So after 3 and a half years, we have to wait another six months for another working group to start from scratch to evaluate light rail. It doesn't even sound like Dominion Rd is a definite as they've now mentioned Sandringham Rd. So absolutely nothing has been decided.
This project was originally sold to us as a much needed rail connection to the Auckland International Airpor. But it definitely won't be connecting to the airport anytime soon. (if ever).
So what's it all about?
Don't we ever learn?
Doesn't anyone remember the vanity project that was the viaduct light rail?
Developers thought it would be hoot to get rate payers to fund this vanity project to give their condo development a bit of a boho look. This vanity project has served its purpose and, despite all the big talk of extending it down Quay street to the Britomart transport hub, has been moth balled.
Now again there is talk of developers cashing in. With plans for multi-level condiminiums down the length of Dominion Road.
Of course these developers want a light rail, tramway, or whatever you want to call it down the length of Domininiou Road. Don't matter if, like the viaduct tramway, it doesn't actually connect to anything, because the tax and ratepayes will be footing the bill. But it will look flash. (for a while anyway).
Talk is, the construction will drive all the small businesses retailers down Dominion Road to the wall, and the developers will be able to buy up all these properties in a fire sale.
And the character of Dominion Road will be changed forever.
I feel I want to throw up.
I mean really, haven't we had enough of corpoarate welfare in this country?
Meanwhile Puhinui Road and the South Western Motorway is crying out for relief from traffic congestion to the airport. Let's get all those cars off the road The corridor is there. The need is there. Mike Lee saw the wisdom of it. The main trunk rail line is ritht there. What could be simpler. Even that old dinosaur Winston Peters with his populist air to the ground knew he could make political capital over the light rail vanity project down Dominion Road. The light rail project down Dominion Road, (or possibly down Sandringham Road) benefits no one except very limited special interest groups. It won't benifit workers who want to commute to their airport or nearby support workplaces, who currently find themselves in near grid lock traffic jams every working ding dong day.
It doesn't benefit arriving and departing air travelers from who want to get into and out of the city centre with as least hassle and time, and with a certaintly of timely arrival.
It doesn't benefit local businesses and residents.
Let's hope this disorganised dog's breakfast gets so tangled up in its own hubris that it never actually leaves the drawing board or the fevered imaginations of the condo builders.
So from today the minimum wage increases from $18.90 to $20 which will help some people. (I still think it would have been better to give everyone an extra $40 in the hand by changing the tax brackets so less tax is deducted). The tax brackets have not been adjusted since 2009? and both Nats and Lab have never adjusted for inflation. Any income over $48k is taxed at 30% which is way too high. And income over $70k that used to be 'rich pricks' income at33%. Well $an income of $70k is not what it used to be.
Wish they would do something about dependent partners – they managed to for the COVID response. The extra tax (about 5,000 per year) a single person supporting two people pays over two people earning the same income might enable things like Kiwisaver that simply isn't affordable supporting two people affordable – let alone saving for retirement for two people.
Oh that is right they did do something – they removed the ability of partners to get NZS so now the working partner has to work even longer.
Boo! Auckland Light Rail development according to Rt. Hon. Jacinda Ardern on RNZ this morning, is open to Public Private Partnerships–the NZ Labour Caucus monetarists (and their fifth columnist prodders in Govt. Ministries) invite further penetration of what should be public infrastructure by private capital.
"It is all about growth. Even when it is clear that more and more people want and need a reliable, trustworthy public broadcaster on free-to-air radio, the ultimate aim for RNZ is about boosting numbers.
Sometimes this “growth fanaticism” is presented cleverly. It has been described as a ‘moral obligation’ for RNZ ‘to build lifelong relationships with all New Zealanders’.
But ultimately it is the same ethos as listening to ambitious sales people talk about their targets."
In other breaking news on April Fool's Day the Prime Minister has decided that the Deputy Prime Minister will enter a Monastery and Mr Robertson has chosen to take an extended stay in the Kopua Monastery in Central Hawkes Bay. His parting words were "I shall spend my remaining years in prayer that my offences against the New Zealand people may be forgiven. I shall never speak again".
This is a Trappist establishment. Trappist monks do not take a vow of silence but do not indulge in "idle conversation". This is a problem for Grant as idle conversation comprises his entire repertoire.
[TheStandard: A moderator moved this comment to Open Mike as being off topic or irrelevant in the post it was made in. Be more careful in future.]
I think this Housing Crisis situation must be happening in most country's that adhere to neo liberal policy. Pulling back on state house building and selling off the same to reduce "big government" is a huge loser policy for the people that need it. And speculation in housing also rampant around the world with the same result-unaffordabilty. I think supply issues are not to blame in affordabilty, got fuck all to do with it IMHO. Our world pricing systems are all driven by demand regardless of supply levels. Butter anyone? We are surrounded by cows yet the price is up. Same with houses. Controls are needed but won't be forthcoming under neo liberal Govt's. Stuck with it!
For those buying their first home there is a huge discount provided by the Govt for new builds, so the incentive to buy existing houses by new buyers is just not there, and there is no upwards pressure on the market. House prices for 3 – 4 bedroom homes have stayed around the 350k – 450k range for years.
It does and it dosnt…..western central banks are members of a club and if you want the benefits of belonging to that club you play by the rules…and the rules are set by the hegemon…currently the US.
The government CAN decide it dosnt want to be in the club but that means losing the benefits of being in the club….and they fear that more than anything else at the moment.
Essentially, unless the Government decides the cost of being a member of the club is too high they are little more than middle management or worse, sales reps.
Fact is that successive WA Governments have consistently supported their construction and building industries thus maintaining and preserving a dedicated labour force. So there is no shortage of housing stock. They are in the fortunate position also of having abundant land available for development, and they have a well developed public transport system that supports these new developments. The biggest crisis as far as WA is concerned is the availability of water. There is a huge aquifer and a massive salt water desalination plant, but the rainfall in the area has steadily decreased over the last few decades as a result of the Hadley Cell shifting south with AGW and dramatically changing the climate.
Knew about the support, was unaware of the water issues and will note that the support dosnt prevent crashes if conditions are right,
"Values in Perth and Darwin are more than 20% below their 2014 peaks, while the remaining capital cities have seen housing values move to new record highs through the COVID period."
Yup. Aussie Citz get a 50k handout for new builds I think. If that's true and could be used to support the deposit then a great help, well done AU. SFA this side of the ditch tho!
Checking out Real estate windows on the Goldie shows pricing cheaper than Tauranga/Hamilton and way down on Auck. Sydney not so good tho. Go figure.
Our Gov did that years ago by allowing Kiwisaver funds to be used for 1st home deposits and then added a grant on top…..if joe public cant save the deposit (because of high rents living costs in relation to wages) then a mechanism needs to be provided to put a floor under the market.
That might look as if it is in Perth but it is actually quite a long way south.
It has about the same relationship to Perth as Paraparaumu has to Wellington, or the Auckland CDB to Karaka.
Perth has been in a depression for a couple of years now with the mines in the north of the state caught up in the Chinese row with Australia and the FIFO people who work there and live in Perth out of work. There are a lot of houses in the area for sale.
Warnbro, which is the local station on the Mandurah line, is a 40 min ride into the city. There is a train into the city every 10 mins. You might as well live there as in the City. I enjoy riding the train, and passing the cars on the Freeway as you travel at well over 130kph, and no traffic jams.
Agree…it goes back to the liberalisation of the finance and banking sector that essentially gives the banks a free hand to create credit (debt) as they like and so they have….and why wouldnt they, greater credit means greater profit for them.
Especially when they now know that when they overdo it the public purse will bail them out a la GFC.
Did you notice what The Chancellor did in 2015 that was meant to solve the housing problem. It didn't do anything did it?
Now can you see any real difference between that and what Grant has just announced here? No? So what makes anyone think that the current Government actions will do anything at all to even ameliorate, much less solve the New Zealand problems?
Did anyone look at the link?…i have no idea, but i would suggest a couple of points, firstly they already had a reduced offset ability that was further reduced, unlike here where we have gone from 100 mph to zero in one hit, and as I have constantly espoused it is sentiment driving the market, sentiment spun by the vested interests.
But in a way you are correct, the underlying driver is the availability of credit which is the point, that is driving the price growth but that easy money (supported by ever decreasing interest rates) has run out of road…where to from here?
80 convictions for breaching protection orders. Now if only the authorities had been this assiduous about dealing with certain male stalkers or abusive ex-partners ….
Now personally I don't get all hot and bothered about patches. Living in the un ironically named Nash Street, in the middle of the Hood, I probably should ..but I just block it all out.
The issue I have is particularly with Nash, who rants and raves about a number of issues…only to disappear from the room when in a position to actually act on his beefed up "manly man" "Get Hard" rhetoric ..gangs, housing, jobs, fisheries…all have been through the same wash with Nash.
I've often said, given his stance on a number of issues, he should have joined the National Party. And as it turns out…by now he could well be Leader of the National Party.
Instead Labour are stuck with him. Like the kinda annoying cousin from the provinces that makes you dread the family Christmas year in year out.
But then again, it would seem he fits perfectly with Labours policy of incremental inaction..
Napier has the highest ratio of people in the country waiting for stable housing. Half of the motels are housing people who would be living on the street. Other areas have a high need as well.
An older teenager might find joining a gang giving them security or a place to escape. The one thing the government can do is build more state houses to deter youth joining a gang. Once in a stable home then the older teenager could look at job training or furthering their education. Youth are under so much strain when living in poverty. When home is an unhappy place a teenager will find ways to spend as little time there as they can.
