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Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

Even though it’s probably a lot of wasted time (they read proposals ahead etc), I think it’s a good idea to ban phones entirely in parliamentary chambers. The opposition should be granted the attention. People watching should see people debating or listening, not sleeping or looking at their phones.

If this creates a problem for those in the chamber then perhaps the solution is shortening the sessions and removing redundant sessions like reading proposals that everyone could read beforehand, and instead focus on efficient debate and voting.

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Politicians could be treated like students: below a certain attendance rate or failed pop quiz they "fail the class".

Lack of attendance or lack of understanding of the discussion they vote on greatly undermines the already narrow interpretation of democracy we do have. It means that not only are "the people" in no way in power, most don't even have a representative in any reasonable interpretation. They are physically not in the room to contribute to the decision, or don't understand their own choice.

A very small minority of representatives gets to decide for a large majority of people they don't representnt.

"We the people" has been replaced by "We the lobbyists" or extending to "We the corporations".

Not sure why you're getting down voted, that's how it works in Australia.

Just look at how we're still embracing coal, and introducing mileage tax of EVs to repel their takeup.

There's a big network of old chummies and political donations from big fossil behind that.

I support mileage taxes on Electric vehicles. The whole idea of the gas tax (at least in the US) was a way approximately tax road usage to fund infrastructure. Why should predominantly well off ev owners get out of paying for road maintenance? If we want to discourage carbon emissions just tax carbon.

> Why should predominantly well off ev owners get out of paying for road maintenance?

Great point. We should raise gas taxes to subsidize electric vehicles for people with low incomes. If enough people switch to electric to the point that this revenue starts seriously dropping, great: keep turning up the heat with more gasoline taxes until polluting vehicles are completely gone.

The "it's not fair" trope about road maintenance for EVs isn't super compelling - the vast majority of road damage is from heavy vehicles like semis. Road damage increases with the cube of mass. Once we've put gasoline vehicles in the history books forever we can work on a mass*acceleration tax.

In Australia, roads are paid for by our taxes - not the fuel excise.

I think I actually support a KM usage tax, but it'd have to be for all kinds of cars - not just the green kind. CO2/PM25 emissions tax should be on top of that.

And: To buy an EV in Australia would be considerable stretch on my own budget, and I'd need every single dollar left after it. I'm actually needing a 2nd car now, and am loath to buy another ICEV.

What's the mileage tax you mention?

It's a newly introduced km fee on all road usage for EVs only, not for ICEVs, in Victoria.

https://www.caradvice.com.au/955801/victorias-ev-user-tax-is....

https://www.whichcar.com.au/car-news/victoria-passes-ev-tax-...

There's a $3k limited incentive that was used to distract from the fundamental issues behind taxing EV mileage. It doesn't cover long range cars as they're outside the price bracket.

The reasoning was that there's no fuel excise being collected, yet the fuel tax isn't being used to cover roads - normal tax payments are.

Also it doesn't care that ICEVs currently aren't paying for environmental emissions, when they should.

Actually having said all that I should just have pasted https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLflYkgnNBY , which explains it all so much better. (Fair warning: Australian language).

Same thing is being proposed for NSW. Pathetic really.

The last I can find on the proposal for NSW to do the same is from April [0] yet in June they introduced EV purchases [1] with no mention of a mileage tax.

I find it more than a tad ironic that the NSW Liberal (conservative) state government has the best EV incentives while the Victorian Labor ("progressive") has the worst, out of our two most populous states.

[0] https://thedriven.io/2021/04/29/perrottet-flags-holistic-app...

[1] https://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/topics/climate-change/net...

Why is it pathetic? As other commenters have stated, the fuel taxes have supposedly been about offsetting infrastructure costs of the roads and not a pollution control (at least in US). All cars need use of the roads whether EV or ICE powered. Personally, I'd rather they actually charged you by requiring odometer readings instead of a generic tax on utilitly fees. Maybe collect that info on your annual inspection vs the over the air telemetry??

Here is a table of vehicle damage levels by size.

https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weigh...

"Fat man on freakishly heavy bicycle" => lol, thanks, I'm saving this for next time I hear "pay your reggo".

(I _am_ paying on my ICEV, which I'm going to get carbon offsets for soon).

