Written By: - Date published: 9:26 am, January 22nd, 2008 - 99 comments
Categories: housing, Media -
Tags: granny, housing, john key, Media
Yesterday The Herald reported that:
Demographia, an international survey business run by Hugh Pavletich of Christchurch and Wendell Cox of the United States, today issued its fourth annual report, showing New Zealand has slipped drastically on an international scale.
Now quite aside from the shoddy methodology of the study to which the PM has already responded, a moment spent with Google reveals some interesting results.
The highlight is this extraordinary bit of brown-nosing from Hugh Pavletich to John Key back in October:
Dear John,
Housing Affordability
Congratulations on your sterling efforts over recent months in articulating sound policies on this issue. It is clear from your recent speeches and statements and those of your Housing Spokesman, Philip Heatley MP, that the National Party as a team. is researching the issue thoroughly and developing policies which will work & and over a reasonable time & allow young New Zealanders the same housing opportunities their parents had. They deserve nothing less.
My apologies for not writing to you earlier & but my wife Marg and I have been overseas since mid July.
It is particularly heartening to me to see the progress the New Zealand National Party is making & since I embarked on this issue on a voluntary basis in late 2004, when I initiated and with my good friend Wendell Cox, developed the Annual Demographia Housing Affordability Surveys. The 2008 4th Edition will likely be released late January…
I almost wish I had a Herald subscription just so I could cancel it.
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Does anyone remember Liarbour’s last attempts to create “affordable housing” and attack evil property speculators that took place in the 1970s?
At a time when a mortgage was difficult to come by and banks were picking and choosing as to who got a housing loan, property developers were doing up houses in inner city Wellington, then onselling them at a profit with vendor finance to people ineligible for a bank loan. The vendor then got their money out by discounting the mortgage off to a second tier lender.
Sure, the purchasers were paying a higher interest rate on their loans, but these were people who would otherwise have been unable to afford their own home.
Railing against the twin evils of “speculators” and “profit” Liarbour introduced a capital gains tax (soon repealed by National) which abruptly halted a market response to a human need, as developers shifted out their cash to more profitable investment mediums.
As a consequence, Liarbour had to step in an build hundreds more state houses, which created a raft of additional state serfs and cost taxpayers a bomb. All Nanny had to do was stay out of it and let the market get on with meeting the needs of consumers.
Correction: I have never said the market is “perfect” but left alone it is always seeking an equilibrium. A TEMPORARY market failure is always preferable to long-term GOVERNMENT failure and its ongoing unintended side effects.
As note previously, what Thomas Sowell calls “The Vision of the Anointed” is one in which good intentions will always trump consideration of real outcomes. When people pay no price for being wrong they feel no compunction in co-opting others as human cattle for their social experiments.
Come on, bean, you’re being dishonest now. The EBs distributed two pamphlets. They weren’t particularly high quality, were clearly not written by communications professionals, and I don’t think I know anybody who actually received it.
Compare this with the mouthpiece for the Labour Party, set up with the potential support of the EPMU, who may or may not be turning a blind eye while its staff write this blog. We won’t know for sure until Tane makes a proper disclosure statement. As Bryce Edwards notes in kiwiblogblog, it is an issue if EPMU staff are writing the Standard’s blog and it isn’t declared, since the Standard has championed the cause of the Electoral Finance Act, the EPMU is an affiliate union of the Labour Party, and the EPMU will be a third party campaigner during the election campaign.
[Irish Bill]: Prick you have been warned about this. I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you missed the first warning. If you continue to make the same baseless allegations against the owners of this blog you will be banned for a week.]
Welcome back Michele, I hope you can behave more civilly this time.
I’m afraid you are wrong about the capital gains tax. There wasn’t one. As I recall there were cheap first home buyer loans available from the housing corporation in the early seventies but one of the prerequisites for the loan was that the house had to be new. This lead to a boom in privately developed affordable housing across the country including the creation of whole suburbs (such as Kelson in Wellington). There was also a boom in state housing.