Indeed. Like you say…The two problems that lead to gang membership here in the hood …dire lack of affordable, secure housing, and, equaly, wages in the orchards basically at a standstill since the 80's. When we first moved here people who worked on orchards and in the meat works could hope to buy their own home ..now a kiwibuild in Marenui was.$385,000 upwards ..and that was last year. .prices around these parts have escalated.
People tend to talk about "housing insecurity" in a slightly detached way, as if its purely a financial problem. I'm not sure they understand the effect on children of a life of feeling "less than" with parents at breaking point, time and time again, looking for yet another house…always on the back foot…
So, whatever, they can ban gang patches ..its not going to stop the problem one little bit…but I guess, out of sight, out of mind for some..
"Bernard Hickey wrote about this in January, suggesting that the Government could actually use this money to build up to 800,000 new homes: “Rent subsidies paid by the central government are forecast to rise from $2.6b last year to $4.2b by 2025. They have already risen from $1.9b over the last four years, Treasury figures show. Just as first home buyers use their rent to calculate how much they could afford to pay in interest, the Government could currently borrow over $400b with that $4.2b of rent subsidies. At $500,000 per dwelling, that $400b would ‘buy’ 800,000 new homes, which would be half the current housing stock of the entire country”
An excellent piece that highlights how woeful the Governments action (?) on state housing is (and has been)….why is the Government not ramping up its ability to directly build the housing needed or, if incapable ,at the very least directly contracting to the private sector a construction programme significantly larger than current?
Yeah the rental subsidy has been out of control for a while.The government could build or subsidise young people to build a heck of a lot of assets with it. Personally I think in some of the smaller districts they could add up the amounts paid – work out how much to build to collapse the rental market and then move outwards in ever widening crcles.
I think its a rort and I can only assume that the government, regardless of hue is complicit. Surely they must see what other see or are they so naive?
Journalists who had tried to verify the original story were angered by the stunt and hit back at the company, saying it was not a joke but “deception”.
Why do we need to tax the rental income of landlords? Why not make residential rental income rent free?
I know that today is April 1st, but the above comment is not made in the spirit of April Fools Day.
Owner-occupiers do not pay tax on the income imputed to them by dint of their living in their own homes. This income is essentially the rent that they save from doing so.
Landlords probably pass the tax on as part of the rent, so it just represents an additional burden on tenants, and is probably a form of 'double taxation' (a situation where two lots of tax are paid on the same income tranche).
It would also put to bed all the arguments flying about over the removal of interest deductibility.
I don't think a automobile is deemed to be an investment. I suppose one has to draw the line somewhere between what are considered investments, and what are considered consumption. Houses for some reason are considered investments. I suppose it’s because they are eminently rentable.
Every time someone brings up this objection – and you are by no means the first – I'm left wondering at the dishonesty of omitting that TOP explicitly covered this off by giving people the option of deferring the CCT until either the property was sold or passed on in an estate. Effectively converting it into a standard CGT or an Estate Tax. But either way they got to live in their home during their lifetime without a hit to their cash flow.
I've forgotten how many times I've typed that out now. Please don't make me do it again.
"did not account for people on lowish fixed incomes – they'd've been obliged to sell"
Quite. And they are most likely to be retired people who over their lifetime have had relatively limited financial resources and acquired only one home, which, when it went onto the market, would most likely be bought by someone with several.
Landlords cannot operate like the IRD taxing a tenants rent.
They don't actually tax tenants' rent. But I would assume that they tailor the rent that they charge so that it takes into account the amount of tax that they themselves are paying on that rent.
The first rule in business is to watch the cash flow.
Any increase in costs, such as this new tax, must be managed, either the profit is reduced, costs are reduced elsewhere or the price is raised – or some combination of both. What cannot happen is that the cash operating profit goes negative. In that case the shareholder must either add funds, or the business is insolvent.
This new tax will likely take some unknown fraction of landlords into negative cash flow territory. I know that it's taken us very close to it, and our mortgage is relatively low compared to what it used to be. If this had happened to us ten years ago we would have fallen over almost for certain.
Yeah but many landlords charge rent completely unrelated to their costs i.e. market rent.
My mother on NZS has just had her rent put up another $30-00 a week on the mortgage free unit because the "market" says so. Also landlords aren't business people in most senses of the word. They don't even get when the government puts subsidies up by $30-00 that it is a 70 cent in the dollar subsidy. So the $30-00 rent increase means at best the person gets only $21-00 and is now $9-00 poorer. Business people they are not. You might be but many are not – for a large number the relationship between cost and rent isn't that existent.
There are many….whether they are implemented however is a different question.
Consider….an investor buys a property 20 years ago with a 20% deposit and a $100k mortgage over 25 years…the mortgage outgoings including principal payment at current interest rates equate to around $100 pw…there are additional costs associated but they remain deductable,
What is the current market rent for that property?
A friend of mine owns 20 rental properties – she had 22 but assisted her tenants to buy them. She paid the mortgages off years ago and charges rents that are affordable and reasonable.
Market rent is like CEO's salaries – once they start going up the market says they have to keep going up. They become self-perpetuating. They then push the price up as the capital gain starts outweighing the actual value and we end up in a viscous cycle with the working class as pawns in the capitalist game.
I partly blame Christchurch where profiteering after the earthquake massively increased rents and emboldened rampant capitalism. That is when a rent freeze should have gone on.
It was happening long before the ChCh quakes….the rent rort post quakes in ChCh was driven by insurance money….it increased the ability to pay.
Disaster capitalism
There are several ways to do this. What I think you're going for is to take the costs and add a margin. But then every owner will have different costs based on their mortgage, and it would lead to odd outcomes – if for example the owner came into an inheritance or windfall and used it to pay down their borrowings, thus reducing their costs – would you argue for the rent to fall at the same time? Or if the same house was then sold to a new owner with a much larger mortgage – should the rent immediately rise to match?
That's not how virtually any business works.
What actually happens I think is that the 'market price' is set by the vendor with the highest marginal cost. It's a bit like the electricity market in this respect – total supply must always equal total demand – and during peak periods when the most expensive generator comes online (because it has to) then everyone else is paid the same price that this generator charges.
The residential rental market isn't quite so rigidly organised like this, plenty of landlords actually charge well below 'market'. The data that the Ministry of Housing publishes is only for new bonds, it doesn't track older established ones at all – which as a rule are lower than for new tenancies.
The other way to look at this is to consider what would happen if the owner simply sold the property and put the cash into a bank deposit. This would be considered the 'Minimum Risk Rate of Return", which by convention is set at 3%. So if we took your 20 yr old property that is probably now worth north of $750,000 that would equate to around $22kpa return before tax. If you're going to go to the hassle and risk of renting the house to someone you'd certainly want to do better than this. Consider that your fixed costs – rates, insurance, R&M, new compliance rules, and management fees etc – are going to be at least another $10kpa, this means you need a rental income of around $32kpa just to do better than putting the money in the bank. That's a rent in the order of $620pw.
This is pretty easy to work out for the property you live in, just go to qv.co.nz and enter your own address. Then do the numbers for yourself – it should give you a sense of what your minimum rent should be if your landlord was being economically rational.
And the investor that bought the property for 120K 20 years ago may well decide that original 20K investment that is now worth say 750K today is better off in a TD or somewhere else…thats for him or her to decide…the point is IF the investor has not increased his/her leverage the pressure to increase rents does not exist…..it is a choice.
Nope – you need to have a bit more of a think about it. What would happen if the market consisted of just two rentals – an old one with no mortgage that had fixed costs only say $200pw or a new one with borrowings that had a cost of $600pw? And each landlord charged enough just to cover these costs only?
And now consider there are only two tenants who can choose between them. Assume both houses are of similar desirability for the sake of the argument. Which one would they both want? The cheap one at $200pw of course. But only one can live in it, forcing the other to pay $600pw to live in the other one. Well the landlord charging only $200pw might be content with this situation, but what happens when demand increases and a third new tenant appears in this market?
Of course none of this addresses the current problems in the NZ housing market that go well beyond the dynamics of the rental market, which has existed since the year dot.
a lot of mental gymnastics going on there to attempt to refute the fact the original landlord has a choice….and none of it changes the fact he/she does.
So the original landlord charging only $200pw retires and decides to sell to a new operator? One with a much larger mortgage.
The point is that you're essentially relying on the willingness of this person to leave $400pw on the table indefinitely. You may well have an opinion on the morality of this, but I think you can see that in the context of a real world market – it's just not a stable scenario.
The willingness or not of the investor to set their rent at whatever will depend on multiple factors…one being the quality of the tenant…it is financially advantageous to the investor to have a reliable trouble free tenant who may be able to afford a lesser amount than to risk a series of unsuitable tenants and vacancy periods….real world enough for you?
I know investors who operate on this basis and have done for years…a good long term tenant is worth their weight in gold.
But all of that aside the original comment was regarding landlords passing on the tax changes to tenants and my comment pointed out that there is no need for many investors to pass on costs as the carry little or no leverage, and have no financial pressure to do so…..and as stated previously, those that are excessively leveraged and operating a marginal investment have the option to rebalance or exit …..non viable businesses are wound up all the time.
If two farmers are producing the same crop, but one due to having some competitive advantage – better rainfall or management methods for example – has a lower cost of production, and demand equals or exceeds supply, do you think this farmer will sell at a lower cost than his neighbour? Of course not – that farmer sells at the same price and uses their competitive advantage to make a higher profit.
This is how all businesses work, why do you think residential rentals must be an exception?
The most important factors in determining the level of rent is:
– Size of mortgage to service
– Number of bedrooms
– Location
Quality of the tenant might help in terms of future rent increases, a little. I have one house which we haven't increased for three years because they are solid and there's zero debt on it.