Sadly, I see this as a natural consequence of how much influence individuals have versus how much influence organizations with money have. I, as a concerned citizen, have nothing compared to a group with a revenue stream orders of magnitude above my own. Even if I were to become a full time activist, the number of people I can reach is tiny compared to an institution with an advertising budget and a consultancy.

I get your point, and it is valid, but also observe that there have been numerous successful social movements in the near and longer past! They had to fight against vastly more powerful systems and still succeeded in the end.

As activists, we can obtain substantial press coverage even without an advertising budget, by carrying out well-thought-out direct actions and acts of civil disobedience, and we can offer direct resistance (for instance, when we build tree houses to occupy forests which are on the clearing list of governments or the fossil fuel industry, like we successfully did with the Hambach Forest in Germany).

I know what you mean. I just feel demoralized and beaten down.

And what's the result of "failing"? A popularly elected representative gets automatically removed from the house because he failed some arbitrary attendance threshold or a test which is going to biased by whomever designed/approved it?

I don't think there is an easy way out of this, the "quality" of politicians can only improve if the majority of the people voting for them actually started caring about the actual work they do when elected (instead of basing their decisions entirely on the party they represent, their public image etc.)

A popularly elected representative who does not represent has failed their mandate. The "contract" of democracy is (at least morally) "vote for representation". Without the representation that person is no more entitled to be there than any other random person if you ask me.

At the very least in the next election cycle the people will know who represents them and how.

Tell that to Sinn Fein MPs who were elected to the British parliament in all the elections since 1997 but any of whom is yet to attend a single session.

Abstaining from participating in parliament when you're elected or participating in unconstructive ways (i.e. by being disruptive etc.) is a legitimate behaviour. As long as you're transparent about your intentions to behave so to your voters, removing such MPs without an election would be authoritarian.

If he/she is not transparent about this and this is/becomes a widespread problem it's preferable to decrease the duration of office terms or allow recall elections instead of instituting arbitrary rules (which will have to be approved by the ruling party/coalition and therefore will likely be designed in such a would which would favour them over opposition parties).

i'd be down for giving tests to legislators of all the bills they're voting on for the day, with questions designed by legislative analysts of all stripes. that way, potential consequences are tested for, not just the contents.

The vast majority of politics is about things reasonable people disagree on. When you have an elections bills that one side considers to expand access to voting, while the other side considers it to enable voting fraud, how would you write a test?

ah, the dichotomy trap again. we've really got to get past "two sides". what's best for people? for society? if voting is expanded, to who? why? how? what kind of fraud could it enable? how much? how likely? it's not that hard.

> Even though it’s probably a lot of wasted time (they read proposals ahead etc), I think it’s a good idea to ban phones entirely in parliamentary chambers.

This is general theme with meetings: once you've allowed people to do something else and reduce the perceived inefficiency at a personal level, you've allowed meetings to become excruciatingly inefficient since nobody complains anymore. The incentives (again, at a personal level) to make the whole process more efficient disappear, so nobody bothers.

Anything like that would just be silly public posturing. Probably in all parliaments almost all of the actual work happens in committees or in other places outside the chamber. An MP who would attend all the public sessions but do nothing else besides that would be completely useless regardless of how attentive or active he is in the discussions.

And in any case any question being discussed in the given time might be only relevant to a small subset of the people currently present, what's the point to forcing everyone else to pretend that they are listening...

Why would posturing be silly? As you say the main chamber(s) of most parliaments is rather symbolic in nature. But it’s important as such: it represents to the public a lot of what their representatives do.

There are usually tons of formal rules for etiquette, dress code etc which are also in a way posturing, or in another way, showing respect for the institution and processes and showing that they take the job seriously. That something is only superficial does in no way mean it’s useless!

Showing on opposition speaker the same respect that a 10 year old shows their teacher in school seems like a pretty low bar.

The point of forcing everyone to pretend they are listening is the same as the point of forcing everyone to wear a tie: to not make it look like a condo board meeting.

