Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

A NZ political quiz

Pundit have published a nice online NZ political quiz that tells you which party shares most of your beliefs earlier today. It's quite short so should not take you long to do it, I just tried itself, and the result is quite similar to what I expected:

1. The Green Party - 73%
2. The Progressive Party - 73%
3. The Labour Party - 72%
4. The United Future Party - 70%
5. New Zealand First Party - 62%
6. The National Party - 55%
7. The Act Party - 35%

Except Rodney Hide's far right Act Party, I was quite amazed that the difference between National and Labour is just about 20% - I guess that's the down side of a short quiz - there's not enough questions to fully separate the beliefs held by each party.

But despite of that, the quiz also got an amazing level of details. It is capable to tell you the similarity between you and each political party for each issue, like this:

It's a nice quiz, recommended to everyone.

A note to myself

Note - I didn't win that 30 millions jackpot so I still need to go to work tomorrow.

Nah that's just joking, the real note is ...

While most of the contents in this blog are about politics, I actually prefer to remain as apolitical as possible in my real life. That's one of the reasons why I did not promote my blogs to my friends.

The reason's quite simple. I've always found very difficult to have any real discussion or debate on political issues with some people, especially my fellow countrymen. If you oppose their views, the trend is, they will try to win the debate by putting all sorts of labels on you. In that way they would feel like they are on the moral high ground, or what we Chinese call Ah Q - well in fact, I feel quite sorry for them.

But the even sadder thing is, some searches have found that personal ideology to overrules facts is more like a fact of life, and we may just have to live with them.

So I'll still remain as apolitical as possible in my life.

Just one quick point

Environment is an important issue to me. After seeing the debate tonight, I just got one question: "if we don't have an environment that is able to sustain our life, will we still be there to enjoy the economic development?"

New Zealanders are always proud of their progressive, sometimes radical social values. They are part of our nation's identity. We cannot compete in economy with countries like USA, but we can lead the world in social issues.

We did not seek a balance between rugby matches and our value, we also shouldn't do like what Mr Key said, "a balance between environment and economic development". Mr Key also should not be hesitate to answer the question on the 1981 Springboks tour, I agree the past has no value in order to help us solve our current issues, but Mr Key's personal values are  important though, for me, to assess whether he's the right man. His hesitation to answer that question, shows me that he got no social value at all - that was the defining moment of our country and yet you have no opinion on that?

For that reason, National is definitely off my list for now - if we lose our identity, New Zealand will no longer be New Zealand.

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In terms of the debate itself, both did fine. But clearly John Key is more energic and won the debate. After 9 years of Helen Clark, you can even tell what she's going to say before she actually says it.

And it's quite weird that John Key didn't mention the phrase "national party" a lot in the debate ...probably only once or twice.

A smart move

Auntie Helen has announced this afternoon that if reelected, her government will eventually make the student allowance universal by abolishing the parental income test in 2012. Before that, the threshold for receiving an allowance will rise each year to make more students eligible for student allowance.

Well sure this policy is not targeting at current university student like me, so I won't benefit much from it. The real target of this is the middle-class family: 40ish couple, with a bit of money but not too much, got a kid or two that is about to enter the university but don't want kids to ruin their life.

Middle class people do not form the stable vote base of neither major party, and they are the real king/queen makers of the election. People will eventually have children at a point of their life (well most of them), so a few bucks of tax cut sure is no match to Auntie Helen's big cash out bribes.

Just need to see how would the voters respond to this policy...

Although I will not benefit from it, it does, however make me swinging more toward Labour. I like left-wing more than right wing Nats - lefties usually tell public what they really think, wheres Nats tend to tell you what you like to hear - I cannot understand why National's cash dishing policy (tax cut) can be branded as "smart" "helpful to economy", but Labour's same type of policy is branded as "big election bribe". So why high income earner's spending can stimulate economy, but give more money for students' to spend is a bribe?

Some people are really  too greedy, 2% more of taxation in exchange for the cheaper labour and social stability, that's the best deal in the world. Most importantly, that 2% reduces the gap between the rich and poor,  prevent proletariat to become lumpenproletariat class (gosh, such a long word).

Just a thought

Labour want you to save money, so it set up the KiwiSaver and people praised for that;

Nats need money to fund their tax cut,  so they slashed the government contribution and reduced employer contribution into the fund; some people praised for that as well.

But wait a minute  -  for us, especially ones who joined the KiwiSaver, isn't this just politicians play your money around? give you a $1,000 tax cut, and take out $1,000 government contribution from your KiwiSaver?

Em....

back in time

As part of Google’s celebration of its 10^th birthday, Google has made its earliest search engine index from January 2001 available to the public. With the help of the Internet Archive, people can revisit those pages even if they are not there anymore.

Sure I believe most of my visitors like you know the Internet Archive bit already – it has archive pages right back to 1996. But I still enjoyed this 2001 search. You need to know the exact URL of the page you wanted before you can access it in Internet Archive, but this Google search does not, just type in the key words you wanted.

This enables you  to do a lot of stuffs ... like check what kind of promises auntie Helen has made back then, or things happening in Afghanistan before the 911. Quite interesting to see how the world was like - blog was pretty much a new concept, SNS has yet been created, and people's hope was still high on Duke Nukem Forever.

Apart from those, it's just fun to revive your good memories.