Interesting that this government has been “we can use urgency to skip due process because we campaigned on these things, people voted us in, so therefore the details are all perfect and don’t need scrutiny” and yet them campaigning on opening a new medical school didn’t get the same treatment.

Oh yes, one of the recommendations from the review… 5… (10?) years ago, was to lower the threshold to 4%. That never happened for some reason.

Yeah, I think the most well known group is probably the Taxpayers Union, which allows people to donate to right wing parties without their name on the record. Over the years my opinion has been growing in the direction of banning all political donations and bumping up the public money given to political parties. The devil is in the detail but it seems better than allowing companies to donate millions.

I’m a fan of more civics education as well.

Yes, I like this idea as well. The proposal was clear this is about how the government system works, rather than about individual political parties, which I think is a good thing. I’ve got to be honest, I’ve read about our three branches of government time and time again and yet I still have to look it up each time it’s mentioned - and it’s not even complicated 😆

These items are a nice proposal, but unfortunately it’s not anyone with the power to change things. Hopefully the various items will get picked up by future governments.

He makes a lot of good points. I seem to recall having discussions here on Lemmy about some of these, but the details are lost in my memory.

For the proposal to require registration of lobbying and limit individual donations - why do we allow companies to lobby at all?

I think the problem is that some views do not deserve to have a platform. In theory, having a reasoned discussion about climate change is a good thing and should be welcomed at a university. In practice, someone coming to a university to talk about how climate change is not real is not going to have a reasoned discussion. Saying the university should not take sides is good in theory, but in practice allowing equal time for climate change deniers as for climate change supporters in the name of free speech does not actually support free speech (given the supporters are 97%).

A possibly pessimistic take is “speakers that support us keep getting their events cancelled so we have changed the law to stop that happening”.

I think this is a form of bothsidesism, where they are requiring universities to give all sides equal weight where not all points of view deserve equal weight.

Yeah good thought. Could you make a parent group that donates their donations to 100 other groups to get around it, or does Canada have something that protects against that sort of manipulation?

Does Australia allow super PAC type organisations?

Its all good to cap donations but if you can donate to an entity that’s not the party who will run ads and campaign for the party, then it doesn’t really matter that you capped party donations.

It is kind of insane that most of the examples are of 60 year olds challenging the 75 year olds.

One of the young ones is in their 50s, and one example is of an early 70s challenging a later 70s.

Only one in the whole lot I would think of as “young” (35).

Yes, it’s been interesting watching the fallout from getting rid of so many public servants and trying to decide if they knew it would happen and are pretending to be surprised or if they were actually surprised.

E.g. collapse of hospitality in the Wellington CBD. They had to know this would happen, and their “get all the public service back to the office” gesture was just lip service as their own data showed most are there most of the time anyway.

But then they had a target to drop the number of people receiving unemployment benefits but they made thousands redundant and there were foreseeable consequences of many others becoming unemployed from businesses supporting the public sector. So why set the target? Was it that they don’t understand the economy or just that they hope it will recover by the end of their term?

That may also be difficult. Measuring the number of families on the emergency housing list is straightforward (even if misleading).

Measuring the number of homeless people is harder. Especially because families might be cramming into a friends house or otherwise have a roof over their head that is actually not permanent housing.

So, the employer’s options:

Her proposed changes would mean an employee’s pay could be reduced by a proportionate amount “calculated in accordance with a specified method that is based on identifying the work that the employee will not be performing due to the strike”.

Alternatively, the employer could deduct 10 percent of the employee’s wages.

Either option would need to be communicated to striking workers ahead of the deduction being made, but they would not be required to communicate the amount.

One of the example situations:

train drivers in Wellington working to rule in September.

Isn’t working to rule meaning that they are doing their whole job and nothing that they aren’t paid to do? And if this happens in future their employer can deduct 10% of their wages?

Have I misunderstood something here?

They are smashing the one about reducing the number of families in emergency housing (by changing the rules so people don’t qualify anymore). Don’t know why they don’t fix the one about 80% of year 8 kids being at or above the expected level by changing the expected level.

You are sure that no one has heard of Homestar Runner on a website of technology savvy early adopters whose age averages in the 30s and 40s?