David Farrar has recommended some sort of questionnaire that determines who you should vote for based on your answers to some questions. So I thought I'd give the New Zealand Vote Compass a try.
I ran into problems with Question 2.
"Up to what age should the government fund GP visits for children?"
They don't give the current age of funding, yet they ask if it should stay the same or be younger or older. There is no option for no funding of GP visits for children. In order to answer the question and move to the next, I had to choose "same as now" or "I don't know", which were the closest to my opinion. "I don't know" implied cluelessness or lack of opinion on my behalf, so I couldn't choose that. "Same as now", implied I was happy with the status quo - which is what I chose, yet I don't know what the status quo is. It was annoying to be asked a question about something, yet not given enough information to be able to answer more accurately as to what I thought, given that it's supposedly a political compass test.
At this point I decided I would write this post. I opened up a new tab, created the post, started typing and then tried to get back to the test and then I ran into another problem - I couldn't find the tab! I normally have a lot of tabs open at once, and when I started this post, I had more than 14 on my screen. So a descriptive tab title and icon is very important to me, that way I can quickly move to the tabs I need to. The Vote Compass website though, has no icon and the tab title starts off with "New Zealand, which makes it very difficult to identify amongst many tabs.
I suggest that they change their tab title to be Vote Compass, and use that colourful graffic in some way as their website icon.
Onto Question 3 which asks, "How much funding should the Department of Conservation receive?"
Again, how much do they receive now? It doesn't tell me, yet I am supposed to answer whether or not they should receive the same, or less or more. Probably less, given some of their people think they can tell adventurous types that they have offended a mountain by eating food up there, but I'd still like to know how much that funding is before I proffer an opinion on their funding.
I gave up, as it was too annoying.
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| A snapshot of the Vote Compass website and some of my open tabs |
I ran into problems with Question 2.
"Up to what age should the government fund GP visits for children?"
They don't give the current age of funding, yet they ask if it should stay the same or be younger or older. There is no option for no funding of GP visits for children. In order to answer the question and move to the next, I had to choose "same as now" or "I don't know", which were the closest to my opinion. "I don't know" implied cluelessness or lack of opinion on my behalf, so I couldn't choose that. "Same as now", implied I was happy with the status quo - which is what I chose, yet I don't know what the status quo is. It was annoying to be asked a question about something, yet not given enough information to be able to answer more accurately as to what I thought, given that it's supposedly a political compass test.
At this point I decided I would write this post. I opened up a new tab, created the post, started typing and then tried to get back to the test and then I ran into another problem - I couldn't find the tab! I normally have a lot of tabs open at once, and when I started this post, I had more than 14 on my screen. So a descriptive tab title and icon is very important to me, that way I can quickly move to the tabs I need to. The Vote Compass website though, has no icon and the tab title starts off with "New Zealand, which makes it very difficult to identify amongst many tabs.
I suggest that they change their tab title to be Vote Compass, and use that colourful graffic in some way as their website icon.
Onto Question 3 which asks, "How much funding should the Department of Conservation receive?"
Again, how much do they receive now? It doesn't tell me, yet I am supposed to answer whether or not they should receive the same, or less or more. Probably less, given some of their people think they can tell adventurous types that they have offended a mountain by eating food up there, but I'd still like to know how much that funding is before I proffer an opinion on their funding.
I gave up, as it was too annoying.
I found the same problems with it as well Lucia. Also I thought it was about pointing people to the best options, not about collecting personal information. There were no questions about social engineering, gay marriage, and sex education, etc. In the end it pointed me to ACT, and ACT is not for me. However, it also pointed to NZ First which is closer for me.
ReplyDeleteI thought I'd try again, and now the questions are different. There's this doozy of a question, "How much control should Māori have over their own affairs?" What the heck does that mean? They might have well asked how much control Chinese should have over their own affairs, or women for that matter.
ReplyDeleteArgh, questions that make no sense!
The questions are not different, they just shuffle them for subsequent tries. I did the thing about 5x to test results.
ReplyDelete