If anything the Housing Corporation loans encouraged private sector development. I can’t recall the vendor finance schemes you talk of. They might have existed but they were not such a significant portion of the market as to be memorable.
The were sufficiently significant for Liarbour to move against them politically …
What evidence do you base this on?
Overseas experience clearly shows a relatively weak link between GCT’s and speculative bubbles.
The real driver is the availability of cheap credit. If the banking industry demanded sensible equity ratios (instead of the 90-100% loans that we have been seeing lately)… and where also required to maintain lower fractional reserve ratios with real liquid assets…the actual supply of borrowed money that actually drives these bubbles would be moderated.
Fractional reserve banking means that banks are essentially commercial printers of money. Once the supply of credit becomes too loose then inflation is inevitable. Viewed from this perspective, calls from people like Wendell Cox to increase the supply of land fall into perspective. Because banks make their money by creating credit, then it becomes obvious that no matter how much the supply of land increases… the supply of credit will always grow faster.
Ah, Bill, now we’ve got threats of banning. I didn’t make baseless allegations. I picked up on an allegation made by Bryce Edwards, which Tane chose to fudge an answer on. All his answers have been fudged. He hasn’t answered the substantive issue, as to whether any Standard authors are employed by the EPMU, the Labour Party, Parliamentary Services, Ministerial Services, or any other affiliate union of the Labour Party.
In case you’ve missed it, Bill, this has been the issue dominating the blogs over the last couple of days, since the Standard was forced to reveal that its hosting has been subsidised by the Labour Party. Since Tane’s fudging, kiwiblogblog has declared its political affiliations–that its authors are amateurs, and none of them are employed in the public service, by a political party, by an affiliate to a political party, by a third party, by a lobby group, think tank, or by Parliamentary or Ministerial Services.
Unfortunately, Tane’s deliberate obfuscation–on the very flimsy pretext that it would encourage stalking, while Tane encourages the Standard’s Stalker-in-Chief and uses a nonsensical argument that the stalker-in-chief felt intimidated–as a reason for not divulging the Standard’s political affiliations. It is clear that the Standard could easily do so without revealing the identities of the persons involved.
Finally, the Standard’s support, as Bryce Edwards has noted at kiwiblogblog, for the Electoral Finance Act, and championing the cause of everybody else declaring their political affiliations–makes the Standard’s excuses for acting in a sneaky, secretive manner, trying to hide its political affiliations–seriously compromises the integrity of this blog.
[Irish Bill] That’s it prick, you’re banned for a week for repeated lies and groundless accusations.
probably best you be off then really IP – give you more time at quality sites like kiwiblog.
the sprout said:
“probably best you be off then really IP – give you more time at quality sites like kiwiblog.”
and..
“is that you SlaterWhale, or DPF?”
Russel Brown even disagrees with you. Perhaps you’d like to bust out some fundamentalism and call him a fascist too now?
I’d be surprised if anybody takes your shrill outbursts at all seriously.
BANNED FOR WHAT? For asking a few questions?
Where did he lie Bill? How were his questions BASELESS?
Banned for asking questions? Hope you are all proud of yourselves. Authoritarians of the highets order.
Fascists!
The Standard is OVER.
Hi Kimble, thanks for your contribution
I think this sums it up
[IrishBill]: Prick, you’ve posted this comment several times now across several threads and are becoming a troll. You’ve been given more space to make your point than you would have been given on other blogs. If you don’t refrain from this behaviour you will face a one week ban.]
seems more than fair to me. two warnings. three strikes trolls are out
Really? I got banned for asking questions that weren’t even answered? This doesn’t augur well for the investigators at the Electoral Commission. They’ll get deported as soon as they start looking at the activities of the EPMU.
I’m a little bit confused. Is this the same Standard that harangued DPF for banning left-wingers?
Deano
Russell was being polite. How can a guy like DPF, who isn’t all that new to blogging, miraculously have an innocent “cookie problem” from when “Cameron once logged in from this laptop, and a cookie remembered his details. But the last time Cameron used my laptop (going off memory) was the local body election night in October”.