There's two others, only one of which has a mortgage and it's small – we do review that annually.
Agree with you about the very marginal investors. They will now get out, or their banks will tell them hard to sell one or two and bring their position down, or the next time they go to their bank for a rollover they are going to get a reality check. That's a desired outcome from government policy.
@Ad..yes dont disagree with factors setting rent but for some reason RL wants to debate a self evident truth regarding financial pressure on low or zero leveraged investors.
And yes banks will be having some uncomfortable conversations.
my comment pointed out that there is no need for many investors to pass on costs as the carry little or no leverage, and have no financial pressure to do so
For any given net profit the landlord's tax payment will always appear in the rent that he charges, for example (for a net profit of $100 pw there are two ways that this can come about:
(a) At a tax rate of 33% the landlord will need to add $150 to his outgoings in setting the rent, or
(b) At a tax rate of zero he will need to add only $100 to his outgoings.
Actually there are more than two when one takes into account the fact that different landlords may be on different tax rates.
Simplistic…in fact there are numerous determinants in crop sales and the price is seldom the same for all sellers or even for the same seller across the entire crop….and one critical factor is the relationship.
But obviously its important to you for some reason to convince yourself that all investors behave the same way when patently they dont and as said originally the investor has choice….or do wish to continue to deny that fact?
And as an after thought what happens to the dairy farmer whose cost of production exceeds the MS price?
Buyers don't care or even know about the cost structure of the producer. If two truckloads of turnips from two different farmers turn up at the produce market – then all other things being equal – they will sell at the same price. What actually sets the price on the day is the balance of supply and demand.
Introducing other factors is irrelevant to the argument here.
And as an after thought what happens to the dairy farmer whose cost of production exceeds the MS price?
Either they find a way to reduce their costs or they go out of business. Tough on that farmer but good for the economy as a whole because it tends to drive toward better productivity over time.
what happens to dairy farmers who's costs exceed the MS price is an unwelcome visit from the bank….much the same will be occurring with many investors who are over-leveraged.
Great so what you've finally concluded – which is what I said days ago – is that as over-leveraged landlords exit the market the supply of rentals will go down. At a time when there is already a shortage of rentals this is only likely to put upward pressure on rents.
The argument that ex-rentals automatically become first homes is flawed because it assumes that ex-tenants are all going to become first home buyers just because they want to. What happens in reality is a lot more messy than this.
Aye but you're arguing that the market rent by necessity must be $600-00 per week because the most leveraged "investor" determines he market price. In you scenario both tenants would pay $600-00.
"Well the landlord charging only $200pw might be content with this situation, but what happens when demand increases and a third new tenant appears in this market?"
The landlord charging $200-00 might be even happier because they know that they are providing good support to someone even though demand has increased.
The rate of return argument is financial trickery to justify such financial rorting. It also becomes self perpetuating as values increase – I must charge this much because I could otherwise do this. The classic paradigm of knowing the price of something but the value of nothing.
It's nonsense pretending their is a strong relationship between rental income and cost. The fact that so many properties are actually untenanted – if the relationship was as strong as you suggest then you would not be rational to have a property untenanted. Plenty of landlords are content to have this occur.
Market rents like much of economics is filling an emotional response by landlords. It is nice couching economics in notions of rational players but that notion is a pretence.
The landlord charging $200-00 might be even happier because they know that they are providing good support to someone even though demand has increased.
This indeed is the position we are in. If I was to achieve the same return from my rents as selling up and putting the money into a 3% TD, I would have to increase them all across the board by $160pw.
Sustaining this position is a choice. Up until now I've been reasonably happy to accept a relatively modest cash operating profit because I could anticipate doing better once the mortgage was paid down. Plus indeed we did see it as a social good.
Well both of those conditions are now off the table, this govt has now added a new tax that reduces our cash operating flow to zero and has openly told us that what we are doing is no longer considered of any social benefit.
So either we increase the rent or do something else. Probably the latter.
I'm by no means a big financy guy, but it seems to me and rando calculator site that a landlord owning a $120k house that is now $750k after 20 years that the landlord already has a calculated return of 9% per annum.
Sure, let's say the saint will never sell. Sunk cost is $120k (plus interest on the mortgage that is now paid off), with ongoing rates and maybe a margin for projected maintenance (piles, drains, etc). That's if they're people who are genuinely providing a public service with no thought of profit, just the costs being covered. Not that private ownership is necessarily the best model for that, I'd suggest a trust or charity as an instrument for community rent provision.
But none of that has anything to do with market rates. That's a function of supply and demand. Housing shortage, so it's down to how much individuals can afford to pay before they're living rough.
Many landlords will be somewhere between those two extremes. Some might well be practically a housing service. #notAllLandlords is the problem with that charitable view, though.
Persisting in pretending there is no difference between cash flow and capital gain really disqualifies you from any honest participation in this conversation.
As for your idea that the market can run purely on a not-for-profit charity model, runs afoul of the fact that sooner or later those charities will have to renew their stock, and find the funds to do this. In the long run they have to operate commercially on pretty much the same basis as private operators do.
And then most private operators make relatively low cash operating profit, the difference between them and a ‘not for profit’ charity amounts to sfa.
You're the one saying the current capital value has anything to do with cashflow on a house bought 20 years ago.
If someone buys a house as a public service, the only costs are the costs of purchase (incl mortgage) and ongoing costs like rates and maintenance. And they don't have to "renew their stock" if they maintain the house.
Houses in NZ have about an 80yr economic life. This means that roughly 1.25% of them must be replaced every year just to keep pace with existing stock, much less meet a growing population. In my lifetime NZ has roughly doubled it's population.
And just about anything older than 50yrs no longer meets modern expectations, and needs substantial investment.
So in reality your 'housing charity' has to keep either replacing or adding to it's stock – at current market prices – in order to stay in the game. And it cannot do this on fresh air.
Many years back we were involved in Habitat for Humanity in the Wgtn area, essentially the kind of housing charity you have in mind. Once we got involved at the board level we had to be schooled in this lesson the hard way.
And then most private operators make relatively low cash operating profit, the difference between them and a ‘not for profit’ charity amounts to sfa.
"At Habitat for Humanity Australia, we believe in helping low-income families achieve the dream of building and owning their own home."
"To date Habitat for Humanity Australia has built more than 160 homes in New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland."
Habitat for Humanity and land Lords – not so different?
In reality just about anything older than 50yrs no longer meets modern expectations.
My (one and only) home is ~60 years old; it may not meet modern expectations but it (still) meets mine, and I’ve never had a complaint from occasional visitors.
So we have an arc in capital value that a well-maintained house goes from 120k to 750k @20 years to $0 at 50 years? I mean, bollocks, but even if it were true you could find that fiscal sweet spot.
Because they don't need to create a house from thin air, if the objective is to not lose money they can sell the old one and buy a new one using the increased capital value. And a landlord renewing their stock is renewing their capital assets.
But of course any landlord would be lucky to be in the business for 50 years, anyway – one reason to go to a longer term structure than personal ownership.
Well like McFlock when we first started with H4H we too thought like he did, but it turned out we were quite wrong. A couple of older and more experienced members had to be quite sharp with us over it.
And H4H is not even a rental charity. That would be closer to the Masterton Community Trust model, and even that very well established entity charges rents that are not all that much lower than the private market in the same town. Certainly they don't hold their rents static for 20 years as McFlock would have them do.
There are several ways to do this. What I think you're going for is to take the costs and add a margin. But then every owner will have different costs based on their mortgage, and it would lead to odd outcomes – if for example the owner came into an inheritance or windfall and used it to pay down their borrowings, thus reducing their costs – would you argue for the rent to fall at the same time? Or if the same house was then sold to a new owner with a much larger mortgage – should the rent immediately rise to match?
Differing tax rates also come into it. A landlord on a 17.5% tax rate can afford to charge a lower rent and still make the same net profit as a landlord on a 33% rate
“It’s a bit like the electricity market in this respect – total supply must always equal total demand – and during peak periods when the most expensive generator comes online (because it has to) then everyone else is paid the same price that this generator charges.”
This is why the Labour Party's single seller proposal, of earlier years, may have been a good idea. At peak times electricity could be sold, by a single seller, at an average price. A 'single seller' arrangement, however, would obviously not be appropriate in the residential rental market; mortgages, and landlords' tax rates (as pointed out above), would be disorienting factors. This is why mortgages and differential tax rates should not be factors in determining rents. Fairly stable, and equal (after factoring in differences in the quality of the dwelling) rents would seem to be desirable.
Influences due to differences in tax rates could be avoided if the same tax rate was applied to all rental income – I would suggest 0% ), but I think the influence of mortgage payments could only be avoided by removing them from rent determinations altogether. this latter suggestion would make sense since mortgages should be the landlords' responsibility in any case.
PS: If there was a CGT in place the fact that mortgages, including their interest component, are capital expenditure would suggest that the aggregate unclaimed interest might be considered deductible against a capital gain.
This is practice in a few US States, though it seems to be widely seen as an un-natural tax distortion there and is understood to have elevated house prices.
In considering this I think too much emphasis can easily be put on the differentials and incentives (between occupiers and investors or between landlord renter) and not enough on how much borrowing can be accrued against housing which appears more important to pricing.
The problem is that councils now reclaim all of the cost of supplying services to new sections in the first year not over a 30-50 year span from rates as used to be the case. The 4 billion spend announced last week was specifically to negate this practice for goverment builds.
Reminds me of the Jewish theme of the song 'If I Was a Rich Man' of what he would do. One who lives the ethical life, with little indulgences!
'Dear God, you made many, many poor people.
