Posts by Moz
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Speaker: Sprawled out, in reply to BenWilson,
My own feeling that we need new levers of economic control.
Yep. Various governments keep whining that there's no money so they "have to" cut spending. The alternative is to raise taxes, which is apparently something they can't think of (I'm an ecognomic geeniuz, I teels ya).
We could just fix the taxes we have, because right now an awful lot of what most people consider "income" is not taxed, and some of it is even officially not taxable. So we could start by taxing all income. I'm kind of attracted to the NZ/US view that capital gains and so on count as "unearned income" and should be taxed differently. But unlike NZ I think they should be taxed, and unlike the US I think it should be at a higher rate. Say, 50%, or "maximum possible marginal rate on all income".
Similarly with company tax, I think it's quite reasonable to do a sanity check by saying "your company made $X in the most recent year we have numbers for, and about 4% of your activity was in NZ. You must pay 4% x $total profit x NZ tax rate, as the absolute minimum income tax.
Also, a financial transactions tax. I think we may need to also tax empty/unused land and houses too.
But really, a big chunk of the problem is foreign money regarding NZ as a combination safe haven and tax shelter. That needs to be fixed too. Perhaps trusts with no beneficial owner (ie, the physical person who owns them) get a declared tax rate, and if necessary a declared income from their assets/turnover.
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Speaker: Housing for the disabled is a…, in reply to Rosemary McDonald,
What is the point of compulsorily acquired data if the Gummint is either not going to use it for the general good....or even worse...use data collected against the target group?
Wait until you see the new innovations Australia has introduced. It's being done online and there's not even the pretence of privacy any more. Your data will be collected, it will be used for anything the government thinks is a good idea, and it will be secured as well as the ABS can afford (with budget cuts for all!). I'm sure NZ will be watching with interest.
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Speaker: Sprawled out, in reply to Sacha,
It's a bigger dynamic than we can control. I'd still push for regional economic development
Yep, this. It's difficult for governments to fight it, and the ones succeeding seem to have 50M people or more, but that is possibly just because with that many people you can have several 5M people cities. In New Zealand with only 5M people total it's hard enough to have one decent city, let alone several. Christchurch is great, as is Dunedin, but they're "technically cities" rather than the sort of place where you can have multiple symphony orchestras and a decent selection of touring international artists. Even if everyone goes to see the theatre production... that's 2000 people a night for a couple of years, and good luck getting literally everybody to go.
Look, I live in Sydney because there are relatively few people doing my sort of work in NZ and if I want one of those jobs I'd have to be willing to live in Wellington or Auckland on half the money I get now. There are more people, more jobs, more of everything in Sydney than in Auckland. When we bought a house it was "out along this train line until we can afford it", and my approach to jobs is much the same "smallest city with more than 5 job openings". And I still whine occasionally that there's only one train on my line between 4am and 6am on weekends.
And FWIW Sydney has been trying the "second city centre" game for, oh, 25 years now, and it still hasn't worked very well. Even at 30 minutes on the train, every 10 minutes, people still won't go "all the way out there" for a meeting. Forget decentralising 100km up the coast to Wollongong or Newcastle, for every job that moves out there I reckon at least two move in.
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Also, every one of those needs a matching emojii. We have 💩 but I can't really think of one for the rest. (and yes, there are unicode code points and glyphs for that as well as many, many others - if the Chinese can have 40,000+ for their language, I think another 100 or so to allow teenagers to communicate is fine)
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Looking at the bad words list... I'd put retard higher, along with nigger, coon and boong (are those last two particularly Australian?), but fuck lower, depending on context. I do think PA should have a similar survey, because I think we'd have a different set of ratings and probably a whole pile of different words.
