Voters should choose all 45 deputies, says report
Friday 14th January 2011, 2:30PM GMT.
ISLAND-WIDE voting could finally get the go-ahead next month.
In what has been heralded as a new dawn for democracy, next year people across the island could vote for all 45 deputies rather than the six or seven within their own electoral district.
The recommendation has been put forward by the States Assembly and Constitution Committee, which looks set to face strong opposition in the States, not least from its own chairman, Ivan Rihoy, who has put forward a minority report.
The long-time island-wide voting campaigner said he’d had to search his soul before submitting it.
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Are you sure it is 2011 AD
Not 1300 as it has been all these years.
My word what a to do this will be-
Liberation all over again Yippee!!!
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Why did the need a report to tell them to do this? Yet more incompetence from our States, I really hope we get some fresh blood next election. With island wide voting I will be able to vote for somebody who maybe has some more common sense than our current lot.
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Voting for 45 deputies Island wide at one election is a ridiculous suggestion and shows the members of SACC to be lacking in any sort of commonsense on this issue. Mary Lowe says that the majority of responses to consultation supports SACCs proposal but the consultation was flawed in that it gave people 4 or 5 specific options none of which were particularly sensible or well-thought through. In fact the poor options given probably prevented a lot of people taking part in the consultation and in reality only a tiny percentage of the population supported the option now being proposed.
It is a shame that SACC appear not to have listened to the many comments made after the results of the consultation were made public. Lets hope their proposal is thrown out by a large majority, if it succeeds I for one will never vote again as the election would be a farce.
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Island wide voting is nonsense. How exactly are you meant to compare the relative merits of up to 100 candidates for 45 jobs?
It would be totally impractical and would lead to an even lower turnout than usual which would make it all the more likely that some of the nut jobs that write into the paper every week or crawl out of the woodwork at election time would actually get in with 20 votes!
Nothing wrong with the way it’s done at the moment. At least this way you can actually talk to, or listen to at the hustings, everyone you can vote for.
Do you want 100 randoms turning up on your doorstep?
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What the report seems to be missing is any analysis of how to evaluate the trade between having the most representative system (island-wide voting) against the disadvantage that selecting and voting for 45 candidates from 100 candidates will be stupendously laborious.
Island-wide voting may set the bar for effective participation so high that only the most politically interested individuals will be able to.
It’s interesting that the Committee dismisses Single Transferrable Vote on the grounds of the voter education that would be required, but thinks nothing of dumping an 87-page book with the manifestos of 100 candidates on every doorstep in the island which people would have to read entirely in order to make any kind of informed voting choice.
By the way, which candidate appears on page 1? :-)
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I generally agree with you The Truth.
IWV is good in principle but this idea is a logistical nightmare.
If this goes through I propose the election campaign begins immediately, as unless we’re retired or unemployed we will need months to study every manifesto in detail, meet all the candidates and then make an informed choice.
Hustings meetings with over 100 candidates? You’re having a laugh – and don’t say you could have smaller scale ones as you’d have to attend each one with no guarantee of getting your question across.
If this goes through I’ll try my best to vote but I fear if this goes through then russm won’t be the only one who will give up on voting.
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I passionately believe it could work but we would need to change the way we do things at the moment. For example, currently there is a media black out for candidates in the run up to the election at the very time when the public crave to know who is standing and what they stand for. This at a time when the media should be engaging with those who want to stand and helping those candidates get their electoral message across. I also believe that all new candidates should be given more media help and Air time (TV, Radio, etc) than returning candidates, as we have had four years to get our message across to the voting public and I would suspect most voters would know where we stand on lots of issues.
The act of putting a cross on a piece of paper goes back to medieval times. We simply have to bring our electoral system into the modern age. I believe we would need a 3 or 4 page pull out from the Guernsey Press with all the candidates manifestoes clearly laid out in those pages new candidates should be allowed 3-4 hundred more words than existing candidates as they are starting from scratch. The public would need to have this publication a full month before polling day, in order that they can study closely the candidates, this publication would be sent at States expense to every household on the electoral roll.
Secondly we would as candidates set up our stall in the sports hall of Beau Sejour or some other large venue for a week and the public could come to us and tackle us one to one on any subject or policy they choose after all they turn out to the hustings just to hear the same question being answered in a dozen different versions of the same answer, which I suggest doesn’t really give you much idea of what you are likely to get when you vote. Also if you strip out friends and relatives of the candidates from the audience together with deputies who have come to watch, that would make a big hole in the genuine voters at the hustings.
This going to see the candidates would not be unusual for our people, we ran this system in the Vale very successfully alongside a parish husting meeting at the last election and a fair number of people turned up at these sessions and were grateful for the one to one interviews, sometimes people want to look into your eyes when they ask you something or see your body language when you are put on the spot. Or if they prefer they could ring the candidate and ask specific questions on the issues that concerned them. I think people are more interested in who governs them than they have ever been and will take the trouble to go over the candidates manifestoes thoroughly and ask the questions they want the answers too.
With a four page pullout from the press issued a month before the election, people would have time to go through it and pick the candidates they want to represent them and as I have said before it is an insult to the electorate to believe that IWV is to complicated for them.
I ask all those who think the present system is working, whether you think the present crop of States members are the ones the island would have chosen in an island wide vote, I am not sure we are. I am making no judgement on the present States of course but it is a fair question and one I am asked frequently when the subject of IWV crops up.
Modern elections throughout the world are carried out using electronic voting, postal votes, and touch screen computers why not voting by text?
Any modern democracy, even one as small as ours, can have whatever type of election we desire. There are highly respected organisations across the western world that could provide all the necessary equipment and hardware to run a ‘modern’ election in this island, all we have to do is have the political will to do it. Touch screen TV’s at the polling booths one for each district with the voter choosing who they want to represent them by going down the line the other advantage is that these votes would be counted electronically so you would not be waiting until two in the morning to get the results. Look, there may be some hiccups when we first try it but I believe in time islanders will wonder why we didn’t do it years ago, deputies who get elected, will for the first time in their lives have to worry about what ALL islanders think of their policies, not just a small number in their electoral district who are the only ones under the present system who can remove them from office, that reason alone is enough for me to support IWV.
It depends on how serious you are about having a fully democratically elected parliament, as to whether you want to spend time electing the people you want to serve you. I think a lot of people have given up on voting simply because they can’t vote for who they want outside their own electoral district. If they had that chance I think they would re-engage with the political process and take the time to put forward the people they want to serve in their government.
It is your parliament not ours we hand back the power you have given us after four years for you to empower a new government to serve the next four years, it is the peoples government, not the state. Most people I know find the time in the course of a day to read a newspaper or other materiel and this would be no different, people have to make the effort, or give up whining about those who represent them. What kind of government you have and who you choose to serve you is a big decision every four years. That decision can affect your whole family life, from your taxation to their schooling, your family’s health, their security through policing, their ability to find jobs and the quality of life on a very overcrowded island. In fact a whole raft of things that make peoples lives worth living.
Are we really saying that people can’t be bothered to sift through the candidates, who if elected will have a huge influence over all those things. This is not about self preservation although I suspect it might be a factor for some who vote against it. For me this is about having a whole government accountable to ALL its people and if in that process some serving deputies are not returned through an Island wide vote by the public, then that in itself will be the democratic wish of the people, surly that is worth fighting for?
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Do we REALLY need 45 deputies?
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Dave Jones,
You are expending a great deal of effort explaining how you think IWV could plausibly work, but not enough explaining why it’s necessary to try – i.e. why IWV is better than the status quo (and by how much).
I think the proportion of islanders who are so vexed about having the opportunity to vote (or not voting) for candidates in other districts that they may actually not vote at all because of it must be miniscule. In fact the vast majority of islanders barely know who the incumbent deputies are.
I’m also troubled by your implication that people who you feel are too lazy to spend hours and hours reading manifestos deserve to be disenfranchised. IWV is fine in theory – but in practice it risks handing power over to a cabal of political bores.