I realize, of course, that it's no shame to be poor.
But it's no great honor either!
So, what would have been so terrible if I had a small fortune?'
If I were a rich man,…
And then –
I'd build a big tall house with rooms by the dozen,
Right in the middle of the town.
A fine tin roof with real wooden floors below.
There would be one long staircase just going up,
And one even longer coming down,
And one more leading nowhere, just for show.
I'd fill my yard with chicks and turkeys and geese and ducks
For the town to see and hear.
And each loud 'cheep' and 'swaqwk' and 'honk' and 'quack'
Would land like a trumpet on the ear,
As if to say 'Here lives a wealthy man.'
But then –
The most important men in town would come to fawn on me!
They would ask me to advise them,
Like a Solomon the Wise.
'If you please, Reb Tevye…'
'Pardon me, Reb Tevye…'
Posing problems that would cross a rabbi's eyes!
And it won't make one bit of difference if i answer right or wrong.
When you're rich, they think you really know!
Only took 38 years to come up with the award. The song, and it was a great one, dates from 1983.
It is almost as bad as the Nobel Prize is getting. The 2013 Physics Prize, was awarded for work on the Higgs mechanism. The theoretical work had been done in 1964, half a century earlier.
The withering of anti-trust laws which allowed for the rise of behemoth companies started in the 1970s, MacGillis says, and then really intensified in the 1980s with Ronald Reagan.
“We’re now still experiencing that very lax approach to anti-trust which has helped abet the growth of these giants. To put it crudely, all sorts of business activity which used to be spread around the country in various sectors of the economy is now increasingly dominated by a handful of companies and that commerce, activity, and wealth is sucked into the places where they reside.”
And what about someone touting for a Silicon Valley here? It will cause as much problem as silicone breast implants did – look good to begin with and then the effects start body deterioration. Has this bloke got eye augmentation?
Years ago, on April 1 the ODT had two front page articles that to me seemed equally farcical. It turned out that the monorail from Otago to fiordland was a real proposal.
Thought I'd submitted my appreciative comment (@4:39 pm) to the post: National Party leadership spill under way post (Categories: humour), but must have put it somewhere else by mistake – apologies.
Must be awful to lose one’s sense of humour; worse than losing the sense of smell imho
I've been listening to the musical Chess, The writers have done a clever piece about the Russian applying for asylum to smug Brit embassy immigration johnnies.
Embassy Lament
Oh my dear how boring
He's defecting
Just like all the others
He's expecting
Us to be impressed with what he's done here
But he hasn't stopped to think about the paperwork his gesture causes…
Have you an appointment
With the consul?
If you don't we know what his response'll
Be, he will not see you, with respect it
Buggers up his very taxing schedule…
I know. I was pointing out that as long as the make a net profit, that the tax on that profit gets transferred to the tenant as part of his rent, regardless of the lack of pressure.
Yesterday I received come lovely feedback following my Star Wars themed newsletter. A few people mentioned they’d enjoyed reading the personal part at the beginning.I often begin newsletters with some memories, or general thoughts, before commencing the main topic. This hopefully sets the mood and provides some context in which ...
April 30 was going to be the day we’d be calling Mum from London to wish her a happy birthday. Then it became the day we would be going to St. Paul's at Evensong to remember her. The aim of the cathedral builders was to find a way to make their ...
Rob MacCulloch writes – Can’t remember the last book by a Kiwi author you read? Think the NZ government should spend less on the arts in favor of helping the homeless? If so, as far as Newsroom is concerned, you probably deserve to be called a cultural ignoramus ...
Eric Crampton writes – Grudges are bad. Better to move on. But it can be fun to keep a couple of really trivial ones, so you’re not tempted to have other ones. For example, because of the rootkit fiasco of 2005, no Sony products in our household. ...
A new report warns an estimated third of the adult population have unmet need for health care.Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāHere’s the six key things I learned about Aotaroa’s political economy this week around housing, climate and poverty:Politics - Three opinion polls confirmed support for PM Christopher Luxon ...
Today is May the fourth. Which was just a regular day when my mother took me to see the newly released Star Wars at the Odeon in Rotorua. The queue was right around the corner. Some years later this day became known as Star Wars Day, the date being a ...
Buzz from the Beehive Much more media attention is being paid to something Winston Peters said about former Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr than to a speech he delivered to the New Zealand China Council. One word is missing from the speech: AUKUS. But AUKUS loomed large in his considerations ...
Is the economy in another long stagnation? If so, why?This is about the time that the Treasury will be locking up its economic forecasts to be published in the 2024 Budget Economic and Fiscal Update (BEFU) on budget day, 30 May. I am not privy to what they will be ...
The annual list of who's been bribing our politicians is out, and journalists will no doubt be poring over it to find the juiciest and dirtiest bribes. The government's fast-track invite list is likely to be a particular focus, and we already know of one company on the list which ...
In the weeks after the October 7 Hamas attacks on Southern Israel I wrote about the possible 2nd, 3rd and even 4th order effects of the conflict. These included new fronts being opened in the West Bank (with Hamas), Golan … Continue reading → ...
Peter Dunne writes – It is one of the oldest truisms that there is never a good time for MPs to get a pay rise. This week’s announcement of pay raises of around 2.8% backdated to last October could hardly have come at a worse time, with the ...
David Farrar writes – Newshub reports: Newshub can reveal a fresh allegation of intimidation against Green MP Julie-Anne Genter. Genter is subject to a disciplinary process for aggressively waving a book in the face of National Minister Matt Doocey in the House – but it’s not the first time ...
The Treasury has published a paper today on the global productivity slowdown and how it is playing out in New Zealand: The productivity slowdown: implications for the Treasury’s forecasts and projections. The Treasury Paper examines recent trends in productivity and the potential drivers of the slowdown. Productivity for the whole economy ...
Winston Peters’ comments about former Australian foreign minister look set to be an ongoing headache for both him and Luxon. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: The podcast above of the weekly ‘hoon’ webinar for subscribers features co-hosts and , along with regular guests on Gaza and ...
These puppet strings don't pull themselvesYou're thinking thoughts from someone elseHow much time do you think you have?Are you prepared for what comes next?The debating chamber can be a trying place for an opposition MP. What with the person in charge, the speaker, typically being an MP from the governing ...
The land around Lyme Regis, where Meryl Streep once stood, in a hood, on the Cobb, is falling into the sea.MerylThe land around Lyme Regis, around the Cobb that made it rich, has always been falling slowly but surely into the sea. Read more ...
Buzz from the Beehive Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters was bound to win headlines when he set out his thinking about AUKUS in his speech to the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs. The headlines became bigger when – during an interview on RNZ’s Morning Report today – he criticised ...
The Post reports on how the government is refusing to release its advice on its corrupt Muldoonist fast-track law, instead using the "soon to be publicly available" refusal ground to hide it until after select committee submissions on the bill have closed. Fast-track Minister Chris Bishop's excuse? “It's not ...
As pressure on it grows, the livestock industry’s approach to the transition to Net Zero is increasingly being compared to that of fossil fuel interests. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / Getty ImagesTL;DR: Here’s the top five news items of note in climate news for Aotearoa-NZ this week, and a discussion above ...
The New Zealand Herald reports – Stats NZ has offered a voluntary redundancy scheme to all of its workers as a way to give staff some control over their “future” amidst widespread job losses in the public sector. In an update to staff this morning, seen by the Herald, Statistics New Zealand ...
On Werewolf/Scoop, I usually do two long form political columns a week. From now on, there will be an extra column each week about music and movies. But first, some late-breaking political events:The rise in unemployment numbers for the March quarter was bigger than expected – and especially sharp ...
David Farrar writes – The Herald reports: TVNZ says it is dealing with about 50 formal complaints over its coverage of the latest 1News-Verian political poll, with some viewers – as well as the Prime Minister and a former senior Labour MP – critical of the tone of the 6pm report. ...
Muriel Newman writes – When Meridian Energy was seeking resource consents for a West Coast hydro dam proposal in 2010, local Maori “strenuously” objected, claiming their mana was inextricably linked to ‘their’ river and could be damaged. After receiving a financial payment from the company, however, the Ngai Tahu ...
Alwyn Poole writes – “An SEP,’ he said, ‘is something that we can’t see, or don’t see, or our brain doesn’t let us see, because we think that it’s somebody else’s problem. That’s what SEP means. Somebody Else’s Problem. The brain just edits it out, it’s like a ...
Our trust in our political institutions is fast eroding, according to a Maxim Institute discussion paper, Shaky Foundations: Why our democracy needs trust. The paper – released today – raises concerns about declining trust in New Zealand’s political institutions and democratic processes, and the role that the overuse of Parliamentary urgency ...
This article was prepared for publication yesterday. More ministerial announcements have been posted on the government’s official website since it was written. We will report on these later today …. Buzz from the BeehiveThere we were, thinking the environment is in trouble, when along came Jones. Shane Jones. ...
New Zealand now has the fourth most depressed construction sector in the world behind China, Qatar and Hong Kong. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: These are the six things that stood out to me in news and commentary on Aotearoa-NZ’s political economy at 8:46am on Thursday, May 2:The Lead: ...
Hi,I am just going to state something very obvious: American police are fucking crazy.That was a photo gracing the New York Times this morning, showing New York City police “entering Columbia University last night after receiving a request from the school.”Apparently in America, protesting the deaths of tens of thousands ...
Winston Peters’ much anticipated foreign policy speech last night was a work of two halves. Much of it was a standard “boilerplate” Foreign Ministry overview of the state of the world. There was some hardening up of rhetoric with talk of “benign” becoming “malign” and old truths giving way to ...
