NZ POLITICAL SYSTEM of public governance & administration

You might like to contribute something here too @andrewsheldon

For example, I feel that their are some simple cosmetic parameter changes we can make to the election rules, such as abolishing the party vote threshold rule (currently set at 5%). As a small start to begin with at least

When it comes to election rules I would furthermore recommend to lift the age restriction. Everyone should be allowed to vote, from birth onwards. Parents may exercise the vote for their children up to an age of 14 max.

Also denying prisoners their right to vote is unacceptable and must be fixed.

Exploring the age-vote thing further. It would be interesting to explore the age at which sentience/conscience becomes very well developed.

Also would like to explore the idea of situations where baby makers would try to game the system by making as many babies as possible to maximize vote impact with little care for responsibility over their children, even leading to neglectful practices... a bit far out speculation.

And then, on the other hand, what if one is raised in a communal family environment - the whole tribe are your parents. Then how do you determine which guardian may vote on your behalf? Or perhaps their could be a weighting system. The weight of that child's vote is split up between all the voting family/community/tribe members and added to their votes.

Could be a pretty complex thing to optimise...

The biggest impact on the voting system as I see it would be to accept electronic voting. This would help increase the youth vote which of course would be a major concern to the traditionalists because of the influence that would come with it. Then we would see some changes in the processes of governance and administration.

We ask ourselves why this hasn't been brought in as policy and the answer is easy. It would impact greatly the power ratio in law making.

Imagine a weekly referendum with multiple questions
that replaces the current parliament process.
Where parliament is not governance (rule) instead
it organizes and facilitates the referenda and implements
voter decisions. (pure democratic). The voters will have to engage in the political process and live with the consequences of there decisions. At the moment we basicaly hand all responsibility over every three years
and suffer/prosper by decisions by others.
We need to take control and responsibility in our democracy. Right now how much do we have.
At the moment we cant even get a serious referendum
with the flag we have been thrown a toy to pacify.
Adversarial party politics is very inefficient as the sides spend time trying to out politic one another, to have there "theories" put into legislation, even if we voters don,t agree on mass. With the power centralized it is easy to corrupt by special interest groups.
What would "power to the people" actually look like ?

And perhaps split an election into (i) what legislation must be passed in the next 3-year term - item by item and no additions unless passed by a 75% majority (ii) a vote for the best candidates to implement that program.

Done properly it would put a stop to broken election promises and remove most of the tribalism that paralyses our existing process.

And perhaps split an election into (i) what legislation must be passed in the next 3-year term - item by item and no additions unless passed by a 75% majority (ii) a vote for the best candidates to implement that program.

Nope. Can't do that as nobody could keep track of the ~750 pieces of legislation to be decided upon on one day. Then there's the fact that many pieces of legislation come up during the parliamentary term in response to something going wrong.

IMO, what we'd want to do is have it so that parliament does the day to day running of the government but actual policy changes such as asset sales and rules around abortion are decided upon by the people via referendum. And, yes, we'd want to say that participation must be at least 75%. It would probably require that participation in such referenda be compulsory.

It's removing the tribalism from decisions that's important. There's no way that many policies, such as asset sales, would pass if they were decided upon by the people. But, then, that's why we have representative democracy instead of participatory democracy - so that the rich could still rule.

Some good points there Colin.
I have wondered over the years, how the voting population would react to being given the power and responsibility via full referendum.
Most every one ive asked has gone "yes i would participate on a weekly basis"
How many people would get involved on the grounds that
the current 3year system is just a democratic joke, not representative ?
There is in the current system no minimum threshold for participation, the total voters in a general election can fall to 5% and still it will be valid.
Point being that i believe the trend of falling voter turn out
would reverse if the disenfranchised returned and participated ( making the democracy more accurately representative and bring a wider scope ideas and solutions to our issues.