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Dave Jones
What a pleasure to read something from a Deputy with a CAN DO attitude
I very much doubt that every voter will use his 45 votes
The key for me is the satisfaction of being in a position to help vote OUT certain Deputies from outside of my Parish
OK I might not be successful but I will have had the satisfaction of being permitted to try
I am eagerly awaiting the debate on this subject so that I can add a few of our more negative ‘leaders’ to my vote OUT list
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Many ask why so many and why all at one go?
45 for a small Island is far too many, twenty (20) is really quite adequate.
The second point about why all at once;:
Well here I smell something, hope I’m wrong, but it seems to
me the present lot want to go down fighting(more that they have done the past years) and by so doing bamboozle the people into signing on the grounds that pøeople will say
“Well they weren’t all that bad)”
‘That folks is ¨how dubious they are.
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About time too! I never voted for any of the lot we have in now – none of them know how to keep an eye on the purse strings – they only voice their annoyance at others spending when they do the same themselves. We do not want hypocrites – just deputies with some common sense and a knowledge of budgeting that is important to the people and the island itself. Spending to be prestigious and keeping up with the ‘Jones’s’ is ridiculous and has cost the island’s people a fortune. If the deputies had to put their own money up front I doubt that the avalanche of spending would have happened at all. It is time the people of Guernsey are allowed to vote on important matters not the Deputies. Voting via the tv would be an efficient way of doing so without wasting more paper. Island news is repeated endlessly on the radio and tv so why do we have to have to vote at polling stations wasting more money employing people to be there to supervise the event and everybody’s time. It is time to move on.
I would be pleased to vote for my favourite Deputies and I will choose those who are sensible, have some idea as to how to budget and are willing to serve the people and the island selflessly (though I think the last requirement is a thing of the past).
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Mr Jones, are you seriously suggesting people would want to come to a big hall with 100 candidates in it and spend time going round asking questions of each one?
Lets do some simple maths shall we. On the presumption that you can get in and out of each one in 5 minutes, which would be a struggle given the example of your recent post, that would take 500 minutes, 6 hours, and thats if you don’t have to wait for someone else to finish before you get onto Maurice Le Clerc from La Chapelle.
It’s a nonsense and totally impractical. And how exactly do you suggest you’re going to fit 100 manifestos on 4 pages of the paper????
No, you’re right, I haven’t read all the detail of your post, it was far too long, just like any attempt to put this many candidates into one election process would be.
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This is how IWV might have played out last time. We polled 650 people and gave them twenty votes out of eighty eight candidates.
http://ifcfeed.com/articles/detail.aspx?articleid=1879
PDF download.
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An excellent idea in principal.
What a wonderful opportunity to reduce the number of States’ members.
The applicants should go through a comprehensive vetting procedure.
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Neil – most interesting. Especially since Dave Jones asked ‘I ask all those who think the present system is working, whether you think the present crop of States members are the ones the island would have chosen in an island wide vote, I am not sure we are.’
Dave Jones: looking at the outliers in Neil’s poll – we see that IWV might have returned Wendy Morgan, Vanessa Crispini-Adams, and Roy Bisson as deputies in 2008. Meanwhile Mike Hadley and Martin Storey would have been a long way from making the cut.
Also of interest is that Lyndon Trott comes fifth out of 45 in the IWV results, but only managed to scrape in as fifth out of six in his district in the real election.
Personally I do marginally prefer Neil’s IWV poll outcome to the actual outcome. But I suspect that’s because I’m the sort of person Neil’s polls tend to attract. Of course I am – I’m the sort of saddo who blows away what precious little time there is in this life to contribute to this forum and participate in polls like Neil’s!
But the fundamental question is whether, in practice, IWV would be any more democratic or representative than what we have at the moment? I think that would be a highly dubious claim to make. Most importantly, I don’t see any evidence from the report that SACC have even considered this question properly.
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Simply unworkable
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Why not use the current system to produce 45 candidates, and then hold an island-wide vote to elect 20 from those 45? We don’t need 45, several of whom are only making up the numbers as they add no value. 45 deputies for an island of 65,000 people and 21 square miles? Ridiculous.
The roughly £600k saved from paying the extra 25 deputies would enable the 20 elected deputies to be paid an average of £30k per annum extra each on top of what they currently get paid. A far more appropriate wage for the responsibility involved.
The 20 elected deputies would be far more accountable for their performance and would rightly be judged by the entire island at each selection.
Not sure of the best way to elect the Ministers. I don’t think automatically giving a ministerial post (which one?) to the top 10 highest-polling candidates is the most sensible option. Having elected the 20 on an island-wide basis, those 20 elected candidates should be trusted to elect the most appropriate ministers.
This system allows us to vote candidates in or out at the second stage, which would be a massive improvement on the current position. The second stage elections could be held within a month of the preliminary stage, giving ample time for the 45 candidates to market their manifestos.
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Dave Jones
I agree with your suggestion for electronic voting – not that I think it would help people make their choices though.
You suggest that many people don’t vote because we don’t have IWV. You have also used this lack of engagement as a plus point for IWF. Are you aware that there is at least one person here (russm) who has said they will stop voting if IWV is introduced in this fashion? Just a thought – if IWF is introduced in this way I wonder whether the amount of people who join in will exceed the amount that stop?
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David
I agree. I don’t see a problem with two stages of election. However, I think that the top voted should have an automatic place in an in house ministerial election. The representatives can also forward their candidates.
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Dave Jones on another campaign.
For such a small island to have to vote for 45 or more people is absurd, given the low number of parishes.
There should be 1 or 2 candidates per parish maximum, and that is it.
Further, there should be two votes allowed for each Guernsey person, one for the individual who they wish to see in power, and the other for the parish they see as the most adept at managing affairs, this means two votes that represent the best person, and the best region (the region would likely be one that has the best systems and processes in place to help its constituents, whereas the best person would be the one most liked).
As for a four page pull-out from the press, what a load of borlocks. Do people know, for example, what relationships those deputies, such as Mr Jones, have with the media?
It should be based on historical services to the community and door to door, or public promotion. How dare you – Dave Jones – with your vested relational and personal interest in this medium (papers and on-line) suggest such a forum.
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Darren
What the hell are you drinking?
Are you sure it’s legal?
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Ray I was wondering that myself.
Darren
I was putting forward my own opinion there will be others who hold a different view and yes I do dare.
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Darren – apart from the bit where you say that 45 deputies is too much, your phrase “what a load of borlocks” sums up your post nicely.
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Chris
I believe the electorate should have the opportunity to elect all their government and the opportunity to remove all with in it if they choose. Of course there will be people who are troubled by the concept of IWV but I believe the majority of islanders want it. Yes of course it will require the voter to spend longer on choosing who represents them in their government, it will take a little effort but in my view it is no bad thing. All we have at the moment is once the election is over people start complaining that there are a number of Deputies they didn’t want and after a few weeks it will once again be the worst states we ever had. Under the present system some will get elected on a few hundred votes while candidates who polled twice as many in another district will fail to gain a seat.
The Truth
The drop in centre’s could be scattered around the island and people could choose which ones they wanted to attend this would happen over a 7 day period and for those who don’t want to engage with the candidates then they will just vote as they do now on the strength of a manifesto. If you don’t want to participate in the process fine and you will continue to get just what you vote for in your district. If there is no one that you could support then you are left out of the voting process altogether.
David
If you reduce the number to 20 you will have basically cabinet government. With much more of the day to day decision making being done by civil servants. You say many add no value, you of course have no idea the contribution deputies make at committee level. Also who do you think would populate the various departments? Most deputies cannot cope with their workloads now, if you don’t believe me ask any of the new deputies elected at the last general election. Your point on the appointment of Ministers is the only appropriate one in my view.
bc
It is your job to evaluate the suitability of candidates for public office.