Graham Adams assesses the fallout of the Cass Review — The press release last Thursday from the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls didn’t make the mainstream news in New Zealand but it really should have. The startling title of Reem Alsalem’s statement — “Implementation of ‘Cass ...
This open-for-business, under-new-management cliché-pockmarked government of Christopher Luxon is not the thing of beauty he imagines it to be. It is not the powerful expression of the will of the people that he asserts it to be. It is not a soaring eagle, it is a malodorous vulture. This newest poll should make ...
The latest labour market statistics, showing a rise in unemployment. There are now 134,000 unemployed - 14,000 more than when the National government took office. Which is I guess what happens when the Reserve Bank causes a recession in an effort to Keep Wages Low. The previous government saw a ...
Three opinion polls have been released in the last two days, all showing that the new government is failing to hold their popular support. The usual honeymoon experienced during the first year of a first term government is entirely absent. The political mood is still gloomy and discontented, mainly due ...
National's Finance Minister once met a poor person.A scornful interview with National's finance guru who knows next to nothing about economics or people.There might have been something a bit familiar if that was the headline I’d gone with today. It would of course have been in tribute to the article ...
Rob MacCulloch writes – Throughout the pandemic, the new Vice-Chancellor-of-Otago-University-on-$629,000 per annum-Can-you-believe-it-and-Former-Finance-Minister Grant Robertson repeated the mantra over and over that he saved “lives and livelihoods”.As we update how this claim is faring over the course of time, the facts are increasingly speaking differently. NZ ...
Chris Trotter writes – IT’S A COMMONPLACE of political speeches, especially those delivered in acknowledgement of electoral victory: “We’ll govern for all New Zealanders.” On the face of it, the pledge is a strange one. Why would any political leader govern in ways that advantaged the huge ...
Bryce Edwards writes – The list of former National Party Ministers being given plum and important roles got longer this week with the appointment of former Deputy Prime Minister Paula Bennett as the chair of Pharmac. The Christopher Luxon-led Government has now made key appointments to Bill ...
TL;DR: These are the six things that stood out to me in news and commentary on Aotearoa-NZ’s political economy at 10:06am on Wednesday, May 1:The Lead: Business confidence fell across the board in April, falling in some areas to levels last seen during the lockdowns because of a collapse in ...
Over the past 36 hours, Christopher Luxon has been dong his best to portray the centre-right’s plummeting poll numbers as a mark of virtue. Allegedly, the negative verdicts are the result of hard economic times, and of a government bravely set out on a perilous rescue mission from which not ...
Auckland Transport have started rolling out new HOP card readers around the network and over the next three months, all of them on buses, at train stations and ferry wharves will be replaced. The change itself is not that remarkable, with the new readers looking similar to what is already ...
Completed reads for April: The Difference Engine, by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling Carnival of Saints, by George Herman The Snow Spider, by Jenny Nimmo Emlyn’s Moon, by Jenny Nimmo The Chestnut Soldier, by Jenny Nimmo Death Comes As the End, by Agatha Christie Lord of the Flies, by ...
On February 14, 2023 we announced our Rebuttal Update Project. This included an ask for feedback about the added "At a glance" section in the updated basic rebuttal versions. This weekly blog post series highlights this new section of one of the updated basic rebuttal versions and serves as a ...
Have a story to share about St Paul’s, but today just picturesPopular novels written at this desk by a young man who managed to bootstrap himself out of father’s imprisonment and his own young life in a workhouse Read more ...
The list of former National Party Ministers being given plum and important roles got longer this week with the appointment of former Deputy Prime Minister Paula Bennett as the chair of Pharmac. The Christopher Luxon-led Government has now made key appointments to Bill English, Simon Bridges, Steven Joyce, Roger Sowry, ...
Newsroom has a story today about National's (fortunately failed) effort to disestablish the newly-created Inspector-General of Defence. The creation of this agency was the key recommendation of the Inquiry into Operation Burnham, and a vital means of restoring credibility and social licence to an agency which had been caught lying ...
Holding On To The Present:The moment a political movement arises that attacks the whole idea of social progress, and announces its intention to wind back the hands of History’s clock, then democracy, along with its unwritten rules, is in mortal danger.IT’S A COMMONPLACE of political speeches, especially those delivered in ...
Stuck In The Middle With You:As Christopher Luxon feels the hot breath of Act’s and NZ First’s extremists on the back of his neck and, as he reckons with the damage their policies are already inflicting upon a country he’s described as “fragile”, is there not some merit in reaching out ...
The unpopular coalition government is currently rushing to repeal section 7AA of the Oranga Tamariki Act. The clause is Oranga Tamariki's Treaty clause, and was inserted after its systematic stealing of Māori children became a public scandal and resulted in physical resistance to further abductions. The clause created clear obligations ...
Buzz from the Beehive The government’s official website – which Point of Order monitors daily – not for the first time has nothing much to say today about political happenings that are grabbing media headlines. It makes no mention of the latest 1News-Verian poll, for example. This shows National down ...
It Takes A Train To Cry:Surely, there is nothing lonelier in all this world than the long wail of a distant steam locomotive on a cold Winter’s night.AS A CHILD, I would lie awake in my grandfather’s house and listen to the traffic. The big wooden house was only a ...
Packing A Punch: The election of the present government, including in its ranks politicians dedicated to reasserting the rights of the legislature in shaping and determining the future of Māori and Pakeha in New Zealand, should have alerted the judiciary – including its anomalous appendage, the Waitangi Tribunal – that its ...
Dead Woman Walking: New Zealand’s media industry had been moving steadily towards disaster for all the years Melissa Lee had been National’s media and communications policy spokesperson, and yet, when the crisis finally broke, on her watch, she had nothing intelligent to offer. Christopher Luxon is a patient man - but he’s not ...
Chris Trotter writes – New Zealand politics is remarkably easy-going: dangerously so, one might even say. With the notable exception of John Key’s flat ruling-out of the NZ First Party in 2008, all parties capable of clearing MMP’s five-percent threshold, or winning one or more electorate seats, tend ...
Bryce Edwards writes – Polling shows that Wellington Mayor Tory Whanau has the lowest approval rating of any mayor in the country. Siting at -12 per cent, the proportion of constituents who disapprove of her performance outweighs those who give her the thumbs up. This negative rating is ...
Luxon will no doubt put a brave face on it, but there is no escaping the pressure this latest poll will put on him and the government. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: These are the six things that stood out to me in news and commentary on Aotearoa-NZ’s political ...
This is a re-post from The Climate Brink by Andrew Dessler In the wake of any unusual weather event, someone inevitably asks, “Did climate change cause this?” In the most literal sense, that answer is almost always no. Climate change is never the sole cause of hurricanes, heat waves, droughts, or ...
Something odd happened yesterday, and I’d love to know if there’s more to it. If there was something which preempted what happened, or if it was simply a throwaway line in response to a journalist.Yesterday David Seymour was asked at a press conference what the process would be if the ...
Hi,From time to time, I want to bring Webworm into the real world. We did it last year with the Jurassic Park event in New Zealand — which was a lot of fun!And so on Saturday May 11th, in Los Angeles, I am hosting a lil’ Webworm pop-up! I’ve been ...
Education Minister Erica Standford yesterday unveiled a fundamental reform of the way our school pupils are taught. She would not exactly say so, but she is all but dismantling the so-called “inquiry” “feel good” method of teaching, which has ruled in our classrooms since a major review of the New ...
Exactly where are we seriously going with this government and its policies? That is, apart from following what may as well be a Truss-Lite approach on the purported economic “plan“, and Victorian-era regression when it comes to social policy.Oh it’ll work this time of course, we’re basically assured, “the ...
Hey Uncle Dave, When the Poms joined the EEC, I wasn't one of those defeatists who said, Well, that’s it for the dairy job. And I was right, eh? The Chinese can’t get enough of our milk powder and eventually, the Poms came to their senses and backed up the ute ...
Polling shows that Wellington Mayor Tory Whanau has the lowest approval rating of any mayor in the country. Siting at -12 per cent, the proportion of constituents who disapprove of her performance outweighs those who give her the thumbs up. This negative rating is higher than for any other mayor ...
Buzz from the Beehive Pharmac has been given a financial transfusion and a new chair to oversee its spending in the pharmaceutical business. Associate Health Minister David Seymour described the funding for Pharmac as “its largest ever budget of $6.294 billion over four years, fixing a $1.774 billion fiscal cliff”. ...
Bryce Edwards writes – Many criticisms are being made of the Government’s Fast Track Approvals Bill, including by this writer. But as with everything in politics, every story has two sides, and both deserve attention. It’s important to understand what the Government is trying to achieve and its ...
TL;DR: Here’s my top 10 ‘pick ‘n’ mix of links to news, analysis and opinion articles as of 10:10am on Monday, April 29:Scoop: The children's ward at Rotorua Hospital will be missing a third of its beds as winter hits because Te Whatu Ora halted an upgrade partway through to ...
span class=”dropcap”>As hideous as David Seymour can be, it is worth keeping in mind occasionally that there are even worse political figures (and regimes) out there. Iran for instance, is about to execute the country’s leading hip hop musician Toomaj Salehi, for writing and performing raps that “corrupt” the nation’s ...
Yesterday marked 10 years since the first electric train carried passengers in Auckland so it’s a good time to look back at it and the impact it has had. A brief history The first proposals for rail electrification in Auckland came in the 1920’s alongside the plans for earlier ...
The Government is again adding to New Zealand’s growing unemployment, this time cutting jobs at the agencies responsible for urban development and growing much needed housing stock. ...
