A referendum to end all referendums

Baldock's going to do it, it seems. Muppet.

The question this time is, as he hinted before: Should Citizens Initiated Referenda seeking to repeal or amend a law be binding?

Maybe he regrets having such a loaded question last time. Had the previous one actually asked 'do you want the smacking law repealed', and still got a large vote, it might have have been taken seriously.

This one wouldn't be if it was held now, and I'm not convinced it will be if held in a year or two. It's a frivolous waste of everyone's time and money to take this to a referendum.

I propose a referendum question of my own. You must promise to answer truthfully, 'yes' or 'no'.

Will you either answer 'no' to this question or refuse to vote in future pointless referendums?

(This trick is known as Coercive Logic.)

Meta-referendum

So it looks like we may have a referendum on referendums, timed to coincide with the next election and generally cause trouble - providing Larry Baldock can get enough support this time.

The last one got a lot of bad press for being such a huge waste of money, but I think voter turnout - though low - was sufficiently large that, if he campaigns hard enough, he'll probably get the required 10% of voters to sign the triggering petition for this one, since the majority vote was on the side likely to be annoyed that no law change happened.

He does a lot of whingeing in his press release about constitutional inadequacies. Some of that may be worth considering, but of all the ways to address this problem, he's chosen one very likely to get a lot of media attention and criticism and to cost the country a good bit of money, but not very likely at all to change anything substantial. It smacks (sorry) of self-publicity.

Also, as The Standard points out, he's not really in a great position for being self-righteous about fair democratic processes, since a good chunk of his funding for these theatrics appears to come from a hundred-million-a-year US fundamentalist christian group which spent nearly USD$600,000 on lobbying in 2007 alone.