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Arnald
I’m not totally convinced by the automatic ministerial point. Just because somebody has the highest number of votes at the polls does not mean that they have the inter-personal skills, the diplomacy skills or the leadership skills to run a department, no matter how popular they are with the voters. John Gollop springs to mind. If ministerial roles are handed out to the most popular candidates, without due reference to their personal skills and attributes, its inevitable that Joe Bloggs will get the ministerial responsibility for a department because he’s the last one to be allocated one and there’s only one left for him to have, which may be totally inappropriate for that person. Is that in the interests of the population ?
I do think though that the elected deputies should nominate a shortlist or 2 or 3 (maximum) candidates for the key posts of Chief Minister, Deputy Chief Minister and Treasury Minister, and that those posts could be decided on an island wide vote basis.
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David
Indeed. However I think they should be allowed to stand for the post on the basis of the popular vote. After all, if they have polled well it ought to mean that the public think them suitable for something. If you are a politician then isn’t it expected that you are deemed to have some sort of political skill. If the electorate know that their vote will be potentially propelling a candidate into a short list for a top post then maybe they would do their homework better vefore voting? Which is, after all, the correct responsibility for the public.
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Dave Jones
Maybe it would and maybe it wouldnt result in cabinet government (although I’m not sure why reducing from 45 to 20 automatically becomes “cabinet government”, but it could only be an improvement on the current “unfit for purpose” structure and I’m a long way from being convinced that an island of this size needs anything like 45 elected deputies. Maybe the figure should be more like 30, still a reduction of one-third, but you get my drift.
The initial phase of district voting could produce a second tier of elected politicians (let’s call them “douzeniers”) who could be elected by the House or do-opted to fill positions on the various committees. (That also begs the question as to whether or not there might be too many committees, but I don’t have a view of that).
Arnald
I take your point. Maybe the top three candidates on the island wide vote should automatically become candidates for the top three posts. It doesn’t meet that they will automatically get those posts at all, but they’d get the opportunity to stand. It would up to the island-wide public to decide whether the “popular choices” would offer the island more in those three senior posts than the House’s own nominees, who will have been less successful at the public polls but may have a much stronger track record or credentials for those senior posts. Still a democratic island-wide decision though – a big improvement on the status quo.
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lets half the states members, why you need 45 i dont know and that would save money and i would get rid of all the deputies we have at present and get new with qualifications in different areas or at least a bit of common sense, there has got to be changes as this island already has been ruined by the states, population ect ect the list goes on.
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“and spend time going round asking questions of each one?”
The only time I ever felt sorry for Kevin Stewart was at the South Show in 1994 when he had 28 beauty pageant entrants and at least 20 of them responded to the ‘what do you do’ question as ‘I’m a Trust Officer’.
Whatever anyone’s view of IWV, non-parish based hustings will not work.
ChrisJ, the ‘saddos’ predicted Brian de Jersey’s ousting 4 weeks before he knew it was the end of his political career.
LT’s an interesting one. As the architect of zero/10 straight out of Fallagate and standing in a blue-collar parish, it was likely that he would have suffered. Had he stood island wide there is no doubt that he would have done well.
Had we had IWV 3 years ago I’m sure the make up of the candidates woud have chaged, certainly Mike Garret woud not have stood and I wonder about some of the less well known/younger would have either.
It’s also likely that the make up of the canditature would change and there would be far more retired dentists, doctors and lawyers and the like in the ranks.
There’s also the potential of the ‘Andy Priaulx’s mum’s dog’ candidate. Anyone with any media profile or association would also do very well.
I remember very well the night of the last election and the regular UK professor who commented through the night on the outcome and the resuts; him being very sniffy at our quasi-exit poll. We had wry smiles on our faces the next day when we discovered that in three of the wards, if you break out the parish candidates, our results were cock on.
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Can you imagine the forthcoming hustings with 45members needed island wide? Twice that number of hopeful candidates at a meeting answering questions. could it be more boring?
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Neil
I like your ‘Andy Priaulx’s mum’s dog’paragraph
One of the popular deputies on my vote out list has recognised the truth in this and as we approach the one year point before votes are required I fully expect that deputy to appear more and more regularly in the front row of every Press photo that his current States salary gives him the time and opportunity to attend
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Dave Jones
You seem to spend a lot of time on these forums during day job hours – masses of info most of us know/realise we know – how about doing what we are paying you for.
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Ray – it was English Breakfast Tea.
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I certainly will not entertain IWV if we have to read 100 or so manifestos and listen to a lot of empty promises at the hustings, I am far too busy for all that. It also seems to me that people think it is a chance to get out the deputies they dont want, than vote the ones in they do, and I am not sure that will work in theory. I hope that makes sense. We are a political parish to the Vale us, and I want to know who I am voting for in MY parish and let the rest of the parishes get on with it.
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Stiletto
Most of what is posted is information I have on file, certainly on Housing issues and things like Commercialisation and Island wide voting. It is therefore very easy to cut and paste that information and takes no time at all. The fact that you might know all the answers is commendable but many of those making comments do not and they either seek clarification or a point of view it is our job as deputies to provide that. I also do my job you will notice I posted an answer today on another tread at 7 am this morning I was in my office at 6 working on states business. At 10 today I am doing the phone in. yesterday I met two parishioners to discuss their problems and my day will start at 6 am again tomorrow and the day after that, and the day after that. I also work late into the evenings on occasions and attend functions and meetings in the evenings to do with states business so please don’t lecture me on what I should be doing with my time, I work hard for this community and I do my job well, as I think our success at housing over the years will clearly testify.
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Neil,
If the results of an IWV election would be virtually the same as the result of an election by district, then there’s no point in changing the system – there’s no point in making people chose 45 candidates from 87, when it’s just a much more roundabout way of getting the same result as under the system where they only have to chose 6 from 12.
My problem is not that I think your poll didn’t accurately predict the results of the last election, it’s that it doesn’t accurately reflect what the result would be of a real IWV election with the real electorate. For example IWV might return one or two of the more thoroughly dreadful candidates who may have a perfectly plausible manifesto, and have a bit of X-factor in their media profile (e.g. by being very young) but are weeded out under the current system when they unravel at the hustings. Your poll wouldn’t exhibit this problem because only the genuinely interested are going to participate, whereas in a real election, lots more of the people who vote know very little about any of candidates when the election process starts.
I acknowledge that IWV is a purer version of our current system. But I can confidently predict two things if it is adopted. Firstly, a lot of people (who do not participate in political debate at all except at election time) will be aghast at what they are being asked to do, and they won’t bother. Secondly, we will still have ‘the worst States ever’ in 2012-2016.
Dave Jones seems confident that the SACC majority proposal (let’s call it ‘pure IWV’) is what the majority of the island wants. I don’t believe we’ve really put that to the test. Dave Jones, how about you silence this criticism by putting pure IWV to a referendum?
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valeite
That’s like watching X-Factor and then at the end of the show being told that the Channel Islands and the South West regions can vote between contestants one to three, the Midlands can vote between contestants four to six and the North can cast their votes for contestants seven to nine
Tough that because of an accident of address you are prevented from voting for your real favourite or, just as important,NOT voting for some useless chancer from the Raving Loony Party with lots of cousins in Torteval
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IWV for the small community of Guernsey is fine in theory, but a nonsense in practise because of the 45 to be voted for. And what happens to Alderney? And Sark?
Before solutions are debated you need a proper concensus on the problem. Which is?
Once the problem is clearly identified and agreed, then think of the solution/s.
The current debate is cart before horse.
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Dave Jones
In describing your workload as a Minister, you have completely reinforced my argument. Your average hourly rate is probably barely above the local minimum wage, which is disgraceful. Its a situation which will put off many good candidates from standing.
Unless the requisite extra monies can be found elsewhere (unlikely in the current financial climate), the only way to finance this is to materially cut the number of deputies and redistribute that pot.
With the responsibilities that you and your colleagues have, why shouldnt you get paid a commensurate salary?