With Minister Karen Chhour indicating in the House today that she either doesn’t know or care about the frontline cuts she’s making to Oranga Tamariki, we risk seeing more and more of our children falling through the cracks. ...
The Labour Party is saddened to learn of the death of Sir Robert Martin, a globally renowned disability advocate who led the way for disability rights both in New Zealand and internationally. ...
Labour is calling for the Government to urgently rethink its coalition commitment to restart live animal exports, Labour animal welfare spokesperson Rachel Boyack said. ...
Today’s Financial Stability Report has once again highlighted that poverty and deep inequality are political choices - and this Government is choosing to make them worse. ...
The Green Party is calling on the Government to do more for our households in most need as unemployment rises and the cost of living crisis endures. ...
Unemployment is on the rise and it’s only going to get worse under this Government, Labour finance spokesperson Barbara Edmonds said. Stats NZ figures show the unemployment rate grew to 4.3 percent in the March quarter from 4 percent in the December quarter. “This is the second rise in unemployment ...
The New Zealand Labour Party welcomes the entering into force of the European Union and New Zealand free trade agreement. This agreement opens the door for a huge increase in trade opportunities with a market of 450 million people who are high value discerning consumers of New Zealand goods and ...
The National-led Government continues its fiscal jiggery pokery with its Pharmac announcement today, Labour Health spokesperson Ayesha Verrall says. “The government has increased Pharmac funding but conceded it will only make minimal increases in access to medicine”, said Ayesha Verrall “This is far from the bold promises made to fund ...
This afternoon’s interim Waitangi Tribunal report must be taken seriously as it affects our most vulnerable children, Labour children’s spokesperson Willow-Jean Prime. ...
Te Pāti Māori are demanding the New Zealand Government support an international independent investigation into mass graves that have been uncovered at two hospitals on the Gaza strip, following weeks of assault by Israeli troops. Among the 392 bodies that have been recovered, are children and elderly civilians. Many of ...
Our two-tiered system for veterans’ support is out of step with our closest partners, and all parties in Parliament should work together to fix it, Labour veterans’ affairs spokesperson Greg O’Connor said. ...
Stripping two Ministers of their portfolios just six months into the job shows Christopher Luxon’s management style is lacking, Labour Leader Chris Hipkins said. ...
Tonight’s court decision to overturn the summons of the Children’s Minister has enabled the Crown to continue making decisions about Māori without evidence, says Te Pāti Māori spokesperson for Children, Mariameno Kapa-Kingi. “The judicial system has this evening told the nation that this government can do whatever they want when ...
It appears Nicola Willis is about to pull the rug out from under the feet of local communities still dealing with the aftermath of last year’s severe weather, and local councils relying on funding to build back from these disasters. ...
The Government is making short-sighted changes to the Resource Management Act (RMA) that will take away environmental protection in favour of short-term profits, Labour’s environment spokesperson Rachel Brooking said today. ...
Labour welcomes the release of the report into the North Island weather events and looks forward to working with the Government to ensure that New Zealand is as prepared as it can be for the next natural disaster. ...
The Labour Party has called for the New Zealand Government to recognise Palestine, as a material step towards progressing the two-State solution needed to achieve a lasting peace in the region. ...
Some of our country’s most important work, stopping the sexual exploitation of children and violent extremism could go along with staff on the frontline at ports and airports. ...
The Government’s Fast Track Approvals Bill will give projects such as new coal mines a ‘get out of jail free’ card to wreak havoc on the environment, Labour Leader Chris Hipkins said today. ...
The government's decision to reintroduce Three Strikes is a destructive and ineffective piece of law-making that will only exacerbate an inherently biased and racist criminal justice system, said Te Pāti Māori Justice Spokesperson, Tākuta Ferris, today. During the time Three Strikes was in place in Aotearoa, Māori and Pasifika received ...
Cuts to frontline hospital staff are not only a broken election promise, it shows the reckless tax cuts have well and truly hit the frontline of the health system, says Labour Health spokesperson Ayesha Verrall. ...
The Green Party has joined the call for public submissions on the fast-track legislation to be extended after the Ombudsman forced the Government to release the list of organisations invited to apply just hours before submissions close. ...
New Zealand’s good work at reducing climate emissions for three years in a row will be undone by the National government’s lack of ambition and scrapping programmes that were making a difference, Labour Party climate spokesperson Megan Woods said today. ...
More essential jobs could be on the chopping block, this time Ministry of Education staff on the school lunches team are set to find out whether they're in line to lose their jobs. ...
Te Pāti Māori is disgusted at the confirmation that hundreds are set to lose their jobs at Oranga Tamariki, and the disestablishment of the Treaty Response Unit. “This act of absolute carelessness and out of touch decision making is committing tamariki to state abuse.” Said Te Pāti Māori Oranga Tamariki ...
The Government is trying to bring in a law that will allow Ministers to cut corners and kill off native species, Labour environment spokesperson Rachel Brooking said. ...
Cancelling urgently needed new Cook Strait ferries and hiking the cost of public transport for many Kiwis so that National can announce the prospect of another tunnel for Wellington is not making good choices, Labour Transport Spokesperson Tangi Utikere said. ...
The Government has delivered on its election promise to provide a financially sustainable model for Auckland under its Local Water Done Well plan. The plan, which has been unanimously endorsed by Auckland Council’s Governing Body, will see Aucklanders avoid the previously projected 25.8 per cent water rates increases while retaining ...
Foreign Minister Winston Peters discussed the need for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, and enhanced cooperation in the Pacific with German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock during her first official visit to New Zealand today. "New Zealand and Germany enjoy shared interests and values, including the rule of law, democracy, respect for the international system ...
The Minister Responsible for RMA Reform, Chris Bishop today released his decision on four recommendations referred to him by the Western Bay of Plenty District Council, opening the door to housing growth in the area. The Council’s Plan Change 92 allows more homes to be built in existing and new ...
Thank you, John McKinnon and the New Zealand China Council for the invitation to speak to you today. Thank you too, all members of the China Council. Your effort has played an essential role in helping to build, shape, and grow a balanced and resilient relationship between our two ...
The Government is modernising insurance law to better protect Kiwis and provide security in the event of a disaster, Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister Andrew Bayly announced today. “These reforms are long overdue. New Zealand’s insurance law is complicated and dated, some of which is more than 100 years old. ...
The coalition Government is refreshing its approach to supporting pay equity claims as time-limited funding for the Pay Equity Taskforce comes to an end, Public Service Minister Nicola Willis says. “Three years ago, the then-government introduced changes to the Equal Pay Act to support pay equity bargaining. The changes were ...
Structured literacy will change the way New Zealand children learn to read - improving achievement and setting students up for success, Education Minister Erica Stanford says. “Being able to read and write is a fundamental life skill that too many young people are missing out on. Recent data shows that ...
Trade Minister Todd McClay says Canada’s refusal to comply in full with a CPTPP trade dispute ruling in our favour over dairy trade is cynical and New Zealand has no intention of backing down. Mr McClay said he has asked for urgent legal advice in respect of our ‘next move’ ...
The rights of our children and young people will be enhanced by changes the coalition Government will make to strengthen oversight of the Oranga Tamariki system, including restoring a single Children’s Commissioner. “The Government is committed to delivering better public services that care for our most at-risk young people and ...
The Government is making it easier for minor changes to be made to a building consent so building a home is easier and more affordable, Building and Construction Minister Chris Penk says. “The coalition Government is focused on making it easier and cheaper to build homes so we can ...
New Zealand lost a true legend when internationally renowned disability advocate Sir Robert Martin (KNZM) passed away at his home in Whanganui last night, Disabilities Issues Minister Louise Upston says. “Our Government’s thoughts are with his wife Lynda, family and community, those he has worked with, the disability community in ...
Good evening – Before discussing the challenges and opportunities facing New Zealand’s foreign policy, we’d like to first acknowledge the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs. You have contributed to debates about New Zealand foreign policy over a long period of time, and we thank you for hosting us. ...
From today, passengers travelling internationally from Auckland Airport will be able to keep laptops and liquids in their carry-on bags for security screening thanks to new technology, Transport Minister Simeon Brown says. “Creating a more efficient and seamless travel experience is important for holidaymakers and businesses, enabling faster movement through ...
People with an interest in the health of Northland’s marine ecosystems are invited to a public meeting to discuss how to deal with kina barrens, Oceans and Fisheries Minister Shane Jones says. Mr Jones will lead the discussion, which will take place on Friday, 10 May, at Awanui Hotel in ...
Kiwi exporters are $100 million better off today with the NZ EU FTA entering into force says Trade Minister Todd McClay. “This is all part of our plan to grow the economy. New Zealand's prosperity depends on international trade, making up 60 per cent of the country’s total economic activity. ...
There are heartening signs that the extractive sector is once again becoming an attractive prospect for investors and a source of economic prosperity for New Zealand, Resources Minister Shane Jones says. “The beginnings of a resurgence in extractive industries are apparent in media reports of the sector in the past ...
The return of the historic Ō-Rākau battle site to the descendants of those who fought there moved one step closer today with the first reading of Te Pire mō Ō-Rākau, Te Pae o Maumahara / The Ō-Rākau Remembrance Bill. The Bill will entrust the 9.7-hectare battle site, five kilometres west ...
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Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith has attended the Universal Periodic Review in Geneva and outlined the Government’s plan to restore law and order. “Speaking to the United Nations Human Rights Council provided us with an opportunity to present New Zealand’s human rights progress, priorities, and challenges, while responding to issues and ...
The Government and Rotorua Lakes Council are committed to working closely together to end the use of contracted emergency housing motels in Rotorua. Associate Minister of Housing (Social Housing) Tama Potaka says the Government remains committed to ending the long-term use of contracted emergency housing motels in Rotorua by the ...
