It is extremely useful in providing links to all (or almost all) significant media and some blog articles arranged under topic headings.
NZPD does not make the news. It records what's in the media. The media makes the news.
Let's see what sort of topic balance there was today (23 Nov.) with headings and the number of media articles:
But. Air NZ was a profitable and well-run company when he took over as CEO and "then rode one of the greatest travel booms in history... He arrived at the very start of a boom and left right before it came crashing down."
Most weaknesses with our polling systems lie with their reporting by the media and not with the polls themselves (See pn812). In three areas, however, I think the polls themselves could be more informative.
First, we have a Mixed Member Proportional voting system that means we have two votes, one, for the party of our choice, the other for wannabees in our electorate. There are 120 seats in Parliament, 72 electorate seats and 48 party seats which are scaled up or down to make the overall results proportional.
The polls only ask about our party or List vote, and yet many people, myself included, vote for one party with our party vote and a different party with our electorate vote. It is true that the party vote largely decides seats in parliament but if both the electorate and party votes were counted separately we would have a better idea of the actual support for individual parties.
Secondly, the polls often ask what we think of the direction the government and the economy are heading but these very general "summary" questions do not tell us what people think about policies and actions on individual issues such as health, education, child poverty, social inequality, wage levels, taxation, the environment and so on which in various ways combine to produce our answers to the"summary" questions.
Further, I would like to see answers cross-tabulated by parties so that we can know how people who voted for each party answered on each policy issue. Their answers could be shown on a 1-10 scale from very bad to very good..
Thirdly, we are asked for our preferred PM even though we never vote for the PM. With National votes shared among several possible contenders, it might be better to also ask which person voters would like to see leading their preferred party.
Knowing how all voters think may be helpful but lumping all voters together may be misleading. What Labour voters thought about Judith Collins as leader of the National Party, for instance, is not important. It's the opinions of National Party voters that count.
What do you think?
-- ACW
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| David Seymour as Prince Charming |
All four main polls showed similar results: Labour is down a little or unchanged, National and Greens up or down a little but no real change, and ACT, the real winner, is steady or with significantly increased support.
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Why Victoria's protests should concern us all
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| Graham Davis |
"Pieced together, it is an amazing tale of how the Attorney General, Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum, used the Prime Minister and the weight of his office to try to strongarm [Solicitor General] Sharvada Sharma into resigning for his alleged “misbehaviour” in presiding over the failure of the state case to remove the SODELPA MP, Niko Nawaikula, from the Parliament. According to multiple sources, Sharma was summoned to the office of the Prime Minister, where he was told by Frank Bainimarama that he had lost the trust of the AG and he wanted his resignation. When Sharma refused, it set in train a series of events
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| Khaiyum and Bainimarama |
"Make no mistake. Rather than strengthening our institutions to make them more resilient and allow for smooth transfers of power when the people decide a political party has run its course, Fiji under Frank Bainimarama and Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum is more dictatorship than democracy – a parliament that is manipulated by the ruling party, opposition figures detained and released at will, institutions stacked with FijiFirst supporters and now blatant defiance of the Constitution, the supreme law. It is the Zimbabwe road - a journey into darkness and regression as a nation - and Bainimarama and Khaiyum are leading us all down that path."
My emphasis -- ACW
Read the whole article by clicking here.
"No comment" below this article means "0", no one has yet commented. Be the first and turn it into "1 comment." Then others may join you😎
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| Dr Rawiri Taonui |
Māori are the highest daily cases for 42 consecutive days. There was a new record of 121 Māori cases today. Māori cases are rising both in number as a percentage of all cases.
The three highest number of daily Māori cases have come in the last three days. Friday - 108 Māori cases or 53.7% of 201 new cases; Saturday - 103 or 58.9% of 175 new cases; and Sunday - 121 or 58.5% of 207 new cases.
This is the first-time new Māori cases have been over 50% of all new cases for three days in a row.
At the current 7-day rate of 91.9 new Māori cases per day, there will be 6,000 Māori cases by Christmas.
In Kawerau one thing impedes the effort to vaccinate Māori: New Zealand’s history
Low Covid vaccination rates among Māori reflect practical barriers – but they also have good reason to distrust the government
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/20/in-kawerau-one-thing-impedes-the-effort-to-vaccinate-maori-new-zealands-history
"When they voted for Labour, they voted for a safe Covid response and a Government that understood and was going to keep out the Greens and they were going to look after the economy. What they've found instead is a Government that is (sic!) absolutely and utterly failed."
