"Should there be a reform of our justice system placing greater emphasis on the needs of victims, providing restitution and compensation for them and imposing minimum sentences and hard labour for all serious violent offenses?"
Now let's play tldr with the law!
Luckily it was non binding and stands forever as an argument against binding referendums.
I'm not really seeing the deception here since it specifies hard labour and says it would apply to all serious violent offenses. How could you vote for this and not know you were voting for hard labour?
"Should there be a reform of our justice system" -> "should the law be passed"
"emphasis", "restitution", "compensation" -> too hard to skim, brain is bailing out
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the only way to provide valid direct democracy is to provide more than enough explanations and rewordings from both sides of the debate *at the point of voting* to remove miscommunication
The deception is that it combines two largely unrelated questions into one vote - leading with one that most will agree and followed by one that is more questionable. By the time people will be reading the second question they will already have be primed with an opinion on the first.
In many respects I agree with you there, I almost went with softer language. The fact remains that it appears people were deceived. All of the advocacy pushing the referendum only focused on the first part. To this day I find people who are amazed that it mentioned hard labour and and that they voted for it.
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I guess think of it in terms of a vote that you had discussed and decided upon before you voted. Could you honestly say that you would read every word of the question or would you just look at the start of it to establish that it was the question under discussion and then trust that the discussion accurately represented what the question on the form would say. The length of the question, was I believe specifically designed to be long to prevent the frequency of its full publication.
Could you honestly say that you would read every word of the question
Yes?? It's not like a school exam where the questions are secret until you see it in the voting booth, and even if it were, you should still read the question carefully. I'm all for things being written as clearly as possible but at some point you have to acknowledge that voters have a responsibility to think about what they're voting for.
It is consistent with my experience that most people seem to not realise that they voted for hard labour.
That is indeed the entire theme of this thread, That people can give an answer to a question that in some way does not reflect their honestly held opinion.
> most people seem to not realise that they voted for hard labour
This is incredibly anecdotal, a major victim of selection bias, and also there are possibly effects of agreeableness here b/c it seems like you may be part of a vocal minority on this issue (and I mean that with absolutely no negative connotations). That said, I don't automatically reject vibes based determinations like this because often the high bandwidth of personal interaction can outweigh the problems with low bandwidth questioning in polls. But in this case, when 90% voted in favor, I have a hard time believing it. I think that what you can safely conclude from your experience is that a lot of people didn't know what they were voting for. If you wanted to say maybe it was really 75-25 I could go with that, but 91% in favor (in an actual vote and not a poll) is pretty convincing to me.
Eh, it’s kind of the opposite for me. I’ve never seen any legitimate vote in a democracy > 90%. Even if you put ‘we agree that puppies are cute and fluffy and deserve all the pets’, > 10% will vote the other way purely out contrarian ness. Or because they’re cat people. Or because fuck you, that’s why.
And there is no way you can convince me 91% of New Zealand voters, where this is the common policy stance [https://www.mbie.govt.nz/business-and-employment/employment-...], had any clue they were voting for forced hard labor for prisoners. Especially considering how relatively cushy the current standards are for prisoners.
I’m sure with enough lawyers and PR folks could also write (and pass) a CA popular thingy which calls for all males to be kicked in the groin too.
That said, I’m also a big believer in voters getting what they voted for - only way they’ll learn. Besides, a few kicks to the groin might teach them a lesson!
Modern slavery legislation passed in 2022 has abslutely no bearing on public opinion on crime and punishment for violent offenders in 1999. People in NZ have been fed up with soft on crime policies and short setences for violent repeat offenders for a long, long, long time (and continue to be today). Despite what the noisy left wing in this country might tell you.
It baffles me that you people think we didn't know what we voted for in a referendum question expressed in a single sentence which included the words,
> Should there be a reform of our justice system [...] imposing minimum sentences and hard labour for all serious violent offences?
idk, maybe they're actually in favor of hard labour (which was after all spelled out in the question) and they're just telling you what they think you want to hear so you don't bug them about it. A lot of people are happy to lie this way.
I don't buy that, and even if they did that doesn't make it deceptive. I'm not arguing in favor of this increased punishment, it just seems to me that its stated plainly enough you can't seriously argue that people were tricked.
It is somewhat deceptive, or at least misleading, to bundle up the concepts of giving the victims compensation, and punishing the prisoners more aggressively.
Unless the prison labor is providing the compensation, but that would be totally bizarre and dystopian, haha. Not really the sort of thing you’d see in a civilized country.
"Hard labour for all serious violent offenses" seems almost refreshingly straightforward. Was there more in the actual referendum that was hidden? I grant that "serious violent offenses" is somewhat vague; was it overly broad?
That question clearly says hard labour. I'm sure some people didn't read it, but I think there also may be another effect there, where when talking to people in person, they realize you are morally opposed to forced hard labour, and don't want to seem like a bad person, so they pretend they didn't know. Sort of similar to the recent effect in the US where trump significantly underpolled as many voted for him but don't want to admit it.
"Should there be a reform of our justice system placing greater emphasis on the needs of victims, providing restitution and compensation for them and imposing minimum sentences and hard labour for all serious violent offenses?"
Now let's play tldr with the law!
Luckily it was non binding and stands forever as an argument against binding referendums.