Lowering the voting age to 16 was one of the significant changes proposed to strengthen the local government system and improve New Zealand’s dismal voter turnout.
The bullshit list of nothings to increase local Government participation has been released by the wobbles and it’s all just garbage.
Lower voting age to 16 – sure, but it’s not enough.
STV voting? Fuck off!
More Tic Toc? Are you drunk?
The naked truth that no one wants to hear is that local elections are a scam because they are run by a private company who doesn’t give a flying fuck about the participation rates!
In the end, in Auckland, we had only 8 polling booths for a city of 1.2million voters!
Tic Toc, STV and bloody lowering the voting age to 16 won’t solve 8 voting booths for a city of 1.2 million will it you clowns!
The problem is that we are such cheap pricks in this country that we subcontracted our democratic obligations out to a private company!
The solution is that we take this contract back, have the Electoral Commission run elections, JUST LIKE THEY DO FOR NATIONAL ELECTIONS and have the same dispersion of voting booths (with the same ability to enrol and vote) over two weeks before a main Election Day.
THAT. IS. THE. SOLUTION.
Everything else, Tic Toc, STV and lowering the voting age is window dressing to avoid having to pay the cost of breaking the contract to the private company and running it ourselves.
Our venal cheapness to short change democracy is the issue here, not more bloody Tic Toc accounts.
BTW – you all understand that Tic Toc is a Chinese mass surveillance platform right? Why would allowing China more control over our local elections via that platform make elections better or safer in NZ?
This country’s stupidity is beneath the challenge of our times.
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Democracy needs compulsory voting.
The greatest ‘democratic deficit’ New Zealand suffers is the high proportion of people who do not vote. To make democracy democratic, New Zealand ought to follow the century-long law in Australia, and make voting mandatory for everyone who is eligible to vote, and present in the country on election day.
The failure of great numbers of eligible people to vote is a stain on New Zealand democracy. Voting needs to become compulsory, as it is in Australia; it needs to be made clear that participating in elections, both national and local, is a duty of citizenship. Compare the voter turnout in Australia for the House of Representatives (91.01% in 2016, 91.89% in 2019, 89.62% in 2022) with voter turnout in New Zealand: in 2014 76.77%, in 2017 79.8%, in 2020 81.54% of registered voters. But break those 2020 numbers down: 89% of people aged 65 to 69 voted, only 74% of those aged between 25 and 34, and even fewer, 65%, of eligible Maori in their late 20s. The young, especially the Maori young, surrender their futures to the old.
And the proportion of eligible voters who do vote in local-body elections is only half the low voter turnout for general elections.
In 2017, RNZ interviewed politicians on whether voting should become mandatory Former Labour prime minister Sir Geoffrey Palmer said it should be against the law to stay home from the voting booth. “If you are going to live in a democracy, which is supposed to be conducted by the people, for the people, then the people should have some duties. They should participate and they should vote.”
In Australia, voting is compulsory in federal elections (since 1924) and in all state elections. In all states except South Australia and Western Australia voting for local council elections isalso mandatory.
Tasmania made voting mandatory for council elections only in 2022. “We want to lift the community’s engagement with the local government sector, and I am confident the passing of this legislation will do that,” Tasmania’s Local Government Minister Nic Street said when he announced the change in June. “By making voting compulsory, we will lift community’s perception of local government and its importance by bringing local council elections into line with state and federal elections.”
In an essay ‘Australia’s experience of compulsory voting’ (abc.net.au 10feb2022) Matteo Bonotti and Paul Strangio write that: ‘Compulsory voting has a century-long history in this nation. Not only is it a durable feature of Australian democracy, but it is universally applied. Whenever an election is called, whether it be at the national, state or territory level, voters are obliged to turn out….’
