Let me guess - ‘do you support violent prisoners being given work in proportion to their crimes’ or something similar?
"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.
On the other hand. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44870087
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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.
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.
I guess it is at least consistent with your belief that there is a mandate for Project 2025.
> I live in a country where 91.78% of the population voted for a referendum that bought back hard labour in prisons.
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.
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.
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!
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?
1) Hard 2) Words
"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
Anyone that phrases a referendum like that ought to be sentenced to hard labor themselves for attempting to subvert democracy.
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.