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Politicians and promises

Richard — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 08:40:54 +0000

An article today in The Age quotes Julia Gillard as saying that election promises may be broken, given the current parliamentary arrangements here in Australia.

I can’t be the only person who finds the idea of government-by-promise underwhelming, but oppositions of all persuasions never tire of the rhetorical flourish of “broken promises” and the causally-related issue of trust. (That the nation might well be better off without any of the porky promises on both sides of politics is a different discussion.)

Circumstances change, and I can understand Gillard’s inclination to realpolitik in a parliament where she is going to frequently need her (seemingly considerable) negotiating skills. I won’t think of that as a breach of trust – trust to me relates to good government holistically, not promised programs specifically. Outright lying is another matter, but if a government can steer the ship within the spirit of what it proposed, I think it still deserves my support.

Julia Joy

Richard — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 12:13:21 +0000

Middle East Peace

Richard — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 13:11:35 +0000

I thought this article from the International Herald Tribune was interesting, even if its proposal seemed rather unlikely, at least in the current climate. But it seems substantially more interesting when you realise that it’s written by Muammar Qaddafi, i.e. Lybia’s Colonel Gaddafi.

Zimbabwe and intervention

Richard — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 05:27:34 +0000

Fantastic article in The Age by Waleed Aly, mirroring some thoughts I’ve been having as Zim slides into 9+ digit inflation and a cholera epidemic. If Iraq justified a military intervention, why not Zimbabwe? Oh that’s right, no oil.

Melbourne City Council Mayoral Elections – how the candidates would “vote”

Richard — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 09:09:58 +0000

Candidates in the mayoral elections publish charts of how they’d like you to distribute their preferences, and these charts make interesting reading. I wondered – who’s the most popular candidate among the candidates?

Totalling up the preference votes democratically, you get this:

52 Singer
56 Fowles
56 Ng
58 Bandt
63 McMullin
65 Morgan
67 Crawford
69 Columb
72 Doyle
80 Roberts
88 Toscano

Singer is the most popular among the candidates, Toscano, a “radical activist(s) who have over eighty years experience combating the state, corporate capitalism and bureaucracy”, is the least popular.

Another interesting measure on this one was to see who got the most “2″ votes – i.e. who the candidate would prefer you to vote for, were they not running. Here, Fowles wins with 3 votes out of 11.

If you take this order of popularity and weight the opinion of the candidates based on the popularity of their peers (more popular = more important opinion) hardly anything changes. Probably you wouldn’t expect it to.

The spreadsheet I used to crank this out is here, if you’re interested.