I am really curious as to the language used by participants in the group exercises, because being exposed to that language does tend to produce it. I suspect that like many here, being exposed to the clips used would generate strong emotional reactions in group members. I'm also thinking the survey would make a useful key "4 he's a 3 5 who can 6" :)
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I do use arse or arsehole as a generic insult, and I think it works better above. But far be it for me to tell Emma how to swear properly (I have an amusing mental image of that). And I recall a discussion on feministe or somewhere on good, rude-but-not-offensive terms out of which came crotchwad. But I still like arsehole, because it describes someone who is a source of shit. Often, accurately, someone who doesn't create the shit but is merely expelling what they've been given.
Also, pizza chit, because it's homonymous.
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Speaker: Sprawled out, in reply to Russell Brown,
That's a great libertarian logic fail right there.
I think it's more a classic example of libertarian logic. "less government is always better, you can tell by {insert example of government doing what people want}". The libertarian solution is usually to remove those disruptive elements of "the people" from consideration.
The problem in this case really is that "the people", specifically, those who vote in council elections, don't want intensification. The people who want that generally don't live where it's proposed to happen. Which is one problem that the super-council is designed to solve. I think there is a real need for larger-scale planning than we get with lots of little sub-city councils. But at the same time, anything the democracy-hating elitists want strikes me as a bad idea purely for that reason.
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It's single-handedly sorted out the genuine free-marketeers (who are usually OK with building upwards) from the Generation Rentier
Interestingly that link from steven takes the approach of also bashing town planning for their restrictions on sprawl.
Saying that the housing market is
significantly influenced by government
is a statement of fact.and
The compact cities cult
Yeah, problematic describes that paper pretty well. I find it amusing that first they complain about planners preventing people building what and where they want, then they flip that and talk about what people have been doing as an indicator of what they want to do. "very little intensification means people want sprawl" does not follow from "planners prevent intensification", if anything the contrary would be true.
I admit to losing interest half way through, when they get into praising the relaxation of building codes in the same paragraph as admitting that that led directly to the leaky homes crisis. But they won't let up on all the "regulatory costs", as if people would be any happier buying a new house then discovering that they now had to pay to have the road extended to the end of their driveway, a water main extended ditto and all the rest. You could easily end up as it is with cars, the "on road costs" package adding an extra 10% to the final bill. The whole reason developers are forced to pay those contributions up front is because it's cheap to build out the infrastructure in one hit, and that has to be disclosed because otherwise property developers would drop it in the fine print as an extra bill only noticed once the other payments had been made.
Although I hear there's a few islands in Auckland's harbours that could be built on, allowing it to expand east and west rather than just north and south. We should get rid of the petty restrictions that stop people building on active volcanoes, I think.
Russel, your stupid system just looked at my reply and said "I will throw that away, and ask Moz to log in again. That is extremely undesirable. Fortunately my browser cached it.
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The flip side of people getting pushed out by gentrification is the people pushed into gentrifying because it's all they can afford. In the old days people like that would buy in new subdivisions, but these days the equivalent is new apartments... and have you *seen* the new apartments? They're aimed at investors, not occupiers.
The solutions aren't personal, they're systematic. Choosing to stay renting because otherwise one particular family of people even poorer than you will have their rented house sold out from under them is both missing the point, and not going to work. The owner is selling, not the tenants, and if you don't buy someone else will. It's the general pressure from lots of people doing that, that matters. And you can't meaningfully affect that pressure by opting out.
For us the choice was borrow to the max, pay the extra costs and extra interest, and buy where we had rented, or move 20 minutes further out and get a nicer house at a much lower price. Even so, if house prices dropped 40% or 50%, we'd be so far underwater that I can't imagine we'd escape bankruptcy without an Iceland-style bailout (they bailed out the people, not the banks... they jailed the worst of the bankers). If there was a US/EU/NZ style bailout of the banks at the expense of the people we'd be screwed.
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The Conversation on "how proportional is it" , with the conclusion that for the two major groupings it's not too bad, but if you scale that graph to include The Greens getting one lower house seat (0.66%) from 10% of the vote it looks dodgy as. Hence my call for multi-member electorates if we can't just have PR.