Place your bets
UPDATE: All bets are off. See this post for reasons.
CURRENT BETS:
Illegal $265
Legal: $30
As of latest comment
At present a $10 bet on Labour’s pledge card being legal, would pay almost 9:1 odds. Come on Dr Cullen? Helen? Trevor?, you must be willing to bet at least $10 on the legality of the pledge card.
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Here’s a chance for true believers of Helen to make some money from the evil right.
Place a bet here on the outcome of the court case that seeks a declaration from the High Court that the expenditure on the production and distribution of the “Pledge Card” and related brochure from money allocated by Parliament as funding for the Labour parliamentary party was in breach of the Constitution Act 1986 s.22(c), the Public Finance Act 1989 sections 4, 5 and 9, and Article 4 of the Bill of Rights 1688..
Now here is how the betting works. You can bet either that the spending will be found to be legal (the plaintiffs lose on all grounds) or that the spending will be found to be illegal (the plaintiffs succeed in having the expenditure found to be in breach of one of the cited Acts). All bets are off if the lawsuit does not proceed to judgement for any reasons (including Labour retrospectively changing the law).
Now I will make no money out of this. All money bet, will be distributed to those on the winning side in proportion to each person’s bet. Here’s an example of how it works.
Say $5,000 is bet that the spending is found illegal and $250 is bet that the spending is legal. If it is found to be legal, then those who bet it is legal will get $20 for every $1 they bet.
People should place bets by publicly pledging their bet below in the comments, and also sending an e-mail to dpf@ihug.co.nz confirming they placed the bet, and their contact details so I can verify them.
I will update this page with the running total of bets for and against, and the payout odds for each.
I suggest $10 should be the minimum bet. Again this is a great chance for all those people who argue that Labour have not broken the law to put their money where their mouth is. And also a great chance for those of the other view to do the same.
Let the betting begin.