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In an ideal world we should only allow those with I.Q,s of more than 140 to vote for candidates with more than 150 ! But then, who will weed out the dishonest the lazy and the greedy, from those elected ?
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I do not think we should reduce the number of deputies for several reasons:
1. Having a larger number acts as a check and balance against a ‘clique’ (people all belonging to one organisation perhaps’) getting too much control
2. It makes it easier to find someone to take up your cause as the workload is spread over a greater number
3. It provides diversity of views
4. It makes for more opportunity for people to get involved in politics
It is not a huge expense in the grand scheme of things – I really do think it would be a mistake to cut the number
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First of all 45 states members for an island this size is too many.We need a smaller states with more expertise. I myself would not have the patience to go through 45 names and if I did it would take far too long. Also, I would not know enough about them to make a proper judgement.
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Higher wages for politicians would turn the position into a career choice. and politics, well certainly Guernsey politics, are generally a tradition of good people coming forward to do something/give back something to the community. You may not agree with them bu in the main all candidates want to contribute and therefore must have an altruistic side to them.
Turning that into a career by hiking the pay up would not necessarily bring people in of a “higher calibre”, whatever that means, into politics, just good public speakers and salesmen/women.
You only have to look back a couple of years to see that the highest paid people in the world nearly broke the world economy.
In Guernsey politics the politicians should contineu to come into politics for the right reasons; the right reason not being an ‘attractive package’
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Don’t forget it is 45 deputies salaries that the tax-payer is going to have to fork out for = £40K? each per year! Do we need that many – I don’t think so!
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I posted this on “Xfactor is ignored” but feel it is better for this stream.
I think it’s a brilliant idea, it means we can vote for the deputies that help the “little” people of this Island.
I want someone in who helps small local businesses not closes them down for ludicrous excuses and poorly writtien policies which are interpreted to benefit politicians with hidden interests.(It shouldn’t be too difficult to look up who’s got ulterior motives for being in the states especially with the help of certain internet sites)! Once you have wheedled all who are in it purely for their own gain from the ones who have our Guernsey culture and locals at heart there really isn’t that many to choose from.
I want someone who listens to what the locals want and has the ability to use common sense not pander to the wants/demands of people/companies entering our Island. By all means come to our Island because you love it and it’s lifestyle but don’t come dictating to us what we should and should not be doing just because it doesn’t suit you. if that’s the case don’t bother making the trip over.
Four Deputies possibly five have my vote so far, (without seeing a list). I may not agree with everything they do but at least they are working to save Guernsey from losing it;s essence and charm and from being changed into a smaller version of the UK.
Sorry Guys but this is purely my thoughts due to what i have experienced and it’s certainly made me see Guernseys political priorities in a total different light, suffice to say I feel extremely let down on the whole.
I am local struggling to keep my business. What i have met with is an absolute farce and i blame offshore big boys with fat wallets influencing greedy people who are supposed to help not hinder people like me. How many times have we seen small companies fold because they were told “no” by states bodies then along comes Mr Mega Store from Shopsthesizeofcitiesland with his personal bank and asks the same question and the answer is “Yes of course oh rich one, not a problem …..ooooh excuse us while we just get rid of this local little fish first!!”
I am not talking about the Deputies who are trying to help me …. to them i send a huge thankyou and appriciation!
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Caw, lumme days, 45, that’s a big number, eh?
10 Parishes. 20 candidates should be plenty, I think, me. Even your barefoot university students should be able to count that high. Ah! But I was forgetting these modern kalkilaters, eh?
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guernseygirl
Is right, the fact that the states cannot be manipulated by powerful factions outside of government is because it is impossible to influence that number of people currently 45. democracy is best achieved when power is vested in the hands of the many, not the few.
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David
I thank you for the support you give to us but I was genuinely not trying to blow my own trumpet, I was trying to point out to Stiletto that the time I spend answering questions and putting forward my views is very small compared to the rest of the time spent being an elected deputy. The job we do is a 7 day a week job, that is understood when you put yourself forward for election. I also joined the states before deputies got paid a fixed salary, so for me it has never been about money, although of course we all have to live. On your point about reducing the number of States members we must always have a majority on the floor of the assembly who could if need be out vote the Policy council and the deputy ministers who are likely to vote with the PC on many occasions. Also as I have said before the workload of the States requires people to do it who are accountable to the people of Guernsey otherwise with a serious reduction in elected members it would mean much more of the decision making process in government would be made by civil servants who are not directly accountable to the public. Right now I am off to Housing.
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Most people would think 45 deputies too high a number. Some would think 20 to few. I ‘m sure theres a right ammount somewhere in the middle. IWV is a perfect oppertuniaty to get to this correct number.
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Neil
I hear what you say but there are a great many people who simply couldnt afford to be a politician in Guernsey. For example, try putting two kids through education, especially university, and we’re automatically ruling out a lot of people under aged 50. If those individuals have chosen to educate their children privately, then their position is even worse. Going into politics simply isn’t an option, regardless of that person’s altruistic intentions. Family comes first. This is a major reason why we don’t see many young people standing for the States. With a few exceptions, its virtually limited to those with no children or very young children, or those whose children have grown up and flown the nest. That can’t be right. And why shouldnt it be a career choice? If you enter the States, serve a term and then don’t get re-elected, your external career prospects may then be pretty limited after 4 years “away”. Again,this results in a skew towards candidates in their 50s and 60s who may never need to risk re-entering the employment market in the future.
Dave Jones
I take your point about the Policy Council needing to be able to be outvoted. I guess I’m veering towards favouring a more cabinet style of government. I don’t see cabinet-style government working without IWV,but with IWV surely that makes it far more viable?
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I note from the 14/1/11 Press report on attendance figures for States meetings and Committee meetings that Deputy Sam Maidonald features in the bottom half of both lists
No doubt Deputy Sam was very busy studying for her main job as a local Advocate and of course many congratulations to her for passing her exams
However,when part of my tax is going towards paying her wages as a Deputy for the ISLAND
( not that she was one of the seven out of forty five deputies I was permitted to vote for)I would prefer it if she,and of course all other Deputies, were to treat being a Deputy as their main job
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I responded positively to the consultation on island wide voting and suggested that every voter should be limited to 10 votes. I still believe this is the best way, and surely it would make people consider their criteria for voting a bit more deeply? “I know him from his shop and he seems like a nice chap” should not be enough reason to select someone as your representative in government.
I actually couldn’t think of 10 sitting deputies I would vote for, and unless there is a massive influx of new talent, I will probably only vote for 6 or 7, whether my choice is 50 or 90.
However if I’m limited to my own parish again I don’t think I will vote at all. I’m certainly not going to vote for someone whose views and style of working/thinking I don’t respect just to make up the numbers!
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@davi: all points accepted.
@michelle: in our delivered to your desk IWV poll of last election we gave people 20 votes; those who participated, on average, used 16 of their votes. IF the proposal that people put 45 ticks down out of what was then 88 candidates, they simply won’t use them.
What you are liable to get is, as our poll demonstrated, the clear front runners (popular) in the top 15 or so and a poo fight of 15 or so bottom runners who will win or lose by minuscule percentages.
I’m not arguing for or against it, just illustrating our experience of our experiment.
@ChrisJ
What would change is the make up of the canditature, so in that sense it wasn’t a true reflection, so fully accept your point.
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I want IWV but not a reduction in the 45, with more civil servants costing more to run the Island.
Some deputies are saying that IWV would mean the more popular ( meant in a derogatory way) would get in.
They then advocate less Deputies, even down to 20.
If this is true,it goes to say, less of the unpopular ones ( or did they mean popular ones) would get in.
I believe it would be least expensive to have good Deputies elected by IWV and have roles for them, rather than more unelected civil servants with all the extra costs added on.
