Polemic polling panacea

News yesterday of a survey showing three out of four New Zealanders think the “anti-smacking” referendum is a waste of money is no surprise. New Zealanders are generally tinny and nine million dollars is a lot of money—a fact pointed out by many bloggers already. There is no point dwelling on it. The likelihood of Sheryl Savill pulling it is nil and implications dangerous.

Bradford’s bill to ensure the wording of future CIRs doesn’t go far enough. Surely there is a better, cheaper way to make sure that the true will of the people is heard by politicians.

Here is an idea: why don’t we just do a poll. A poll is just a smaller referendum with targeted questions designed to actually gauge what people are thinking.

Citizens initiated polls

Let us get one thing straight: in a parliamentary democracy elected representatives shouldn’t run back to the polis to get direction on every issue. That is a horrible concept. We elect them to make decisions for us. If they piss us off we elect someone else. There are times however when the public needs to speak. I’m far from convinced the smacking/anti-smacking issue is one of those times, but hey, that is the hoi polloi for you.

The Electoral Commission would be in charge of the overall polling proceedings but would most likely sub-contract out to a polling company to do the grunt work and provide expert advice. Pollees would be taken straight off the electoral role and given notification that they had been randomly selected to take part.

Because the issues are far reaching it will be important that we have a lower margin of error than most current polls done by private companies do. The aforementioned poll only asked 481 people, which means it has a margin of error of about 5%. A sample size of 2500 would give a margin of less than 2% and we can safely say that if we polled 5000 people we would get a fairly representational result.

I suggest that we keep current threshold of signatures, time-frame etc to keep it just as difficult to have the polling done and ensure that we don’t frivolously waste tax payers money. The other beauty is that since most of the polling could be conducted via phone or email it will be more environmentally friendly than a postal ballot or even a general election.

It would make the democratic experience less painful for the majority of New Zealanders and it might even prompt a higher turn out rate and a deeper understanding of where we as a country rest on certain issues which may arise in the future.