Bonotti and Strangio say compulsory voting has had a century of unambiguous success in achieving high voter turnout. ‘Perhaps most remarkable is how broadly supportive of the practice has been the public. This has been demonstrated by any number of public opinion polls and decades of Australian Election Study survey data….’‘Compulsory voting,’ they argue, ‘can help to realise political legitimacy better than voluntary-voting systems, thanks to its easy use and accessibility, its ability to produce high and socially even turnout, and its propensity to often … encourage greater levels of information, attention, and critical engagement among the public. Furthermore, compulsory voting can also contribute to political legitimacy understood in a slightly different way — namely, as the idea that laws and policies are politically legitimate only if they are justified by appealing to reasons that all citizens can accept at some level of idealisation. More specifically, in a parliamentary democracy … compulsory voting can contribute to public reasoning and political legitimacy by compelling public officials to pay great attention to a broad range of worldviews, interests, and demands, and, based on that information, provide reasons for laws and policies that appeal to the common good rather than to any specific sectarian interests.’
Another way to boost voting in local-body elections would be to make them the same day as general elections. Whether compulsory or not, there would be One Big Voting Day for everything, every three years.
I guess compulsory voting is why Australia has the most politicians per head of population in the western world. The more votes to harvest the more politicians needed to do the harvesting. Still, it increase the overall value of the voters to the politicians so maybe that’s why on the one hand Australian political class is more corrupt than here and on the other hand Australian voters are more wealthy than here? Or they are all just lucky to be sitting around the edge of an open pit mine.
Your guess Joseph is as good as mine. And mine is that Australia’s number of politicians is probably affected by the extra problem they have of states which are fairly autonomous plus federal matters all having to work in together.
The best way is to encourage more voting, is to have more candidates who are less self interested in their political careers and more interested in making their cities better. Remove dirty politics that scare normal people off and have proper debates and more information about the candidates. NZ lacks ethical people with talent who wants to enter the arena of self interested scum bags that seem to surround NZ politics and those on the side lines seem paid to force out more ethical players.
I agree with Martin about taking back the contract, but this is important.
I tried, I read those papers and I had no choice to say ‘no confidence’.
I could find a single candidate I wanted to support. I read the papers several times. This is no small thing.
The set-up meant I had to support a minimum of five candidates. I couldn’t even find one. I felt like I was given a choice of supporting five candidates I had no faith in, or not voting at all.
Which is the same old shit of giving support to the least awful. Yet this is exactly what is perpetuating a status quo that I loathe.
We have a post -democracy visage and I know the idealistic tropes about organising and standing our own, and its not about money, contacts, and the acceptable status quo tribes – yada yada yada
I agree, I vote Elfeso, only because of the free transport, but I had big reservations about voting for him due some of his woke and impractical ideas gleaned from the Labour Party without having a clue they are just made up ideology that isn’t working as much as they push money into it. If it is a dog, it’s a dog.
People vote around party lines in the national elections…because it is easy! All you have to argue is which party is kinder, nicer, talks better, looks after poor vs rich, last time ..etc etc. People come and go , but party’s high level perception remains same.
Let’s look at local election. Every election, there is a list of unknowns, who knows what they stand for and how competent they are other than the sound bites sent with election papers. People simply vote for a name they recognize, not in a bad way, or It all goes into too hard basket and who cares!
Participation in democracy is citizen’s “right and duty”. If people can not be bothered to excercise it, there are reasons why…voter apathy is cancer of democracy. Ozone hole is not cause of it.
Majority of humanity can only dream about being able to vote freely. Many of them die trying to achive that. How naive of them.
Do it on the same date as the general election. Makes it more fun with downticket races at the same time.
1. Enough voting booths so when you are driving around you see the orange signs locating the booths.
2. A day off work so you have time to be driving around and see the booths.
3. Local income taxes, poll taxes, cycle taxes, toll gates on roads and parks, council houses and local income redistribution – some material reasons for non-ratepayers to vote. 🙂
Good idea Martin, bugger the cost let’s make polling stations available to all and for an extended period. Also, let’s make Councils more attractive to a greater diversity of the public. Councils are dominated by older businesspeople, take the WestCoast Regional Council, a mix of miners, dairy farmers and their acolytes, dominated by a MAGA hat-wearing bully.
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