Trade Minister Todd McClay heads overseas today for high-level trade talks in the Gulf region, and a key OECD meeting in Paris. Mr McClay will travel to Riyadh to meet with counterparts from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). “New Zealand’s goods and services exports to the Gulf region ...
Education Minister Erica Stanford has outlined six education priorities to deliver a world-leading education system that sets Kiwi kids up for future success. “I’m putting ambition, achievement and outcomes at the heart of our education system. I want every child to be inspired and engaged in their learning so they ...
The new NZ Transport Agency (NZTA) App is a secure ‘one stop shop’ to provide the services drivers need, Transport Minister Simeon Brown and Digitising Government Minister Judith Collins say. “The NZTA App will enable an easier way for Kiwis to pay for Vehicle Registration and Road User Charges (RUC). ...
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Racing Minister Winston Peters has paid tribute to an icon of the industry with the recent passing of Dave O’Sullivan (OBE). “Our sympathies are with the O’Sullivan family with the sad news of Dave O’Sullivan’s recent passing,” Mr Peters says. “His contribution to racing, initially as a jockey and then ...
Assalaamu alaikum, greetings to you all. Eid Mubarak, everyone! I want to extend my warmest wishes to you and everyone celebrating this joyous occasion. It is a pleasure to be here. I have enjoyed Eid celebrations at Parliament before, but this is my first time joining you as the Minister ...
Associate Health Minister David Seymour has announced Pharmac’s largest ever budget of $6.294 billion over four years, fixing a $1.774 billion fiscal cliff. “Access to medicines is a crucial part of many Kiwis’ lives. We’ve committed to a budget allocation of $1.774 billion over four years so Kiwis are ...
Hon Paula Bennett has been appointed as member and chair of the Pharmac board, Associate Health Minister David Seymour announced today. "Pharmac is a critical part of New Zealand's health system and plays a significant role in ensuring that Kiwis have the best possible access to medicines,” says Mr Seymour. ...
Hundreds of New Zealand families affected by Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) will benefit from a new Government focus on prevention and treatment, says Health Minister Dr Shane Reti. “We know FASD is a leading cause of preventable intellectual and neurodevelopmental disability in New Zealand,” Dr Reti says. “Every day, ...
Regional Development Minister Shane Jones today attended the official opening of Kaikohe’s new $14.7 million sports complex. “The completion of the Kaikohe Multi Sports Complex is a fantastic achievement for the Far North,” Mr Jones says. “This facility not only fulfils a long-held dream for local athletes, but also creates ...
Foreign Minister Winston Peters’ engagements in Türkiye this week underlined the importance of diplomacy to meet growing global challenges. “Returning to the Gallipoli Peninsula to represent New Zealand at Anzac commemorations was a sombre reminder of the critical importance of diplomacy for de-escalating conflicts and easing tensions,” Mr Peters ...
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Paul Goldsmith will take on responsibility for the Media and Communications portfolio, while Louise Upston will pick up the Disability Issues portfolio, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon announced today. “Our Government is relentlessly focused on getting New Zealand back on track. As issues change in prominence, I plan to adjust Ministerial ...
Recreational catch limits will be reduced in areas of Fiordland and the Chatham Islands to help keep those fisheries healthy and sustainable, Oceans and Fisheries Minister Shane Jones says. The lower recreational daily catch limits for a range of finfish and shellfish species caught in the Fiordland Marine Area and ...
Energy Minister Simeon Brown has welcomed an important milestone in New Zealand’s hydrogen future, with the opening of the country’s first network of hydrogen refuelling stations in Wiri. “I want to congratulate the team at Hiringa Energy and its partners K one W one (K1W1), Mitsui & Co New Zealand ...
The coalition Government is delivering on its commitment to improve resource management laws and give greater certainty to consent applicants, with a Bill to amend the Resource Management Act (RMA) expected to be introduced to Parliament next month. RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop has today outlined the first RMA Amendment ...
RNZ News A group of academic staff at New Zealand’s largest university have expressed concern at the administration’s move to block a protest encampment that was planned to take place on campus calling for support for the rights of Palestinians. This week, the University of Auckland warned that while it ...
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Political conferences after a party returns to power are usually a chance for some healthy, even unhealthy backslapping. Yet National Party president Sylvia Wood’s address to its mainland representatives on Saturday hardly contained the unalloyed delight that one might have expected following National’s escape from the wilderness of opposition. Yes, ...
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Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Norton, Professor in the Practice of Higher Education Policy, Australian National University Every year on June 1, student debt in Australia is indexed to inflation. In 2023, high inflation pushed the indexation rate to 7.1%, the highest since 1990. This ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra Changes in the May 14 budget will cut the student debt of more than three million people, wiping more than $3 billion from what people owe. The government will cap the HELP indexation rate ...
Asia Pacific Report The prosecutor’s office at the International Criminal Court (ICC) has appealed for an end to what it calls intimidation of its staff, saying such threats could constitute an offence against the “administration of justice” by the world’s permanent war crimes court. The Hague-based office of ICC Prosecutor ...
By Patrick Decloitre, RNZ Pacific correspondent French Pacific desk A women’s union in New Caledonia has staged a sit-in protest this week to support senior Kanak indigenous journalist Thérèse Waia, who works for public broadcaster Nouvelle-Calédonie la Première, after a smear attack by critics. The peaceful demonstration was held on ...
New Zealand Food Safety is monitoring overseas recalls of Indian packaged spice products manufactured by MDH and Everest due to concerns over a cancer-causing pesticide. ...
By Stephen Wright and Stefan Armbruster of BenarNews Fiji’s ranking in a global press freedom index has jumped into the top tier of countries with free or mostly free media after its government last year repealed a draconian law that threatened journalists with prison for doing their jobs. Fiji’s improvement ...
We might be in Invercargill but all anyone can talk about is Gore. Specifically, Salford Street. That’s where three-year-old Lachlan Jones lived, south of the centre of town, between the A&P Showgrounds and the Mataura River. Roughly 1.2 km away from the single level home he lived in with his ...
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Keen hiker and second-year MSc student Liam Hewson wears two hats when he’s in the great outdoors. “The scientist in me appreciates nature and goes, ‘Oh, there’s that thing and there’s another thing,’ but then the tramper and the outdoorsy person in me thinks, ‘Cool bush.’” Born and bred in ...
After a long and illustrious career as a goal kicker, Dan Carter’s favourite way to unwind is… kicking goals. Why can’t he get enough of it? And what it’s like to watch him do it for an hour straight? A semicircle of people wielding cameras and phones has formed in ...
Dame Susan Devoy takes us through her life in television, including late night ER debriefs, her proudest CTI moment and the show she watches in secret. Quite aside from her four world champion squash titles, Dame Susan Devoy will likely go down in history as one of the best Celebrity ...
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ThreeNow’s new murder mystery series takes us on a dark, damp journey into the Australian wilderness.This is an excerpt from our weekly pop culture newsletter Rec Room. Sign up here. High Country is ThreeNow’s new Australian eight-part crime drama, set in a remote part of the Victorian highlands. It tells ...
Introducing a new way to read The Spinoff every weekend. After nearly 10 years of being an online magazine, we’re finally embracing the weekend liftout. Despite our best efforts to convince you otherwise, writers and editors at The Spinoff don’t work weekend. It is through the sheer power of technology ...
Tip one: let yourself be nurtured by this big old man. Tip two: don’t ask him to adopt you. So, you’ve arrived at your first session with a new therapist. He tells you to make yourself comfortable and you opt for the tweed armchair, hoping it makes you look like ...
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Former Olympic swimmer James Magnussen has already started training for the Enhanced games, though says he won’t start taking performance enhancing substances until about nine months out from the competition. The Australian world champion was the first athlete to be announced by Enhanced, but he says the organisation has had ...
Everyone thinks he’s dead. Every day they expect his body to be washed up along the coast. Most likely up Karitane way, the way the tide’s running. But nobody’ll be too surprised if his body’s never found. Even in death he wouldn’t have wished for such attention. He would have ...
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So after 3 and a half years, we have to wait another six months for another working group to start from scratch to evaluate light rail. It doesn't even sound like Dominion Rd is a definite as they've now mentioned Sandringham Rd. So absolutely nothing has been decided.
No decision on Auckland light rail, as Government opts for 'fresh start' on project | Stuff.co.nz
This project was originally sold to us as a much needed rail connection to the Auckland International Airpor. But it definitely won't be connecting to the airport anytime soon. (if ever).
So what's it all about?
Don't we ever learn?
Doesn't anyone remember the vanity project that was the viaduct light rail?
Developers thought it would be hoot to get rate payers to fund this vanity project to give their condo development a bit of a boho look. This vanity project has served its purpose and, despite all the big talk of extending it down Quay street to the Britomart transport hub, has been moth balled.
Now again there is talk of developers cashing in. With plans for multi-level condiminiums down the length of Dominion Road.
Of course these developers want a light rail, tramway, or whatever you want to call it down the length of Domininiou Road. Don't matter if, like the viaduct tramway, it doesn't actually connect to anything, because the tax and ratepayes will be footing the bill. But it will look flash. (for a while anyway).
Talk is, the construction will drive all the small businesses retailers down Dominion Road to the wall, and the developers will be able to buy up all these properties in a fire sale.
And the character of Dominion Road will be changed forever.
I feel I want to throw up.
I mean really, haven't we had enough of corpoarate welfare in this country?
