Hello Everyone.

I'm new here, and in addition to a skin full of opinions you might get to shoot down at some point, I also have the need to collect some wide ranging opinions from a group such as yourselves for a little project I am working on...

I have cleared this already with the Board Admin, as I really don't want to step on anyone's toes...

What I want to do, is to compile a list of about 100 top generic questions that Aussies should ask their politicians in order to be fully informed about them. Rather than just write 100 questions myself all dripping with my personal bias, I figured that asking a diverse group such as yourselves to suggest questions would give a much fairer and I hope broader range of questions from many perspectives.

Initially, if you are willing, I would like suggestions for the top 10 broad topics or categories for the questions. Later on, once 10 topics are chosen, then I would like 10 questions for each topic.

Some of the topics are obvious - like Environment, Employment, Community Services, but I don't want to limit this to only those topics that seem obvious to me.

The end result of all this, is planned to be a free on-line tool that will encourage ordinary folk to quiz their politicians more closely on what they are all about. The questions will be like a starting point, or a range of suggestions to get people thinking.

So, if you are willing, please let your creative juices flow...

I look forward to chatting with you in the future.

Polly

freediver wrote on Jul 8^th, 2008 at 9:54pm:



No, not quite. Telling people what party suits them assumes that you know what party suits them. Clearly any suggestion that you do, can only be an opinion informed by one's own prejudices whatever they may be.

My starting point is that I have no idea what will best suit another person. The tool is just something that the individual user can use to help order the process of making up their own mind. There is a bit of a twist to make it appealing, but it is intentionally structured so that the only bias that can influence the outcome, is the bias of the individual user.

Thanks for the first list of suggested topics!

Sprintcyclist wrote on Jul 8^th, 2008 at 10:34pm:


Thanks for the encouragement 

Your suggestions seem to be more in the form of objectives than question topics...

Taking your first point as an example - the topic may be Immigration. Assuming immigration gets a guernsey as one of the top ten categories, then the question may be something like "Do you believe our immigration policies allow too many migrants to enter the country?"

I need to chose the topics first. Once they are chosen, then I will need questions for each topic, and if I am to rely on a computer to do the analysis, the questions will need to be in a form that allows a Yes or No answer, as in my example above. For now though, what I am really looking for is just the topics.

Sprintcyclist wrote on Jul 8^th, 2008 at 10:56pm:


Please don't think I'm telling you anything is wrong with your suggestion. I'm not! I am just constrained by what is possible in the software that is being put together. As I said in my first post, what I need are questions from as broad a range of opinions as possible as a starting point for users of the tool I want to build. All of your points suggested are equally valid, useful, and desirable input - I just need them massaged into a form that the software can cope with.

When the tool is up and running, users will be able to enter their own questions into the system as well, I just want to be able to offer a whole set of pre-loaded examples to choose from  - that is what I need these questions for.

Sorry if I offended you in any way - I was just trying to explain more clearly what I was after exactly.

Thanks for answering.

onya acid   

My focus is on areas of regulation, which I would like to see some changes.

1: Ethics
We have witnessed a progressive lowering of expectations of ethically responsible behaviour across the spectrum from Business to Government.
We expect salesman and politicians to be deceitful, for their own purposes, I would like to see that change, by applying real and effective penalties for unethical behaviour, and have watchdog organisations in place to enforce ethical standards.

2: Economy
Yes, it is the economy, stupid.
Economic competence is always an issue, and coming into a world where changing circumstances have seen all previously sound economic predictors, become less reliable, the importance of this area will only increase.

3: Education
With the changing economic focus of the world moving eastwards, we are ideally positioned to take a major role in the booming economies of the asian region.
We need to identify which areas of education to fast track, which will facilitate our role as a hub for Asian business activity, probably in Banking/Finance, Management, Advertising, PR, Information Technology, Green Technology/Renewable Energy Resources, etc.
By advancing our credentials in these types of ways we can evolve from the role of being little more than a non-value added resource supplier.
As I have said before, when a quarry outlives it's usefulness, it becomes a Tip.
If we raise our education levels to world's best standards, we will also cultivate a market as an Education supplier for the whole region.

4: Environment
We face the greatest environmental challenges ever, we must take a leading role as an innovative, and proactive environmentally sustainable, and responsible society.

So that is a few E's, to get me started with, I will work on other letters of the alphabet at another time.

Thanks for the replies guys.

To answer a few of your questions...

The eventual questions to be loaded into the system do need to have a yes/no answer purely so that boolean logic in the software is capable of analyzing them. There will also be the ability for those answering questions to qualify their answer so real people can make more sense of the yes or no - you just can't plot an explanation on a graph!

The only reason I want to break the questions up into topics, is so that people can find questions that are important to them more easily. A short list of mostly relevant questions is easier to deal with than a long list of mostly irrelevant ones.

Also, it is not important for the chosen questions to cover every conceivable issue within the category. These will just be the "starting" questions already in the system. People will be able to add their own questions as the system runs.

The actual software doesn't exist yet as a complete system. It is being written for me at the moment, and the job is about 1/4 done. So long as I can keep enough of the details under my hat until it is ready, it will be a unique service.

The problem with the "Big box - party polling" freediver was talking about, is that that sort of polling only ever asks if you agree or disagree with a pre-determined proposition. The questions that the poll ask are carefully crafted in order to illicit the responces that the people who commissioned the poll want. Having got the desired response, the poll is then used to justify whatever it was the group in question wanted in the first place. The worst of it is, we all let them get away with it time after time... Sometimes, they use focus groups to help choose the question that will best illicit the desired answer. My hope, is to effectively create a focus group with millions of members so the "real" questions will bubble to the surface without any spin doctors being able to adjust them first.

Thanks again - still looking forward to a wide range of views...

polly

freediver wrote on Jul 9^th, 2008 at 8:48pm:


Political Parties do tend to keep their polling results to themselves (unless it is deemed to be in the party's interest that they get leaked - to justify the party's position). Political parties of course, aren't the only ones to use polling like this. Just about every interest group there is will use polling to either justify or argue for whatever it is the interest group is interested in. Don't you find it interesting that never in the history of polling has any group ever released polling figures that didn't support whatever proposition the group was set up to promote?

Many years ago I was in the position of being a part of a group that needed to convince a previous Government about the rightness of our cause. We were advised to engage a professional polling company to conduct a survey in accordance with all the accepted standards to ensure statistical accuracy. The first question asked by the polling company's rep at the first meeting was "What results do you want to get?" As the questions were customised to match the intended result, I lost all faith in the polling industry as it stood.

polly