Thank you, everyone. I’m so glad you’re all responding. I feel my ignorance melting away as we speak. 
What do you mean by this?
By proposing you visit that other link?
Well, I just supposed your knowledge about Soviet territorial divisions would very much be appreciated there.
Or by “Manchester, Siberia”?
If you feel bothered by it, sorry. I’m of course not lacking respect to the great city of Manchester, one of the navels of Europe’s football world.
I’m too ashamed to talk about my government right now.
Is it because of the whole Srebrenica scandal?
woolly, isn’t the Queen your Head of State, and the GovGen simply exercises those powers, just like in Canada? See section 61 of the Australian Constitution:
I’ve never seen the problem with the five-year term. In practice, it’s a four year term. Sure, there’s the occasional government that goes past four years, but as a general rule, those governments get punished by the voters for doing so. E.g. - Brian Mulroney’s PCs in 1993, Trudeau’s Liberals in 1978.
Actually, I wouldn’t agree that it’s a nightmare. Bills are drafted by lawyers trained in the drafting process; making them bilingual is just one of the many technical requirements for the legislation. Canada has a lot of translators trained in the legal field, and lots of lawyers with bilingual, bi-juridical legal training. While you won’t find many people who could do it all by themselves, that’s not what’s required. As with so many other matters in today’s world, it’s just a question of assembling a team to do the job.
Guidance is also provided by statutory and constitutional provisions that indicate that when you have bilingual legislation, both versions are equally authoritative. See, for example, section 57 of the Constitution Act, 1982
Faced with provisions like this, the courts have evolved specific techniques for the interpretiation of bilingual legislation. If an issue comes up, their task is to give an interpretation that best complies with both the English and the French versions of the provision.
Speaking from personal experience, in some of my court cases I’ve occasionally raised an issue of interpretation based on the French version as well as the English, but it’s never been a “silver bullet” kind of argument; more along the lines of “the wording of the French version is another reason in support of my overall argument about how the court should interpret this provision.”
My understanding is that when the codifiers prepared the first Civil Code of Lower Canada, they wanted to avoid using English terms with a specific common law meaning, to avoid inadvertently importing common law concepts. So they tended to use words from Scots Law, since Scotland is also a civil jurisdiction.
Bryan, in the legal context I would translate “patrimony” slightly differently, as the equivalent of “estate.” Under the civil law, rights can be characterised as either “patrimonial rights” or “extra-patrimonial rights.”
Patrimonial rights are rights that an individual can alienate or transfer, such as rights of property, contract, delict, and so on. All of those rights are in the individual’s patrimony, and can be passed on to the person’s heirs under the law of succession.
Extra-patrimonial rights are purely personal to the individual and cannot be alienated. Typical examples of extra-patrimionial rights are the rights to privacy, to bodily integrity, to reputation, and more recently, human rights. An individual can temporarily waive those rights, or choose not to stand on them, but can never alienate them.
Well, we’ve been ashamed of that for 7 years now. It’s just that the government resigned over it last week.
OTOH, it is the first government to take resonsibility over the poor UN representation in former Yugoslavia. I don’t see the French government resigning over it, and their share in the fuck-up that was Srebrenica was just as big as the Dutch one. If not more, since the Dutch troups effectively responded to a French general.
Anyways. Constitutional monarchy, two chamber system. I’ll post more later, it’s too late now.
US, UK, Oz, Canada are all much of muchness compared with the amazing Hong Kong government…
HK = a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China. It is fully self-governing in all areas except defense and top-level foreign affairs. Population 7m.
We are run by a Chief Executive, who is appointed by the Chinese government. To make it look good he is “elected” by a group of 800 people, mainly businessmen and representatives of community groups (90% of them people who will “vote” for the right guy, assuming their is more than one candidate. There was only 1 candidate in the recent “election”.)
His name is Tung Chee-hwa - an inept, bumbling idiot who almost bankrupted his family’s shipping company years back - but the Chinese government trust him, so they leave us alone, and that’s the main thing.
He has a cabinet called the Executive Council (“Exco”). Traditionally, this shared policy-making power with senior civil servants who headed govt depts. Under a new system, the Chief Executive will appoint around 15 ministers. As political appointees, they will be fully in charge of policy-making - like cabinet members anywhere else - and the civil service will be responsible for advice and implementation only.
At this point in drafting the constitution, the drugs started to kick in…
The Legislative Council (“Legco”) is the legislature. It has 60 seats…
- 24 are democratically elected!!! Yippee. These people represent geographical areas.
- 30 represent “functional constituences” - eg banking, law, medical, tourism, transport, accounting, teachers, etc etc. In many of these constituences (eg banking), each company gets 1 vote. So there are only a few hundred voters. In some cases, one person gets several votes because he runs more than 1 pcompany. Most of these members are essentially representing big business, and they will do whatever the Chief Executive asks them to do.
- 6 are elected by (and from) the group of 800 stooges mentioned earlier. as with the other tycoons in Legco, they are businessmen who think they can help their businesses in China by kowtowing to Peking (doesn’t work, interestingly).
Legco members mostly belong to parties. Very amateurish, self-interested and devoid of intelligent policy positions.
