Posts by Matthew Poole
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Provocation will be scrapped by a government bill. So Weatherston's obnoxious performance has turned out to be good for something after all.
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In the absence of a more-recent-and-relevant thread in which to post it, provocation will be scrapped by a government bill.
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isn't "trust" an odd term for something which often seems to come down to tax avoidance?
It's a very, very old term, possibly one of the oldest in "English language" legalese, given that it dates back to the Crusades. Back then, when the head of the household was heading off to claim glory, honour, and as many infidel Muslim scalps as possible, he had to do something with his property to keep it from being claimed back by the local lord. After all, with no laws of property succession and nobody but males allowed to own property, if the head of the household died or was otherwise incapacitated the land reverted to the nobility of the area. So, to avoid this, he'd pass the land to somebody he trusted to be run for the benefit of his family. The trust was that not only would it be run for the benefit of his family, but also that the land would, on his return, be transferred back into his possession. With, at the time, no law to require that this be done, it was very definitely a matter of trust.
From that basic concept we now have the modern trust structure, which is an entity that holds property on behalf of some set of persons for the benefit of another (possibly overlapping) set of persons. Tax avoidance is, as much as anything, an incidental benefit to a trust, since the IRD have fairly broad powers to go around and through trusts to ensure that tax is paid. They're more useful for stopping disgruntled creditors or former partners from getting at your assets, and even that protection is somewhat qualified.can Bill English at some time in the future become a beneficiary of the trust once more?
And at that point does something happen to get back the money he's currently taking due to the shenanigans being uncovered?
I would assume that he's actually ceased to be a trustee rather than a beneficiary, as it's the trustees who hold the title to the property. The Herald article refers to him having transferred full title to Mary, and that's something that trustees do. Trustees are the legal owners of all trust property, as the trust has no legal personality (that is, it's not recognised as an entity in its own right) and thus cannot own anything.
As for a claw-back, I doubt it. This is taxpayer money in the form of an allowance, and the pollie-grubbies are very unwilling to let anything as inconvenient as propriety get in the way of their snuffling at the trough. -
Argh. Recursive tax deductions. I already have a headache thanks to my cold, damn you!
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ww, that's certainly how it read to me. His position is consistent with an abolition of the welfare state, relying on familial charity to support those who are unable to support themselves.
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Mark, in which utopia do you reside where young people have convenient relatives who can take them in? Assuming that there are relatives in the same town, which is a big assumption with current population mobility trends, who's to say they can afford to feed another mouth? Or would you uproot a youth who's probably very vulnerable, force them to leave behind their social networks and potentially current schooling, in order that the state doesn't have to support them to a very negligible level? When I was 16/17, my nearest non-immediate-family relatives who I'd actually met lived in Hamilton and I lived in Auckland. That would probably have placed them considerably closer to me than would be the case for a lot of teens who get the IYB. Hell, maybe the nearest family members are no better than the parents from whom they are so eager to escape.
To give you a succinct, and I suspect fairly widely-held within this forum, response to your position: fuck that shit!
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Oh and while were at it lets all enjoy the drive in the morning to the school of our choice. You gotta love Auckland and the school run.
Tell me about it. I live in the near vicinity (under 10 minutes' walk) of St Cuthberts and Dio, with sundry other schools inside a 1km radius. It's patently obvious by the traffic when it's school holidays. There's some impact from university holidays, but nothing like as marked as when schools are out.
Disgustingly, Hamilton's rush hour is between 3.00pm and 4.00pm.
Oh, has the 'tron shifted to its own time zone? The last time I had the misfortune to try and drive through at 6 on a week night I would've been entitled to believe I'd never left Auckland. Or are you saying that the afternoon rush is worse than the evening one? That's scary, especially given how sneery Hamiltronians are about Auckland traffic.
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Sofie, just because the reports aren't released to the general public doesn't mean that there's not a thorough investigation. Rarely is the release of a report justified on the grounds of "in the public interest." It may well be something in which the public is interested, but that's not the same thing. The public is also interested, at least according to the low standards of the tabloids, in what Britney (doesn't) wear under her dress when she goes clubbing, but you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who considers it to be in the public's interest to know. Would we be done some great injustice by not knowing?
With police use of firearms, there is a great risk that the release of every report would put at risk more lives because officers would be wondering "If I pull the trigger right now, am I going to be subjected to endless criticism by the great unwashed, who, having been fed cherry-picked snippets of the final report by sensationalist media, believe that they could've handled this differently?" It is very definitely not in the best interests of public safety to put that question into their minds.
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Between this and the policy of kicking out pregnant women on student visas, this is shaping up to be the most anti-women government we've seen in a while...
Not quite sure if you can blame National for the policies behind the immigration thing, but they weren't exactly leaping to the defence of the women in question once it became public. Danielle's point about "pay equity is too expensive" is far closer to revealing the true anti-women colours of our wonderful elected dictators.
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Sofie, I'm not trying to scare you. I'm simply trying to dissuade you from judging the police against the yardstick of 24 hours of contemplation, and explain that these situations normally occur in a matter of minutes. The solutions you think you can see days after the event are, often, impossible or impractical for a small number of non-specialist police officers to implement on the street.
Most police shootings in this country are by general duties officers, not armed specialists such as the AOS or the Special Tactics Group. The recent shooting in Christchurch was rather unusual in that it was the AOS who fired the fatal rounds. Normally things unfold so fast that, if there's time to request them at all, the AOS are still mustering prior to deployment. That says that the available options are few because there are insufficient officers present and armed to try and contain the subject until the other things you suggest, such as getting background information from family or getting a psychologist to try and talk to the subject, can be carried out. When the safety of the general public is their paramount concern, the police will not let an armed threat wander around public spaces. Bad enough to have to shoot someone who is armed, but far, far worse to have that person injure an innocent member of the public.As an example, and without rehashing the event, I believe it was 64 seconds from the time that Abbott first called out to Wallace to the time that he opened fire. The entire incident from the time that the police were first notified of the smashing of windows to the time that Wallace was shot was less than an hour.