Aotearoa / New Zealand

There is an old saying "if you want to paint the perfect picture, make yourself perfect and paint naturally".

We aren't going to achieve any of your goals until and unless we decide to become a cohesive society with common goals. Unfortunately that's never going to happen. Right wing forces deployed all over the world are also here fanning the flames of racism, sexism, and bigotry while amplifying every wedge issue then can find so that they can dismantle the state and privatise everything they can into the hands of the oligarchs.

The only way to fight this is by education and solidarity and unions.

That's just a pipe dream though. New Zealand can't even agree that our tax dollars should be spent on feeding our kids in schools and making us healthy when we are sick and injured and helping us out when we lose our jobs.

We need to somehow disincentivise the current polarising where it becomes an us and them think. The left vs right. Boomers vs Millennials. The woke vs the... asleep?

At the moment, the divisive politics drives people to anger at the "others" and this gets people voting for their party of choice. It's also a cornerstone of social media engagement, which I think is not unrelated.This divisiveness and means parties increasingly need to slide away from the centre to find more votes instead of having a big pool of people in the centre with many choices to vote for and parties actively trying to get votes from this pool.

I like the idea of parties that can pick and choose good policies without worrying about how it looks - e.g. Labour not adopting a good policy because it was proposed by National and so it would make Labour look like it was pandering to National voters. Our MMP system actually allows for a solution to this, where smaller parties can cherry pick good policies and campaign on them. I would argue that the Radical Centre is a representation of this.

I think shortening terms to 12-18 months would be bad. National came in, ran parliament under urgency for 100 days to pass a bunch of laws and rip out a bunch of laws the previous government brought in. Is this going to be the new standard, where successive governments just rip out the laws of the previous government? In my view reducing the term in government will just lead to faster turn around on repealing the previous government's laws unless we fix the system that got us here.

I think we need to reduce the threshold to get parties into government. Avoid situations where Winnie gets to tell the big parties what to do under threat of leaving the coalition. Every election should have multiple possible coalitions.

I'd also accept a ranked choice voting system where people who want to vote for smaller parties can do so without worrying about wasting their vote.

Theres no legal way to fix this system.

Only money can choose who gains power, and power only chooses to benefit money.

The issue with that suggestion is, it takes much less time to throw out what the last government was doing than to actually do something yourself.

The best way to stop "rip and replace" is to stop fucking up, in my view. The ferry project is a classic example, set to be over a billion dollars over budget, and the boats are only 550 mil each, and the boats were absolute monsters, far bigger than we needed.

Three waters is another example, if Labour had dropped the co-governance aspect, the project would likely have gone ahead without too much controversy, but they pushed ahead with a wildly unpopular proposal, and it was a big part of why they lost the election.

Ironically, “running the country like a business”.

Have policy outline an objective, Set KPIs, thresholds, etc. If the policy fails to meet them it gets automatically canned. Otherwise it’s safe.

Want to lower road deaths, that is your policy “lower road deaths by 2030 by 10%”. (Largely) A goal everyone can get behind.

But you’ve got to specify how you measure it, allow all parties to add their own metrics like “average journey time must not increase by 5%” or “maintain 99% licensing in rural communities”.

How you achieve the policy is (mostly) irrelevant. Want to do it by lowering speed? Fine. But that might increase journey time significantly. You could improve driver training, but that might impact rural communities.

Subsequent governments could cancel it, but only if it’s failing its KPIs, or if their new policy is “don’t lower road deaths” or “make cars go faster”