(http://www.publicaddress.net/system/topic,917,hard_news_monster_weekend.sm?p=39619#post39619)
ah… yeah right. so despite DPF having commented successfully as DPF on PAS many times since, some how a rogue cookie lodged in his machine and just resurfaced then – when DPF had just made a comment as Slater Whale that was clearly identifiable as a reply from DPF (otherwise he wouldn’t have said anything, would he).
how very very odd.
how odd too that DPF never sweeps his cookies. a far more likely explanation is that DPF was standing in as Whale and had to declare “It is quite baffling to me how it happened” when in the excitement of the server story DPF shot himself in the foot by exposing the fact he stands in for Slater Whale
BANNED FOR WHAT? For asking a few questions?
How about, banned for constantly fishing for their identities while seeking to remain anonymous himself? I’m just surprised they let him carry on with that bullshit as long as they did.
Nonsense, PM. I’ve done nothing of the sort. I’ve called on the Standard to disclose their political affiliations, not their identities. Given that two EPMU employees have already been named at Kiwiblog, it’s astonishing that the Standard would allow their names to be bandied about as potential authors of the Standard, if they are innocent.
The Standard has deliberately obfuscated and played clever games about their political affiliations, despite calling on everybody else to disclose their political ties, and championing electoral law that is supposed to clean up the involvement of shady third-parties in politics.
With a name like psycho milt and you go on about people remaining anonymous on blogosphere ? Really, you should stop throwing stones inside your glasshouse .
it’s a shame your “banning” still allows you to comment IP.
Perhaps IrishBill has reconsidered the rashness of his actions, and un-banned me. He’s a very reasonable chap.
Hopefully he’ll be reasonable enough and give a proper disclosure of the Standard’s political affiliations now.
i don’t see anything rash in warning someone twice, giving them the option to stop trolling, and when the troll remains and keeps acting like a prick the person follows through on their warning. seems fair
IP you’ve been given a perfectly adequate disclosure – you know that, now you’re just lying again and again.
can’t the NRU come up with more lines than that? they shouldn’t make you lie so persistently, it ruins your stellar credibility.
So is it okay to call somebody a pig-fucker then?
I dug out the source report…
Demographia PDF
I haven’t gone over it in any detail (only reason I looked at it was insomnia). However looked at it enough to know I wouldn’t use it for ANY decision making I’d use.
I consider it another good example of how to lie with carefully selected statistics. It compares apples with oranges.
I ignored all of the conclusions while I checked the visible source data. Basically the sources are really suspect.
Just look at the differences in table 7 (extracted below)
Australia
Markets over 50,000 population
Canada
Markets corresponding to metropolitan areas (CMAs)
over 100,000 population
Ireland
Markets over 50,000 population
New Zealand
Markets over 100,000 population
United Kingdom
Markets corresponding to urban areas over 150,000
population
United States
Markets corresponding to metropolitan areas (MSAs)
over 400,000 population
This means that looking in NZ/US that in NZ it has all of the areas that people are moving to (look up the NZ census 2006). In the US it has areas that people are moving to and moving away from. Looking at Schedule 2 :-
So in NZ there are 7 markets with a range having a price/income multiple of 5.3 (Dunedin) to 7.5 (Tauranga).
In the US there are 227 markets ranging from 1.9 (Youngstown, OH) to 11.5 (Los Angeles, CA)
There is exactly 1 market, Auckland on 6.9 that would maybe fit into the criteria to be included in the US table.
It states that there are 49 areas in the US that are affordable. Looking at Table 4, to me it looks like a list of urban areas that I wouldn’t want to live in. Flint-MI for instance I have those vivid images of Moore’s documentary section on U-Haul. But I can see a number of urban areas in there that I know I’d want to stay away from.
As I say – comparing apples with oranges…
Where is the table that shows the population in the data points?
Where is the table that shows the population growth or decline in each of data points?