Those who voted Labour probably wanted it to do more on poverty, welfare issues and the environment but on most matters, they have got what they voted for.
The government has kept the country safer from Covid than almost all other countries. Labour never made any statement on keeping the Greens out. Indeed, most people would have assumed it would rule alone or with the Greens as a coalition partner.** The economy, with low unemployment, economic growth and manageable public debt, is doing far better than one might have expected in the circumstances.
She did not say what the government is supposed to have "understood" but I see no evidence of absolute or utter failure.
Judith, you are one who is selling strawmen holding pups. You protest too much.
-- ACW
* "The lady doth protest too much, methinks" is a line from the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare. It is spoken by Queen Gertrude in response to the insincere overacting of a character in the play within a play created by Prince Hamlet to prove his uncle's guilt in the murder of his father, the King of Denmark.-- Wikipedia.
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| Colmar Brunton |
"Between 6-10th November 2021 1001 eligible voters were polled by mobile phone (501) and online (500). The maximum sampling error is approximately ±3.1%-points at the 95% confidence level. The data has been weighted to align with Stats NZ population counts for age, gender, region and ethnic identification. The sample for mobile phones is selected by random dialling using probability sampling, and the online sample is collected using an online panel."
I'm confident the results are reasonably accurate, at least for the four larger parties, but I have three small reservations:
1) Those polled by mobile phone were randomly selected, but the online results were chosen from a previously selected panel. More information is needed on how the panel was selected;
2) "Percentages do not add to 100 due to rounding." They certainly don't. Party Support totalled 108, possibly close to 10% of those polled.
This is a most deserved appointment for a most remarkable man.
Born in Auckland, the son of an immigrant Samoan labourer and a Northland nurse, Damon has a BA and Master's degree with 1st class honours from Auckland University.
He was the first Pacific Islander to win a Rhodes' Scholarship and has a D.Litt. from Oxford. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of NZ.
He is currently Pro-Vice-Chancellor Pacific at the University of Auckland and was the founding director of the NZ Institute for Pacific Research and the Director of Pacific Strategy and Engagement as well as Head of Pacific Studies. Prior to his Auckland appointment, he worked at the University of Michigan for 10 years.
He is married, with two teenage daughters, to Labour Minister the Hon. Jenny Salesa, née Latu, who was born in Tonga.
Damon is a prizewinning scholar who specializes in the study of colonialism, empire, government, race, and inter-marriages. With a particular interest in the Pacific Islands, he also works on education, economics and development in the Pacific region, as well as in New Zealand and Australia.
Congratulations, Damon.
--ACW
Curia and Talbot Mills both released poll results last week. Most of the results were not statistically significant but there has been a very definite trend downwards for Labour and Jacinda Ardern over the past three months.
Curia is the right-wing poll run by National party activist David Farrar who also publishes Kiwiblog. The poll was for the Taxpayers' Union, another right-wing group. Its results were a little less flattering to Labour than the less politically-bound Talbot Mills poll but both polls showed the similar trends:
While Labour and Jacinda are still by far the most preferred, both were down on previous polls; National and Judith were up a little; ACT and David Seymour were indeterminate; the Greens were up a litle.
The Kiribati Government has decided to open up one of the world’s largest marine reserves to commercial fishing and de-register it as a World Heritage site.
Think: The golden rule is – or should be – that we are free to make personal choices, so long as the exercise of that choice does not do harm to other people.
Think:. Strangely enough, the anti–vaxx champions of freedom appear more than willing to impose their beliefs (and the related risks) onto everyone else. To be consistent, they should be living as hermits and should never use the public health system ever again. Yet that’s not how they tend to roll.
To read this informative and thoughtful article, click here.
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| And I know a lot about boats. |
He said this as Europe's "normal" witnessed an increase in Covid-19 cases. Yesterday, Victoria recorded 1,923 cases and 25 people died, the highest daily death toll from the current outbreak. Yesterday, the UK had 263 and the USA 1,783 deaths.
As fighting flares between Indonesian and independence armed forces, West Papuans flee across the border in their thousands into Sepik, PNG.
China News Service (ECNS) - 22 Oct 21
To read what the media had to say about their plan, click on the links below:
National Party Covid-19 strategy, reopening plan
Marc Daalder (Newsroom): National’s reopening date isn’t rooted in science