For example those in Commerce Employment one could look after tourism, one Agriculture,Commerce etc
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Michelle Levrier
Probably the most sensible post yet on this subject
Deputies,you promised us island wide voting,anything less and I predict the turnout figures/spoilt papers in 2012 will be a massive embarrassment to Mr Trott when (and if)he continues on his world travels next year
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VERY WELL SAID LOCALSFIRST – AGREE WITH YOU ON EVERYTHING YOU HAVE SAID, MY PARTNERS SMALL BUSINESS OF 10 YEARS OF HARD WORK – HAS JUST HAD TO FOLD.
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Why do we need 45 deputies anyway? They meet once a month, have about a year off for Christmas and have a jolly the rest of the time. 2 for each parish should be more than sufficient.
We need IWV so we can actually vote for somebody who might make a difference.
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Michelle Levrier
Just spotted the fatal flaw in your vote for ten maximum suggestion
I suppose there are just about ten deputies at present who can claim to be popular,even in this worst States ever. If the majority of the voting public put their precious cross against those ten names then the other thirty five could creep in with a ridiculously low number of votes each
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Ray, what you fear will happen anyway even without Michelle’s maximum 10 proposal.
In other words many voters will select their top 10 or 20 or whatever and then ‘use up’ the rest of their votes among the remaining 90 or 100 candidates.
There you have your lottery and the end result will be a less representative States than the one we have now.
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Ray,
So Michelle Levrier’s post has gone from being ‘probably the most sensible post on this subject’ to ‘fatally flawed’ in under 2 hours!
I wonder if you would admit there was an element of confirmation bias in your first reaction? If so, take comfort in the fact that your case is a million times milder than Dave Jones’s!
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A common theme is emerging here. Most people seem to be saying that there will be 10-20 stand-out candidates. Its then a lottery to fill the remaining seats. For what purpose exactly would be electing those mediocre candidates? So that, according to Dave Jones, the people who have public would have elected under IWV to run the island can be outvoted by a random mixture of uninspiring deputies who scraped through. Guernsey deserves far better than that. Let’s empower the smaller group of people who the IWV system would produce, and let’s make sure that the election campaign process properly engages the public.
Its also important that people recognise that effective politicians are very rarely popular. Nobody will ever “like” those who are charged with making unpopular decisions for the overall benefit of the island. Whether that’s raising taxes or making expenditure cuts that minister will not be popular, whoever they are!
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Don’t you just love Dave Jones – in his first submission to this subject he takes 1200 words, (plus several thousand words later) yet he suggests that new candidates should have 3-4 hundred more words than existing members and that the manifestos would fit in 3 or 4 pages of the Press!
IWV will certainly generate over 100 candidates. If they each have to print 25,000 brochures – they will cost over £2,000 at the most competitive UK printer and probably twice that locally. Plus the designer’s fee.
Then, how many Islanders will plough through 200 pages of that and work out the 45 candidates to vote for.
It will truly be a lottery, the prize? £100,000+ States members’ pay.
Roll-up, Roll-up, Have a go!
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David
What puts good candidates off from standing is not just the potential workload for not very much money, considering the hours you have to put in to do the job properly but the fact as Charles, our very able Treasury Minister said some time back, that the position is no longer respected anymore by a large section of the community which certainly doesnt help. When you are in public office you are public property, you are subject to constant collective derision by the Guernsey press as a member of the States and every detail of what happens in your political and public life will be reproduced in a way that sells newspapers, it doesn’t have to be accurate it just needs a good headline to keep the circulation figures up. In fact it has got so petty of late, one reporter Nick Mann thought that my mobile going off in the States chamber was of such ground breaking importance that it deserved a column inch all of its own. The fact that it was the first time in 10 years that I forgot to switch my phone off after lunch had obviously escaped him. It is also interesting to note that there are several occasions when Deputies phones ring, sometimes the same deputies over again but who never get a mention but hey ho, it just goes with the territory.
I also want to take up a comment (not made by you David) that the States needs new blood; I agree the States always benefits from having new people who will make a good strong contribution to government. Deputy Fallaize is one that springs to mind but I would remind all of the people who occasionally make this comment, that you had a lot of new blood elected at the last election and true to form a year or so down the road this States was being labeled as “the worst States ever”. Many contributors to these forums say that we need lots more business people in the States, well past States assemblies have had them in spades, in fact at one time they were the only people who could afford to stand for public office, because they had independent incomes. Did having huge numbers of business people make a big difference? Well over a period of several years, some of the islands business people presided over some of the biggest government overspends the island of Guernsey has ever seen, millions on projects that did not appear to have any sensible business direction to them whatsoever. They refused to set up any meaningful recycling schemes and nearly plunged us into the trap of a massive incinerator that would have cost further millions every year to feed. So it doesn’t always follow that business people will make the best politicians. What States members need mostly is commonsense and the ability to show leadership and not allow civil servants to send them in a direction against their better judgment. Also what would help with attracting people to stand for the States is a balanced media to put across the governments policies in a fair and impartial manner and not one that decries every effort of States members.
Martino
How can people who are elected by the people be a less representative States than it is now? Under the present system the majority of voters get NO say whatsoever in the majority of those elected and under the electoral district system it really is a lottery, in one parish you can get a seat in the assembly with a few hundred votes, in another you can fail to get elected with 3 times that number of votes. And what about the voters who don’t fancy any of the 7 candidates under the present system? They get no vote at all, other than spoiling their paper, that’s real democracy.
I heard Mr. Roffey on the radio earlier, telling listeners that the prospect of voting for all 45 members in an IWV will turn people off, well the response that came back from the public to the questionnaire on IWV shows clearly that is the system the want and far from being turned off they are eager to embrace it. I believe if they were given a clear month to go through the candidates they would be more than able to choose who makes up their entire government. I also believe it is patronizing in the extreme to imagine that the public are not bright enough to choose who governs them, many of those who say that people will not be able to read 100 manifestos forget that many who take a national newspaper every day will read hundreds of different articles in the course of a month so it could be done given a respectable period.
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A common theme here is exemplified by the posts from Localsfirst and Zelda (amongst others) and it goes along these lines:
- ‘I see lots of Deputies who won’t do what I think needs doing’
- ‘The problem is I can’t do anything about it because I can only vote for candidates in my district’
- ‘Island-Wide Voting will allow me to directly influence the election of any candidate, not just the ones in my district’
- ‘Therefore I think IWV will fix things’
When people spell out their reasons for supporting IWV, some variant of this usually seems to be at the core it. But if you can see the bigger picture of the issues you are voting for, rather than how you can vote as an individual, then you will see that you have just as much influence under the current system as you would with IWV.
The reason is that if you think there is some big issue ‘X’ in Guernsey and you going to allow your vote to be guided by X, then the chances are there are people in every district who feel the same. They will be thinking about X when they investigate the candidates in their district for you and mark their ballot appropriately, just as it is your civic responsibility to return the favour by investigating the candidates in your district and vote on issue X for them. You may not individually directly influence the election of every candidate, but the crucial thing is that issue X, the issue you care about, is being voted on across every district by you and your like-minded peers.
Localsfirst, you are not the first person to think that Deputies are in it for themselves, that they are lining their pockets, selling out to the big boys and don’t care for the little people. There are already people in every district in the island who are with you every step of the way. The issues you care about will be voted on in 2012, island-wide. And they were in 2008 and 2004. And when everyone else’s views were taken into account as well, we got what we got, for better or for worse.
You have homed in on some massive problems with the way ‘the system’ works in Guernsey. But anyone who gives you the impression that IWV is the answer is selling you down the river.
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One more thing – offering the opportunity to vote by TV, or text, or over the Internet is an absolute no-go. The reason we do not have significant fraud and voter intimidation in Guernsey is because we use the paper ballot and polling booth. Even postal voting has to be treated with extreme care.
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electronic voting – what an idea! That way everyone’s vote can be cast for them!
