via electronic means (so as to remove the excuse of ‘great expense and trouble’ used to justify the need to gain so many signatures to trigger one).

In short, I’d be happy to be proved wrong (deleriously so, in fact) but I just don’t trust any of them sufficiently, hence my support for a “bloodless revolution”, if you will. Now if Act – or any other party – adopted that as a platform, along with accountability measures such as open and transparent ranking of the party list by every member, I might be wooed.

I didn’t know you cared David!

Ever thought of joining Act?

And by the way DPF, that was NOT Nick Kearney presenting for Act.

[DPF: Oh of course it wasn't. I was thinking of Nick when I was writing]

1) s75(2)(f) of the Broadcasting Act 1989 isn’t a criteria for allocation of broadcasting time and money but rather a statement of the statutory purpose.

2) That purpose is to provide a fair (in this case more or less equal) opportunity for each registered party to state its policy.

3) Because the money is rationed the role of the Commission is to its judgement to establish which registered parties are viable i.e. more than likely to be represented in Parliament, and if they are so, to divide equally between all of these viable parties with sufficient funds withheld after initial allocation to elevate one other non viable party, if closer to the election they look like they will make it.

4) In assessing viability the commission has at its deposal the criteria in s75(2)(a) – (e). Satisfying one or more or all or another criteria analogist to either polling data or membership data can bring a registered party into viability.

This argument is one about statutory interpretation. The ACT contention is the equal treatment of viable registered parties matches the rights lost because of s70 of the Broadcasting Act 1989 (which were all equal) and equates with all the other law that the Commission administers which provides of equal caps, equal expenditure limits and equal disclosure requirements for registered parties. Equal division among viable registered parties matches MMP where all governments are likely to be coalition governments and therefore New Zealanders have the right to know about all Parties likely to be presented in Parliament. Rodney Hide noted that this broadly and better equates with most NZers notion of fairness in politics, he also wryly noted that the Commission itself gave all of the parties the same time before the commission to make their case, no more time was afforded to the biggest party than the least.

At the moment the Commission basically allocates are nominal figure for “fair opportunity” (10k per RP or a total of 200K out of $3.2m) and treats fair opportunity as a criterion.

There was a subtle argument by Chief Judge Williams that there was a re-allocation from the two big parties to the next and subsequent tier of parties on the basis of fairness thus demonstrating that the Commission was meeting the requirement for more than fair opportunity. The ACT response that this was due to the starting point of the commission’s allocation model – setting the initial arbitrary and nominal amount of 10K to largely satisfy the requirement for fair opportunity to state one’s case and that if this were more than nominal figure, then reallocation would be required.

Spam, have you been asleep for the last 20 years.

You cant ‘buy’ television or radio time

Err…. re-read my post. I didn’t say you could buy it, I wondered why you couldn’t. I wondered why we have state-paid advertising for this, but not for other media.

“and they had no mechanism to respond………”

THAT is one of the CRUXES of the way THIS GOVERNMENT is SHUTTING DOWN FREEDOM OF SPEECH. Once you’ve spent your allocation, you cannot defend yourself against the smears of the government’s agencies with their bottomless funding, and of THEIR arsewiping allies in the news media.

Stop it, or you’ll give Dunne some ideas…..

You cant ‘buy’ television or radio time.

You are allocated money by the state to spend on TV & radio.
This is the only way to get any broadcasting time unless you break the rules and spend more by not paying the gst.

which would be a good idea if the race was close and wanted to break the law and see if you could get away with it and get 10% or so MORE TV time in the last week of the campaign.
And one party did follow this method and blamed a minor clerk – as though that person is making the decissions on a major campaign

Presumably Damien Edwards (and David Cuthbert, if he is indeed still on Anderton’s Parliamentary staff) have taken half a day’s annual leave to undertake what is clearly partisan political work as opposed to the business of governing for which we pay their salaries? And did all the research and submission preparation on their own time?

Now ‘scuse me, I have to go feed the flying pigs.

Interesting to note though, that if Copeland were to die, the next person on the United list would come in, rather than a Kiwi Party person.

Odd.

I actually agree with United Future here – Copeland only got in because of the party vote which meant United Future gets X amount of MP’s, when Copeland decided to leave UF, he should have left Parliarment and the next person on the UF party list become the new UF MP. I thought we already had a law regarding this?

Why not just up the overall spending cap, and let the parties spend it as they please. If they want more TV time, then let them pay for it.