Where is the table that shows the actual number of house sales in each market?
Where is the table that shows the proportion of rental houses compared to owner occupier? This is particularly important in a market like Canada where a LOT of accommodation is rental on long term leases that area regulated by legislation.
They have used median incomes and prices everywhere. Anyone who has done ANY statistics knows that is an excellent way to hide variances. For instance if only the low income houses are turning over – then the median will be very low.
The central tenet of the paper appears to be that a high median price/income multiple is strongly related to restrictions on use of land area (ie land rationing). This is expressed in figure 9.
Ok? So where is the data on how this figure is constructed? One side of the graph is from schedule 9. Where is the data that was used to decide if there was land rationing or not in the areas shown on the graph. It SEEMS to tell me to refer to previous demographia surveys. It’d be nice to have a reference to where to look – that is why you cite sources – so people reviewing your data have a place to check it.
On the basis of the munged up numbers in this paper it seems like a waste of time looking further into data from demographia. This ‘survey’ looks like a way to rationalize a pre-detirmined opinion. It is the sort of stuff you expect to see from a first year student.
I haven’t seen the herald article (or any of the other msm) that reported on this garbage survey, so I really have no idea about how prominent it was. But the article in the online herald is an extremely poor piece of journalism by Anne Gibson.
The herald article looks like direct copy of a press release from demographia with a few quotes from other people. Were they in the press release as well? I can’t believe that anyone who’d actually looked at the data in the survey would have wanted to rely on it (see my previous post).
But surely any journo that actually read the survey would have realized that it was bogus – just there to provide superficial evidence to support a viewpoint.
They must teach journo’s something about either statistics or checking facts. This looks like an example of the msm doing what IrishBill described in Spinning the spin.
With a name like psycho milt and you go on about people remaining anonymous on blogosphere ?
Your reading comprehension not up to much then? For obvious reasons, I’m in favour of bloggers’ anonymity being respected.
No Sprout,
A “perfectly adequate disclosure” has not been given. I light of the fact thestandard is sitting on a Labour party funded server, I think it is perfectly reasonable to then ask what other affiliations the two entities have – this is the issue, and it has not been addressed by the blogger of thestandard.
Taking into account the disclosure demanded by thestandard of other groups, not answering these questions is amazingly poor form
Phil, I’ve got somewhat lost here – how have you managed to tie in the server upon which The Standard is hosted (which also seems to host several right-wing websites, in case you missed it) with a demand that the authors reveal their workplaces?
I can’t see the link between two two issues. Wouldn’t it be more honest to act like IP and demand, without good reason, that the bloggers reveal their workplaces because…umm…because you’re asking them to.
I’m not demanding anything Matty, I’m simply pointing out that the standard to which thestandard.org.nz expects it political rivals to adhere to, is not being followed in the case of its own (accused) behaviour.
I would not expect an individual blogger to divulge their place of employment if they were not willing to do so. However, where potential conflicts of interest occur – and on the face of evidence presented, this appears to be the case here – the authors have a responsibility to their readers, like you and I, to be open and honest about it
So “In light of the fact thestandard is sitting on a Labour party funded server” is a cover for you insisting that the authors of this site give up any semblance of anonymity on the internet, and you’re admitting it has nothing to do with the server. After all, as Lynn Prentice noted, there were a few right-wing sites also hosted on the same server. Not quite a smoking gun.
I just want it to be clear that anyone demanding to know the bloggers’ identities and places of employment doeesn’t try and hide that demand behind the server issue.
The server is the only ‘evidence’ that has been presented here (on KB anyway), and it has nothing to do with the questions people such as IP are trying to raise.
Matthrew.
Actually the RWS’es were on one of the previous servers that I used. I’ve done a number of sites for various people in the past. A friend, or friend of a friend asks…. Some of the sites have been pretty radical (by my standards) as well – especially some of the animal rights stuff one of my young relatives worked on.
TheStandard has moved around servers a bit in its brief history. I think where it is at present is mainly LWS.
Lynn Prentice