(In case you haven’t guessed, electronic voting machines are the single easiest form of voting to rig – more dishonest than your average politician)
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Well we have seen Dave Jones’s day and that was a Sunday a busy man whether we like him or not, can you imagine the workload if the number of deputies was significantly reduced, on speaking to one of the deputies just recently they had 3 meetings that day and a presentation to attend in the evening, 50 emails had to be answered and the telephone had not stopped ringing. I think I would have lost the will to live by now. Of course there are those deputies and ministers that are extremely unhelpful when you phone them, dont get back to you on emails and answer phone messages and are not in the States for a crucial vote.
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ChrisJ
Not entirely sure what ‘confirmation bias’ means so I won’t admit to it until I have spoken to my lawyer :-0)
I find this whole thread rather encouraging as no matter which side is taken up it’s good to see that people are thinking about it properly
If IWV ( I can’t get IVF out of my mind!)is watered down in 2012 I reckon Deputy Rihoy will be playing golf on that big course in the sky before it is brought back for debate
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Ray,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
We are all susceptible to it. Particularly Dave Jones, Ivan Rihoy, Mary Lowe and now Ron Le Moignon it would seem…
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Dave Jones
You are quite right. Whether a deputy is paid £30k, £60k, £100k or £200k for being a prominent politician, the local media scrutiny makes it totally unappealing. I know of several people who are keen to serve their island and put something back, who have had very successful careers in which they have held huge responsibility and accountability, and who would do a great job. It isn’t the money that really deters them from standing (as you know I believe that the level of pay simply doesn’t reflect the workload, let alone the responsibility), but its the hassle factor.
One only has to look at the extreme media pressure continually faced by Deputies Trott, Parkinson, Adam, Jones, Flouquet, Gallienne and others. We may not agree with some of what they do, and from time to time some deputies really don’t help themselves by a foolish comment (or joke), but the need to have a skin like a rhino is the primary requisite for any senior politician on this goldfish bowl of an island.
We might not be far away from there simply not being enough rhino-skinned volunteers left to run the island. How many members of the current Policy Council have simply “had enough”? About 75% of them it would seem.
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Chris J
Are you really saying that once every four years the voters of Guernsey could not be bothered to engage with the electoral system in order to give them the right to vote for everybody who purports to represent them in their parliament? It will be difficult for some and impossible for everyone if they are not given sufficient time to do it I grant you but to me that is the key. I suspect that if you had a 100 candidate’s people would rapidly dismiss several for a host of reasons. I also doubt as now that everyone will use all their votes. Most of the people I have spoken too have said that they have some idea of the kind of deputy they want representing them, of course they will have to read the manifesto’s of the candidates but as I said somewhere else many people will read more than a hundred news articles in the daily papers over the course of a month, which is the period I suggest the public would need to sift through the candidates. As for the wannabees as you call them, in a democracy everyone has a right to stand in an election, having said that the voting public are much brighter than many give them credit for and they very soon sort out in their mind those they are prepared to trust with their future and those they are not.
Chris I am not saying this leap into IWV would be easy and the public are going to have to work a little harder at election time and the system probably won’t be perfect at the first outing but if we keep putting it into “the to hard tray” because people believe the public can’t be bothered, then you will live with the present system forever and the recent survey shows that is unacceptable to a lot of voters .
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No wonder Guernsey is in a mess if this is the level of thinking.
What is the problem you are trying to solve? Until you can agree on that you cannot agree on a solution.
If you have 45 independents with very little common ground, they will take ages to agree anything. And the work load for all will be high. Lots of meetings and chat but very litle action. And lots of nasty comment. Familiar?
For a population of 60,000 you should not really need more than 12/15 deputies – but lets go to 20 as stage 1. That still means potentially more than 40 candidates which would make the hustings and voting too long winded, and impractical.
If you want the changes to work you first have to agree on the problem/s. Then define the solutions. Then choose the best one. If you don’t follow that simple discipline you will still be arguing about it for years to come, and make change after change. And spend lots of taxpayers money.
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Dave Jones
the fact of the matter is that nobody has asked for this change apart from you and yours
FACT – END OF – why are you wasting our time and money on this paffle?
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Rees Bryant
Very well said. 45 deputies to govern 65000 people is totally excessive.
If there is a concern about civil servants having more decision-making power, then don’t give them that power. The ministers and committee heads would then unarguably be able to justify a far higher salary for having far greater hands-on executive responsibility. Its currently a broken system, especially when the HSSD Minister was clearly only being told what his civil servants wanted him to know. What possible value is that and I’m sure it must be replicated elsewhere.
Let us appoint the best possible people to make the right decisions to govern the island. Pay them far more by culling the number of deputies. Pay them properly for the responsibility that they take on and with that goes full accountability. They rightly will take the credit for a job well done and will get slated when they get it wrong, but we must resource them properly and choose the right people on an IWV basis.
If that sounds like cabinet government then perhaps it is. Maybe that’s the only real alternative now to political parties, which would be far worse. One thing is for sure – the current system does not work and there are very few people outside the House who will say anything different.
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Ed
You are wrong, the public responded to a questionnaire that was sent out in droves saying that they wanted IWV. I happen to agree with them
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David & Rees
I might remind all of you that our system of government and its number of representatives has served this island extremely well for many decades. I might also remind you that the success of Guernsey included a time when Deputies weren’t paid at all, so higher salaries will not give you better government. The Island has out performed all other jurisdictions with the system it has and it is a very Guernsey system which I support. The idea that we could have a government of 12-15 people is the road to cabinet government and corruption. It would not take very long I suggest for the powerful factions I have referred to before, outside the States to wine and dine a handful of politicians resulting in the sort of nepotism seen in governments all around the world. There is safety in numbers; the absence of political corruption in our system is because of the very system we have, it is impossible to get 45 deputies to acquiesce to those who may wish to manipulate the government of this island for their own ends. Any government must be made up of a board representation of its people not all from one particular sector but ordinary people with a bit of commonsense. On your last statement Charles roundup of the year given in his budget speech at the end of last year doesn’t support your statement that our present system of government is “not working” He said that the island was in pretty good shape and we had a reasonably bright future. I certainly don’t want to see what would become an elected dictatorship in the hands of big business and those with the most clout.
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Dave Jones – in your final post you give a glowing endorsement of the Guernsey political system, I quote – it “has served this island extremely well for many decades.”
If it has worked so well within the current voting system, may I respectfully ask why you seem so hell bent on changing it?
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Dave Jones,
The IWV questionnaire cannot be used to conclude that the majority of the electorate want IWV, because no effort was made to control the result for nonresponse bias.
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Dave Jones,
I’d hope it goes without saying that we cannot simply make the voting process as complicated as we like, and say ‘it’s OK, because any voter who really cares will do it’.
Any proposal to change it in a way that makes it harder to cast a fully informed vote will reduce the turnout and reduce the proportion of the remaining turnout who actually know anything about the people they are voting for. That has to be justified in terms of the benefits gained. Again your latest post, like SACC’s report, doesn’t attempt to quantify the benefits.
I think the benefit of changing to Pure IWV would be marginal for the reasons I outlined in this post:
http://www.thisisguernsey.com/2011/01/14/voters-should-choose-all-45-deputies-says-report/#comment-85007
Assuming that the benefits are indeed marginal, I cannot see how you can justify the downsides of Pure IWV – namely getting rid of the hustings and making the entire voting process seven times more laborious.
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Dave Jones
Just because our system of government and number of representatives has worked well for decades, doesn’t mean that its appropriate today. Guernsey has changed massively over the past 20 years, let alone over the past 50 years.
What would a Housing Minister’s role have looked like then? Commerce and Employment? Health? Treasury & Resources? What about all the added external stuff? There is no comparison.
Why does cabinet government automatically equal “corruption”? Surely that’s down to who is elected and what checks and balances are in place. Are we really incapable of putting checks and balances in place?
Using your safety in numbers argument, why stop at 45 deputies? Why not 100? Or 65,000 for that matter?
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“The IWV questionnaire cannot be used to conclude that the majority of the electorate want IWV, because no effort was made to control the result for nonresponse bias.”
An argument that can be levied to all polls and, importantly, elections. Even under IWV the majority of Islanders are unlikely to have voted for their reps.
