Wednesday, 21 September 2005
@ 11.15 am
Snow, and other random events
It's not often I wake up in the morning and weigh up whether I should bother getting out of bed and going to work or not due to the rapidly forming snowdrifts outside my bedroom window. It's especially not often that this is the case in September in Christchurch (a little birdie told me that this was the fourth time in the last hundred years that I would have had to weigh these particular options up in fact). In the end I decided that going to work was the winner on the day, as I figure I'm slack enough as it is and I shouldn't let a little snow slow me down, which turned out to be the wrong decision. Within three hours of reaching work they'd closed the University (and the bus service, and the Regional Council, and the Museum, and probably a lot of other things and places that I don't know about) and sent everyone home. Not really for any point as it turned out, but the threat of another front coming through was enough. So, a day off, which would have rocked except for the damn WoW servers being down... er, but I digress, in a geeky kind of way.
The moral behind this particular story is that I need to buy a digital camera so that I can take pictures of things like this to show all those who have moved to far away lands to prove it actually happened.
Other exciting things, not just snow, have happened in New Zealand recently as well. Like elections. Of course, these were only fun because it looks (pending special vote counting and the obligatory political horse trading) like Labour and the centre-left parties have managed to hold on to the government by their fingernails. It would not have been fun if The Don and his National party cohorts had managed to win, so I guess it's all a matter of perspective.
I guess I have some initial observations about the election results that may or may not be of interest to anyone else, but it's my blog, so suffer.
Firstly, at first glance it would seem that a divide between urban and rural voters is emerging in New Zealand, similar to the oft referred to Red State/Blue State divide in the US (though the colours are reversed here, as we're in the southern hemisphere). I'm not too sure if this is the case, listening to some of the post-election commentary, as it would seem that Labour didn't actually campaign terribly hard in rural seats, preferring to pour their resources into the populous urban centres to try and win the party vote. It's a strategy that worked of course, but perhaps this is an interesting kind of negative that we're seeing in an MMP system - because the party vote is the most important, why bother with the sparsely populated rural electorates at all?
To counter this is a comment that Prebble made on the radio this morning that suggested that while you can technically win an election based on party vote, in many ways the moral victory in an election in New Zealand still comes from winning electorate seats. This rings true to me, as I would suggest that electorate MPs are still considered to be more "proper" than list MPs, as if being voted in to parliament for personal reasons carries more weight than being voted in because you happen to be placed in x position on a list that nobody voted for.
Amusingly, Prebble also claimed that the centre-right parties were robbed, as they actually won more of the party vote overall than the centre-left parties. I haven't verified this claim, but if this is the case, then perhaps there might be a way of using an election result like this to encourage the uptake of STV? Though no doubt people will start to clamour for a return to FPP, like that was any better (like in 1993, where National won the election with a massive 35.05% of the popular vote!).
An especially exciting* aspect of this election for me personally was the chance to work in a polling booth as an Issuing Officer Ordinaries. The booth was in Ilam at Ilam School Hall, so I saw many, many students come through and vote during the day and it was exceptionally busy until about 3.30 in the afternoon. We opened at 9 in the morning, closed at 7 at night, and finished counting just before 9 (something close to 2100 ordinary votes came through our booth alone). It was a long day, but I'd do it again as it does feel good to be part of the process in some small, non-partisan way.
Oh, and in other, totally unrelated news, I've been investigating PhD options, and the nice people at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona seem keen to have me. Which could be fun, but would be at least another twelve months away. So we'll see.
*This is a lie. Interesting, yes, exciting, no.