What if the opposition speaker decides to speak for 10+ hours (assuming the rules/etiquette of the house allow doing so) because he wants to prevent the government from passing some legislation he strongly disagrees with? Should the entire house be forced to sit attentively listen to him reading TV scripts or whatever? Even in less bizarre cases the opposition speaker might purposeful asking irrelevant questions/talking about irrelevant points to appeal to his supporters or otherwise being unconstructive.

I'd say most of the formal etiquette and dress code rules are needless distractions which historically were designed either to exclude lower class people from government or as a form of a public ritual which would lend additional weight and gravity to decisions made the parliament (because the majority of the population were not educated enough/didn't have enough time/etc. to take them seriously just based on their content).

> What if the opposition speaker decides to speak for 10+ hours (assuming the rules/etiquette of the house allow doing so)

I think the answer to this is pretty obvious: if you are touching tiny issues with chamber procedure and etiquette but have this problem, perhaps start with this and return to dress code and cell phones once the chamber is functioning at all. Again: the idea with “no phones” completely rests on the idea that there is a minimum of dead time in the chamber. If that can’t be arranged then that’s the issue to address.

> a form of a public ritual which would lend additional weight and gravity to decisions made the parliament

It’s this. And it’s the same reason people wear suits in a courtroom. It’s because showing that something is serious has a point. Being superficial doesn’t mean pointless.

> completely rests on the idea that there is a minimum of dead time in the chamber

I don't think we can really compare public sessions in a parliaments to regular business meetings. I'd say their main point is to broadcast a summary of decisions (which are largely taken behind close door and the actual voting is just a formality) to the public in a somewhat transparent and formalized way. I would expect a competent MP to generally know what another MP would say on a given topic before he even stands up to speak so unless he's directly participating in the discussion it shouldn't really matter whether he's using a phone at that moment or not.

> It’s because showing that something is serious has a point. Being superficial doesn’t mean pointless

While I'm fundamentally not against maintaining some kind of minimal dress code requirements, I think in modern, advanced societies that mainly serves an utilitarian purpose (by minimizing unnecessary distractions). The assumption that somehow the more distinguishing dress code or complex etiquette rules a specific public procedure has the more seriously it's taken by the society sounds bizarre to me. It obviously made sense in the past when status symbols like various non standard suits, gowns, robes and wigs had a point in the past because they signified that the person wearing them was somehow qualified and/or entitled to perform a jobs he's doing. But I don't think many people now would believe that a sentence passed by a judge who wears a wig is somehow more 'serious' compared to if he/she was instead wearing just a gown or simply a suit.

Adhering to social norms in civic activities signal buy-in, or not.

Sure, wear dirty hiking boots to the ballet.

Snort and fart thru the sermon.

Talk loudly in the phone riding crowded publuc transit.

Every day is halloween and you need to unambiguously alert all other participants the esteem you hold for them, or not. So choose your costume wisely.

Well I don't see how any of your examples are equivalent of wearing something but a formal suit (as long as you don't have too much dirt on your shoes). I mean if somebody like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Buckethead happened to be elected to parliament (as unlikely as it would be) I think he should have the right to wear his costume during sessions regardless of the opinion of other MPs because wearing that costume is a significant part of his political identity.

And how should the MPs antagonized by Buckethead respond?

AFAIK there are no formal rules on dress code in the Netherlands parliament. There was (or is?) a member of parliament who attended in jeans and a T-shirt (because that's what the people he represents wear).

Dress codes are usually set to formal in order to mark that the representatives are not representing themselves (by not allowing personal style - even one that mimics their constituents). That is: the anonymity of uniforms instead of allowing personal style underlines how the person is merely a representative and not there in their own capacity. The most extreme version of this is of course robes and wigs in some courts. Like everything else, this is about to change (as it is looking increasingly weird) but that doesn't mean the underlying idea is crazy.

Better than a ban would be to make public whatever the politician is looking at on the phone during a public meeting, in real time. If it is private or secret they can simply not look at it during the meeting.

Of course politicians in meetings like these would be the ones to vote on such a proposal, so don't bet on it.

Aren't they all elected? I think rather than _control_ what these people do, we just need to have more _reporting_ on what they do.

Some things are perhaps rightly too small to see people voted out for, so it’s not an effective means of control. I wouldn’t want my representative to break speaking rules or dress code either but I’m perhaps not ready to choose a different candidate over such a thing.

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