Unless you go down the Oz route of voting being mandatory, that will be trotted out for every poll and every election.
We have the system we have, if people don’t vote well……….you know the rest.
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Why not simply stick with the current system but introduce a single transferable vote where a voter would rank candidates in order of preference? This is what the Electoral Reform Society suggested. Why don’t the States actually listen to expert opinion for once; rather than coming up with unworkable ideas dreamt up on the back of a fag packet? The idea to elect all 45 members in one go is clearly unworkable. The Minority Report idea (Deputy Rihoy’s plan) is less silly; it just constitutes a return to a “de facto” Conseiller system by the back door; but where is the democratic case for going back to such a system? The States voted to do away with that system not that long ago! What actual advantage will this give us on a day to day basis? Where is the democratic need to rip up the current system (that has served us pretty well so far in my opinion) with a view to having IWV where the apparent advantages of extra accountability / democracy are so unclear?
It is often said that “better candidates” would come forward if there was to be IWV. Well, I do not buy that for a second. What is the evidence for that? I think you would be likely to get a better sort of candidate (whatever that really means) if we had government machinary that was conducive to decent, clear decision-making in the public interest; not by tinkering with IWV.
If the whole point of the States (as a government) is to guarantee work for 30,000-odd people and to preserve or even improve the standard of living of 62,000-odd people, how is IWV going to help us achieve those basic aims?
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Neil,
The SACC poll did not control for non-response bias, but you cannot level that criticism at all polls, because well-designed opinion polls do control for non-response bias!
The criticism would be less valid if the number of responses was a substantial proportion of the electorate (as an election or referendum turnout should be), because it then becomes hard to imagine that the answer would be so different it you took everyone’s views into account. But the SACC opinion poll, being only a consultative poll, had an estimated 14% response rate. That’s actually pretty impressive, but still too low to be able to get away without some kind of non-response control.
It is perfectly plausible that the 86% of non-responders are the kind of people who would not turn out if they had to vote for 45 people, because they are also the same sort of people who won’t respond to consultations!
See http://www.thisisguernsey.com/2010/01/05/island-wide-voting-is-wanted-says-poll/
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The longer this goes on the worse it gets. What is the problem? And by that I mean a problem clearly defined, and then agreed by the majority – public and deputies.
Opinions by the score but no concensus. And as for the talk of corruption, that is really scraping the barrel. And the answer to which is “OPEN” Government, with more public involvement. Which should form part of any solution.
But the starting point is blindingly obvious. Why change? What are the problems with the existing? Define those clearly and let the public comment, and so produce a concensus.
Once that exists start looking for the solutions – what can we do better. Then chose the best solution as agreed after public discussion.
That might take time, but the end result will be far superior to the current method. And what is the hurry? If you are going to do something do it well – getting the right result is extremely important.
Why do I have to spell this out? Surely it should not need saying.
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Thanks for the links CJ, I’d forgotten how consistent I am.
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Rees
As a Vale voter I see the problem as follows ..
I am limited to voting for seven deputies,probably from ten or twelve candidates.Of the seven who were successful last time I would probably not vote for two of them next time
If ‘my’ five stand again I will either have to settle for having five votes or supplement those five with two newcomers.But the maximum influence I can bring on the forty five people who purport to represent me and all other islanders is that I can only vote in 15.5% of them
I get so frustrated when I have to listen to,or read the ramblings of some useless numpty from another district / parish either constantly wasting debating time with fag packet amendments,or protecting his own little vote gathering patch to the detriment of the rest of the island’s needs
At present I have no way of showing my displeasure,other than on this forum.IWV would give me the opportunity of consciously NOT giving them my precious cross.They might still get in but I would be happy in the knowledge that I did my best to prevent that happening
If the majority of the voting population is content with a roughly 15% say in who our future leaders and lawmakers will be then so be it but I will be one of many who will stay away from the voting booth or probably more usefully spoil my paper with the words ‘IWV PLEASE’
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Ray
very well put.
As i have never been a deputy or know anything about being one i just wonder why these same people think they know better? unless they are or were deputies?.
If somone says we only need 20 deputies then unless they know the day to day workings of the job how on earth can somone make such a claim?.
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Sir P.B
There is a world of difference between changing our parliament and the numbers elected to it, than changing the voting system to a more accountable method. Our parliament is representative of a cross section of our community and at 45 members I believe it is about right.. Unfortunately our voting system disenfranchises the majority of voters from voting for the majority of the islands Deputies. They can only vote for and remove from office a handful of Deputies in the parish or electoral district.
Chris J
The call for IWV doesn’t just come from a questionnaire, I am aware as a serving deputy of numerous conversations with members of the public who would like the opportunity to vote for all their Deputies on an Island wide basis. On your second posting, there is nothing complicated about it. It might be a laborious task and some people might get turned off by the numbers of manifesto’s they have to read but it is no more complicated than it is now.
As for the benefits, I believe one of the major benefits is that it will make all elected deputies accountable to all the electorate, it will put an end to the complaint I hear to often that voters cannot remove certain deputies as they have no vote in those districts where they are comfortable behind parish lines. It will also make deputies who live in parishes relatively free from over development and bad neighbour industries think twice before dumping everything in the North of the island safe in the knowledge that the people taking the brunt of all this overdevelopment have no say in removing them from office. It would also have the benefit of removing the anomaly that allows a candidate to be elected in St Peter Port with a few hundred votes while a candidate in the Vale failed to get elected with almost three times that number. It would have the benefit of making sure that if there were no candidates you can support in your own Parish/District then you would still have the ability to vote for many others. At the moment if you don’t like any of the candidates on offer you get no vote at all other than spoiling your ballot paper.
David
I fear you and I will never agree on this simply because you wouldn’t mind executive government, something I do not wish to see. I have seen it many other countries and it doesn’t work, just look at the mess many of these countries are in, in fact just look at Jersey and tell me there executive system is working over there. Consensus government has prevented us on several occasions from making mistakes that would have been difficult to rectify. Some of the debates we have are not pretty I grant you but by and large we usually make the right decision and Guernsey has prospered as a result. Now I wouldn’t pretend for a minute that the business community has not helped in that prosperity but it most certainly could not have happened without key decisions being taken in our parliament and sometimes when we have had to those decisions have been taken very quickly. Your point about “why not a hundred?” is simple, we have the number of States members we need to make up a government that gives us three things, first a workable parliament, secondly a built in opposition which I would suggest is healthy in any democratic assembly that does not have party politics and thirdly the Scrutiny committees to make sure we keep the process honest and to make sure policies passed by the States are being delivered and are within budget (PAC). Finally the parliament is kept honest because it is the size it is, there are any number of examples around the globe where power is placed in to few hands and corruption is rife. The system we have prevents that patronage and nepotism from taking hold because there are too many people who will have a say in the final decision to make the outcome a certainty for those with vested interests. You ask if we have any checks and balances in place, yes we do and the size of our parliament is one of them, if you concentrate to much power into to few hands you have the recipe to put powerful politicians in a position where they could be subject to nepotism, inducements, and political deception, simply because there are only a few people involved it is much easier to keep it under wraps.
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Dave Jones
You are right – we won’t agree on it.
Is the Jersey system failing because of the structure, or because the Jersey people voted in the wrong people? How can you be so sure that its the former? Our existing system would fail as badly as Jersey’s if our electorate voted in the wrong people.
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Dave Jones
| January 19, 2011 at 6:52 am
Ed
You are wrong, the public responded to a questionnaire that was sent out in droves saying that they wanted IWV. I happen to agree with them
Are you sure this wasnt the exodus call?