The legislature has little power. It must approve government spending (and it sometimes holds up wasteful projects), and of course it has to pass laws. With business interests dominating, the Tung govermnent has an assured majority.
There are also District Councils, which are half-elected , half appointed. They don’t do anything much. My local one plants flowers allover the place.
According to the constitution, proper direct election of the CE and Legco will be possible after 2008.
Apart from the lack of proper elections, HK actually runs pretty much the same way as other places blessed with the magic ingredients of ex-British colonies - rule of law, freedom of speech/worship, property rights ($$$), etc etc.
Plus we only pay 15% salaries/profits tax, and zero capital gains tax or sales tax. Beat that.
Explore my website (The Diary, Liberty Party and Not the South China Morning Post sections) for more on HK politics if you are that masochistic.
The expression ‘head of state’ is nowhere to be found in the Australian Commonwealth Constitution. Northern Piper is mostly correct: certainly on a plain English reading of s 61 and other Constitutional provisions, the Queen is the Australian Head of State, albeit through her representative, the Governor-General. However, there is considerable debate as to whether the Governor-General is actually our Head of State. A number of legal writers have made strong arguments to this effect. The Queen is bound by convention to allow the Governor-General to independently exercise the powers conferred on her. It would be quite unthinkable for HRH to actually interfere in the government of Australia.
Nonetheless, some bodies such as the Australian Republican Movement argue that the Queen is our Head of State. (Although obviously, the ARM has a clear interest in proving the case that Australia has a foreign Head of State.)
Note that s 61 appears to confer executive power on the Queen, exercisable by the Governor-General. In reality, the G-G (and the Queen) are bound by convention to act on the advice of the Ministers of the Crown. At a Federal level, this means that executive power is in fact exercised by Cabinet on behalf of the G-G. Interestingly enough, Cabinet is not mentioned in the Constitution.
Woah, baby! I love it when you talk dirty to me. 
Embarassing disclaimer: I have a career interest in taxation law
Sounds like another chief exec in the world I know of…
I love this thread, keep it coming.
Thanks for that Narrad. Much more clearly put than I could have done.
Also …
… and neither is the Prime Minister, which begs the question of how did the Founding Fathers think the day-to-day mechanisms of operating parliament and governance was going to work?
Hemlock’s post remind’s me of a comment from Chris Patten about the PRC’s stance on HK’s Legislative Council. It wasn’t that they were against having an election per se, just that they would prefer to know the result in advance.
Every country in the World has engaged in shitty, grubby behaviour at least the equal of what you are talking about. But it’s a rarity for such an honourable gesture to be made and would only happen in a country where the electorate give a shit about justice. This was my impression of the Netherlands and I think there is still a lot of cause for pride.
Australia has, in my opinion, entrenched 2-party government at the national level by
- compulsory voting
- compulsory preferential voting
To explain the latter: suppose you have 5 candidates standing for a particular seat (ie district). A voter has to number all the boxes (in this case 1 to 5), from most favoured to least favoured, for his vote to count. If no candidate gets 50% + 1 of the valid votes, the candidate with the least number of votes is eliminated and his/her votes are given to whoever is number 2 on their votes, and so on until one candidate gets over 50%.
This means election campaigns are increasingly pitched to the people who are thinking of voting for minor parties, to get them to give their 2nd or 3rd preference to one of the major parties.
They know that the audience is captive; everyone has to vote. The majors rely on the minor parties not getting enough votes, and these votes trickling back to the majors. The major parties are getting elected nowadays on 35-40% of primary votes, which is nowhere near the “mandate” they trumpet that they have after the election.
Pakistan has a general running it as the president and his cabinet of technocrats rite now and we’ve got mayors and a town council for each town. Now theres gonna be a referendum where ppl will vote wether to keep musharaff as prez for the next 5 years and after that parlimentary elections will be held in october 
Ya know, as tempting as it is to accept this compliment and pat ourselves on our Dutch backs, I’m a little bit of a cynic when our government’s motives for resigning are concerned - what with the general elections underway in a little over a month.
NOT resigning after the condemning report would have been handing free ammo to the opposition. Resigning saves face internationally, AND will give you a few more seats in the polls. Maybe justice fits in there somewhere too. I really don’t know.
Amen.
In fact two of the potential PM candidates in the upcoming election were ministers in the 1995 government. Of course there’s no way in heck either of them will resign as candidate :mad: especially not this close to the election.
Balmain Boy, I wrote quite a long post (using ‘facts’ off the top of my head) disputing your second point. Then I did the research. Then I deleted my post. It seems you are quite right. (I never expected to learn this much from a thread started meant to convey information to foreignors, not natives like me.)
Still not so sure about your first point, but I’ll let that one slide. 
Little hijack: did we all see Chris Patten in the news last week? Brought back memories of that occasion when Bejing called him “a serpent, a whore and a sinner for a thousand years”. Classic!
[Taking notes for Pit material]
Thank you all so much for your responses so far. Keep 'em coming. This is really great.
I know we have Japanese Dopers – do any of them want to come out in this thread? ::crosses fingers that someone reads that::