It’s quite simple — STV is a good voting system

PABLO Dennison and regular petitioner Brent Weatherall must take the public for fools when they say that their First Past the Post Working Group only wants to give Dunedinites choice in our council voting system (ODT, 3.8.20).

What other voting choices do they have in mind?

They should come clean and admit that their group is politically motivated in favour of one councillor who still cannot get over what he considers a somehow unfair STV result in 2019 that denied him the mayoralty.

The council vote last week, 141 in favour of keeping STV, revealed all. Who voted against it?

The primitive First Past the Post system is democratically unfair and can be rorted, unlike STV.

The group’s comment that Dunedin voters find STV difficult to understand is an insult to their intelligence.

Philip Temple

Dunedin

General election

TIME is ticking away and the nation fast awaits a new election campaign, and a Parliament to govern the country for the next three years at the bottom of the world.

If we are to thrive as a country, the more minor parties democratically elected, so much the better, as these voices could have greater potential to bring about more new innovative policies for the people who live across Aotearoa.

MMP still has a 5% threshold, and like local government elections, we at New Zealand Social Credit think that Single Transferable Voting may be best to represent our nation in future.

The Otago Daily Times has run some fine articles about the financial policies of the Labour government under Michael Savage and Peter Fraser.

With the will and the resources, we should be able to do this, particularly during these challenging days in which we now live.

Let us reflect on this between now and September 19, 2020.

Tom McAlpine North East Valley