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David
The electorate vote for whoever is on offer, you can’t say that a particular system is not working because the voters have chosen the wrong people. If you take our States for instance, the public say that some of us are too old or are not very bright, have no experience of business or a comment I heard the other day when a person asked how on earth many of the deputies were ever elected in the first place. Well the answer is that they were the only ones who had the courage to stand for public office in the first place. The countries that have executive government are in a mess there is no getting away with it, did millions of people all vote for the wrong people? Although in the UK they are effectively governed by people no one elected and who they can never remove, the Commission in Brussels. In Jersey they have some of the things you say we need, more realistic salaries to attract candidates and an executive system and yet many are calling for a return to the old committee system.
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Dave Jones
Yes – if the quality of candidate is poor then the quality of the House is bound to be poor, regardless of its size or constitution.
So how does Guernsey attract better quality candidates? If such candidates ate put off by the current system and by the highly unattractive salary relative to all the hassle that you all now get, then as I said in an earlier post we will run out of thick-skinned rhinos willing to change.
You refer to everywhere else with ministerial government having problems, but in many of your postings on this blog you stress the importance of disregarding what goes on elsewhere and to do what’s right for Guernsey. Why can’t a ministerial/cabinet government work in Guernsey based on island wide voting?
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I would definitely like it if there were more unbiased informative articles on the candidates and what they stand for in the media in the run up to the elections. I cannot see a down side to being more informed on the matter.
I also like the idea that we can vote for exactly who we want, even if it is 45 people. It may be a lot for some people though.
One way that may help people to decide could be to table the candidates stances on particular subjects in a quick viewable format? It would be brief but may give people an idea who they would like to look into more thoroughly.
My partner made the point that there may be more elected candidates from parishes with higher populations as a lot of people will stick to what they know. It would be interesting to see if that happened.
Also we have also joked about with the idea that voting could be done on a points system, for example where you would have 100 points and could allocate up to ten towards any candidate you like to show how strongly you feel about your choice. You could then also allocate your points negatively against a candidate if you so wanted. : ) I think that would make some of the users here happy!
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“One way that may help people to decide could be to table the candidates stances on particular subjects in a quick viewable format? It would be brief but may give people an idea who they would like to look into more thoroughly.”
Regardless of whether IWV is implemented this is an excellent idea Dani!
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In my opinion, 45 is far too many and with that number of successfully elected deputies would have been the prolonged drama of selection from the masses! This would then detract from the real issue also, which is ensuring Guernsey is managed and run in an efficient manner. To do that though, we need suitable candidates to come forward and put themselves up for election. Its certainly not then about numbers being the issue, but quality! We presently have very little of this.
At present the States of Guernsey has a minority of deputies who care and work hard to the betterment of the Island. This whilst the majority of States members have certainly got long in the tooth (and beard). Add to this the deputies who do ‘not a thing’ and are little more than numbers in the chamber, which in my view makes a case-in/and-point to reduce the numbers of elected representatives.
So, lets reduce and also have a clear out of the deadwood.
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Mr Remfrey, sir
You may well have made some excellent points but I was so incandescent with rage after reading your comment about beard growth that I can’t remember!
;-)
Best Regards
A man with a beard….who is neither old or a States member!
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David
Let me take your last point first, you are absolutely right, I constantly tell people we should do what’s best for us in this island and not worry about what happens or how they do it elsewhere, which is why I don’t want to copy someone else’s failed and corrupt system of government. Your point on the poor quality of candidates is an odd one, simply because the only way to get over that is to subject all candidates to some sort of vetting procedure which would hardly fit into the concept of free and fair elections where anyone in the community who is eligible, can stand for public office. If you believe that the only people who should stand are those who want to work in the system we have, well that is true of any election. I like your analogy about thick skinned Rhino’s, I fear we are rapidly approaching an election where it will be difficult to attract candidates who have the stamina to withstand the constant onslaught from certain sections of the media that goes with the job but remember also it is a question of whether you want to subject your family to the delights of being a States member. Some of the phone calls can be very unpleasant indeed.
PS please call me.
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Simple, reduce the number of deputies to approx 30 and stipulations attached should be.
1. Only Born Locals to apply.(For position as deputy).
2. Only Born Locals to vote.
This would then prevent any interference from non-locals in coming over with their over inflated opinions ruining our Island. So how about the old saying “When in Rome”.
A La Perchoine
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Worst Case Scenario.
I haven`t read all the comments on here but perhaps dave Jones could answer my question.
If there are 45 States Members to be voted in and at the end of the voting only, say, 38 names are voted for from all of the candidates, how would the other 7 members be decided?
Would it be a void election or would the whole process have to be gone through again to decide those 7 members without the 38 names on the election candidates roll?
Is a person going to be able to “get in” with only one vote?
I personally will find it extremely hard to troll through 100 candidate`s manifestos and pick 45 in one go. I honestly don`t think I can be bothered if we`re going to end up with something even worse than we have sitting in The States Chamber today.
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@Dave Jones
I didn’t ask you for a personal daily timetable,I don’t have an interest in when you start your day, if you like cornflakes, whatever, or when you choose to complete your day, I merely wonder about how much time you are spending on this and other forums,from the paid day routine; let us say, over the past 48 hours,you have spent a lot of time, putting forward your various views, seems a fair question?
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Interesting Ideas Ben Remfrey, any particular suitable candidates in mind?
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Check out http://www.gsyfutu.com/?p=15435 for a light hearted look at this debate.
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Stiletto
It’s called ‘communicating with the public’.Part of the job description I would expect
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Stiletto
I have answered your question, in the course of an average week it is very little. Secondly I would be interested to know what other forums I contribute too, I might have done so in the distant past but the GP one is the only one I engage with and has been for some time.
Ray
You have answered the second part of Stiletto’s question for me.
By the way, this post took less than a minute and a half to write.
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nocon
That is a very fair question,the true answer to your question is I don’t know if that possibility might arise but I will say this, there are many people who don’t use all their votes now and if you remember it was not many years ago when there was no election in one parish simply because nobody stood against the existing Deputies who were running again they were therefore returned automatically. I think the thing to remember is that all electors across the island will have a say in every seat and who occupies that seat in the States and that I think will generate sufficient votes. But as we have never had a full blown island wide election before for 45 candidates and therefore nothing to compare it with, it is difficult to judge what possible negative scenarios might arise. I do think that the States would have to address these kinds of issues if the principle of IWV is accepted.
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Dave Jones
I’ll call you over the weekend.
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Stiletto
They are self employed and do not work a set amount of hours per day, so when they chose to take a break it is none of your business as long as they are doing the job they are paid to do.
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I reckon it is very simple and could be done without reports etc. Reduce the number of deputies to 40. Have an election for each parish to vote for 1 parish representative for each parish. The remaining 30 could stand on an island wide basis and be elected for a period of 6 years. 15 could be voted for in for example 2014 and the other 15 in 2017. That way you are never voting for more than 15 a time. In this way islanders get to vote for 31 out of a total of 40. In this way you get more continuity and you still have a parish rep. I have suggested 6 years but that could be fixed at 4 years.
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I am grateful to contributors like bcb, Ray and others who support what we do. Dialog with the public is essential, although I don’t have time to put forward views on every subject on this forum , I do think that with big political issues where we are asking the public to engage with us such as IWV we might at least give them some idea where we are coming from. Many will disagree with our views and opinions but that is healthy debate and I wish we had more of it.
I will be at the Vale surgery this Saturday morning hopefully talking about the Population document.
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Stilletto, as far as i’m concerned Dave Jones is doing what we expect him to do, he’s listening and communicating with the public! I don’t agree with everything he says but then i wouldn’t expect there is a single deputy out there where anyone can say yes for everything that particular Deputy stands for. It’s nice to see at least one conversing and trying to answer some of our queries. I feel that Deputy Dave Jones is genuinely concerned about where this Island is going and he appears to be trying to keep what’s good about our Island and not just focusing on who or what can bring us the biggest fattest cash sack at the expense of local businesses /livelyhoods etc. We are always saying that deputies are not being seen to be listening/working for the public so please don’t criticise the ones who are trying. We need more deputies like Dave Jones, Al Brouard and Graham Guille. We want to see more Deputies on here too please :-)
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