So I'm considering membership, but one of my key considerations around politics these days isn't so much of the laws that are passed, but the way they are passed. The recent method for passing the File Sharing Amendment is a shining example of what should not be able to happen. So my question/suggestion to the Pirate Party:

Would the Pirate Party support and pursue a change in the way government passes laws? specifically to a system were elected representatives would no longer be responsible for voting and passing an act/law, and leave the voting to the populous. To simplify, I would like to see members of parliament to assume the title of 'Law Makers and Implementers', not law approvers, et al.

I feel it is completely unreasonable in this day and age for the populous to require 'elected representatives' to vote on their behalf when the vast majority of us are perfectly enabled (via technology) to make informed votes on proposed bills without a proxy. I would feel substantially better about the past laws enacted and the NZ government as a whole, had the actual 'majority' of NZ made the decision opposed to a group of high income-out of touch-old-white men. I'm going to avoid the details and the practicalities since I don't want to write a book on the matter, nor do I want to be the author. I just want to know if this is an initiative that the Pirate Party NZ would support and lead.

I realise a move to such an idea is not an easy ask and I'm not expecting the current regime to change in my lifetime. However, I do hope to see the next generation of political parties supporting a shift in voting power as well as further developing the idea to make it practical and achievable.

Is this something that the Pirate Party can do for me?

This is one of the ideas I've been pushing since fairly early on.. there are some core issues that define the pirate party, but for everything else (including management of the party itself to a large extent) I think we should lean towards a policy that we'll poll the membership and vote according to their wishes as far as practical.

Overturning the current electoral system would be just about impossible, but if we have this policy and can get some of the other minor parties to adopt a similar policy we might be able to slip a direct participative democracy in through the back door.

I don't think it would be a good idea to have all decisions entirely made by the populous as a whole. I wouldn't want decisions about guilt/innocence in trials to be made by the populous as a whole, because the populous as a whole is not fully informed about the details of every trial. What we'd be doing is aggregating ignorance. I am quite happy for decisions to be made by a jury of normal people who listen to the evidence. I think ideally a parliament should function something like a jury. As you say, stonacek, parliament does seem to have a preponderance of "high income-out of touch-old-white men", and I think this is something worth addressing (better representation). Also, I think it would be worth looking in to better ways of aggregating ideas. Decisions that I do think it would be appropriate for the populous as a whole to make are those regarding how much freedom people are willing to sacrifice for the greater good (e.g. what copyright laws people are willing to endure in order to promote innovation).

Hello,

I've created a space on the wiki for people to propose draft supporting policies. The URL is http://pirateparty.org.nz/wiki/Draft_policy_statements.

If you're keen, feel free to post a draft policy statement up there and we can continue to discuss in the forums.

regards,
Michael.

The trouble with referendum-orientated democracy (as opposed to representative) is that you're basically handing the car-keys to whoever owns the media. It represents a shifting of the power-balance which is possibly not a good thing.

That anti-violence-against-children referendum we had here a while back was absolutely disgraceful... the phrasing of the question was so massively biased it was ridiculous - whoever was responsible should have been dragged out of parliament and pelted with pig-shit... but our media just meekly went along with it.

Which is not to say that "nothing needs to be done"... the display of dishonesty and incompetence we saw over s92a simply is not good enough... but I don't think shifting away from representative democracy is necessarily it. I think we need representatives that are actually... representing us, and not just kowtowing to corporate interests.

So maybe...

Here's a thing I wrote recently... has a whole load of laws from 1800s America regarding corporate law

http://www.genomicon.com/2011/04/a-few- ... revisited/

they include:

- Corporations were prohibited from making any political contributions, direct or indirect
- Corporations were prohibited from making charitable or civic donations outside of their specific purposes

and

- The act of incorporation did not relieve corporate management or stockholders/owners of responsibility or liability for corporate acts
- As a matter of course, corporation officers, directors, or agents couldn’t break the law and avoid punishment by claiming they were “just doing their job” when committing crimes but instead could be held criminally liable for violating the law


Which I'd boil down to:

Any CEO responsible for attempting to subvert democracy by bribing political parties, goes to prison.

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There's some quite good ideas in that list though - worth a look