Meanwhile Puhinui Road and the South Western Motorway is crying out for relief from traffic congestion to the airport. Let's get all those cars off the road The corridor is there. The need is there. Mike Lee saw the wisdom of it. The main trunk rail line is ritht there. What could be simpler. Even that old dinosaur Winston Peters with his populist air to the ground knew he could make political capital over the light rail vanity project down Dominion Road. The light rail project down Dominion Road, (or possibly down Sandringham Road) benefits no one except very limited special interest groups. It won't benifit workers who want to commute to their airport or nearby support workplaces, who currently find themselves in near grid lock traffic jams every working ding dong day.
It doesn't benefit arriving and departing air travelers from who want to get into and out of the city centre with as least hassle and time, and with a certaintly of timely arrival.
It doesn't benefit local businesses and residents.
Let's hope this disorganised dog's breakfast gets so tangled up in its own hubris that it never actually leaves the drawing board or the fevered imaginations of the condo builders.
So from today the minimum wage increases from $18.90 to $20 which will help some people. (I still think it would have been better to give everyone an extra $40 in the hand by changing the tax brackets so less tax is deducted). The tax brackets have not been adjusted since 2009? and both Nats and Lab have never adjusted for inflation. Any income over $48k is taxed at 30% which is way too high. And income over $70k that used to be 'rich pricks' income at33%. Well $an income of $70k is not what it used to be.
Last week we had the largest intervention in the housing market in decades which soaked the rich.
This week the minimum wage went up again, and taxes on the super-rich went up.
It's not like they're doing nothing.
so the tax paid by the super rich has gone up , really. How some are sucked in by what is said as to that what happens in the real world.
https://i.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/300238241/more-than-40-of-millionaires-paying-tax-rates-lower-than-the-lowest-earners-government-data-reveals
Who engages the best tax lawyers and accountants in the country.
The "super rich"
They won't be paying this tax.
Wish they would do something about dependent partners – they managed to for the COVID response. The extra tax (about 5,000 per year) a single person supporting two people pays over two people earning the same income might enable things like Kiwisaver that simply isn't affordable supporting two people affordable – let alone saving for retirement for two people.
Oh that is right they did do something – they removed the ability of partners to get NZS so now the working partner has to work even longer.
It is april 1st!!!
[TheStandard: A moderator moved this comment to Open Mike as being off topic or irrelevant in the post it was made in. Be more careful in future.]
Yay! minimum wage goes up to $20…
Boo! Auckland Light Rail development according to Rt. Hon. Jacinda Ardern on RNZ this morning, is open to Public Private Partnerships–the NZ Labour Caucus monetarists (and their fifth columnist prodders in Govt. Ministries) invite further penetration of what should be public infrastructure by private capital.
Have a great April 1st.
[TheStandard: A moderator moved this comment to Open Mike as being off topic or irrelevant in the post it was made in. Be more careful in future.]
Penk and Brown? April Fools surely…
[TheStandard: A moderator moved this comment to Open Mike as being off topic or irrelevant in the post it was made in. Be more careful in future.]
"Chris Penk-Simeon Brown"
Heh- fortunately I checked the calendar this morning.
[TheStandard: A moderator moved this comment to Open Mike as being off topic or irrelevant in the post it was made in. Be more careful in future.]
"It is all about growth. Even when it is clear that more and more people want and need a reliable, trustworthy public broadcaster on free-to-air radio, the ultimate aim for RNZ is about boosting numbers.
Sometimes this “growth fanaticism” is presented cleverly. It has been described as a ‘moral obligation’ for RNZ ‘to build lifelong relationships with all New Zealanders’.
But ultimately it is the same ethos as listening to ambitious sales people talk about their targets."
https://www.newsroom.co.nz/if-the-rnz-totara-falls-is-anyone-listening
And a Minister who appears to have disproved his earlier promise.
In other breaking news on April Fool's Day the Prime Minister has decided that the Deputy Prime Minister will enter a Monastery and Mr Robertson has chosen to take an extended stay in the Kopua Monastery in Central Hawkes Bay. His parting words were "I shall spend my remaining years in prayer that my offences against the New Zealand people may be forgiven. I shall never speak again".
This is a Trappist establishment. Trappist monks do not take a vow of silence but do not indulge in "idle conversation". This is a problem for Grant as idle conversation comprises his entire repertoire.
[TheStandard: A moderator moved this comment to Open Mike as being off topic or irrelevant in the post it was made in. Be more careful in future.]
"Ooh! Ooh! Look at me! I got the joke!"
A journey, where some of the scenery is different but the destination is the same.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/ng-interactive/2021/mar/31/uk-housing-crisis-how-did-owning-a-home-become-unaffordable
I think this Housing Crisis situation must be happening in most country's that adhere to neo liberal policy. Pulling back on state house building and selling off the same to reduce "big government" is a huge loser policy for the people that need it. And speculation in housing also rampant around the world with the same result-unaffordabilty. I think supply issues are not to blame in affordabilty, got fuck all to do with it IMHO. Our world pricing systems are all driven by demand regardless of supply levels. Butter anyone? We are surrounded by cows yet the price is up. Same with houses. Controls are needed but won't be forthcoming under neo liberal Govt's. Stuck with it!
It really depends on the Govt.
Take WA for example.
Here is a house 4 bedrooms 2 car garage and 2 bathrooms with a rumpus room, just 500m from a popular and good swimming beach.
For those buying their first home there is a huge discount provided by the Govt for new builds, so the incentive to buy existing houses by new buyers is just not there, and there is no upwards pressure on the market. House prices for 3 – 4 bedroom homes have stayed around the 350k – 450k range for years.
"It really depends on the Govt."
It does and it dosnt…..western central banks are members of a club and if you want the benefits of belonging to that club you play by the rules…and the rules are set by the hegemon…currently the US.
The government CAN decide it dosnt want to be in the club but that means losing the benefits of being in the club….and they fear that more than anything else at the moment.
Essentially, unless the Government decides the cost of being a member of the club is too high they are little more than middle management or worse, sales reps.
Fact is that successive WA Governments have consistently supported their construction and building industries thus maintaining and preserving a dedicated labour force. So there is no shortage of housing stock. They are in the fortunate position also of having abundant land available for development, and they have a well developed public transport system that supports these new developments. The biggest crisis as far as WA is concerned is the availability of water. There is a huge aquifer and a massive salt water desalination plant, but the rainfall in the area has steadily decreased over the last few decades as a result of the Hadley Cell shifting south with AGW and dramatically changing the climate.
Knew about the support, was unaware of the water issues and will note that the support dosnt prevent crashes if conditions are right,
"Values in Perth and Darwin are more than 20% below their 2014 peaks, while the remaining capital cities have seen housing values move to new record highs through the COVID period."
https://www.corelogic.com.au/news/why-didnt-australian-housing-market-crash
Yup. Aussie Citz get a 50k handout for new builds I think. If that's true and could be used to support the deposit then a great help, well done AU. SFA this side of the ditch tho!
Checking out Real estate windows on the Goldie shows pricing cheaper than Tauranga/Hamilton and way down on Auck. Sydney not so good tho. Go figure.
Our Gov did that years ago by allowing Kiwisaver funds to be used for 1st home deposits and then added a grant on top…..if joe public cant save the deposit (because of high rents living costs in relation to wages) then a mechanism needs to be provided to put a floor under the market.
Wouldn't 50k here pretty much go straight to the local council?
Depends on the cost of the build, but up to $500,000 build is around $5000 in Auckland.
https://www.aucklandcouncil.govt.nz/building-and-consents/building-consents/Pages/building-control-fees.aspx
That might look as if it is in Perth but it is actually quite a long way south.
It has about the same relationship to Perth as Paraparaumu has to Wellington, or the Auckland CDB to Karaka.
Perth has been in a depression for a couple of years now with the mines in the north of the state caught up in the Chinese row with Australia and the FIFO people who work there and live in Perth out of work. There are a lot of houses in the area for sale.
So relies who live there tell me anyway.
Warnbro, which is the local station on the Mandurah line, is a 40 min ride into the city. There is a train into the city every 10 mins. You might as well live there as in the City. I enjoy riding the train, and passing the cars on the Freeway as you travel at well over 130kph, and no traffic jams.
Lithium mining is the future it seems. Some of the FIFO people have packed up and left, but many others lived out of State – even here in NZ!
Agree…it goes back to the liberalisation of the finance and banking sector that essentially gives the banks a free hand to create credit (debt) as they like and so they have….and why wouldnt they, greater credit means greater profit for them.
Especially when they now know that when they overdo it the public purse will bail them out a la GFC.
Did people look at the link provided?
Did you notice what The Chancellor did in 2015 that was meant to solve the housing problem. It didn't do anything did it?
Now can you see any real difference between that and what Grant has just announced here? No? So what makes anyone think that the current Government actions will do anything at all to even ameliorate, much less solve the New Zealand problems?
Did anyone look at the link?…i have no idea, but i would suggest a couple of points, firstly they already had a reduced offset ability that was further reduced, unlike here where we have gone from 100 mph to zero in one hit, and as I have constantly espoused it is sentiment driving the market, sentiment spun by the vested interests.
But in a way you are correct, the underlying driver is the availability of credit which is the point, that is driving the price growth but that easy money (supported by ever decreasing interest rates) has run out of road…where to from here?
Item about a female stalker from today's Stuff webpage:
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/124709613/a-stalker-has-promised-her-victims-she-will-not-stop-until-she-dies
80 convictions for breaching protection orders. Now if only the authorities had been this assiduous about dealing with certain male stalkers or abusive ex-partners ….
Stuart Nash ..Police Minister, 2019
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/390755/hawke-s-bay-mayors-gang-patch-ban-rejected-by-police-minister
Also Stuart Nash …Not Police Minister, 2021
Now personally I don't get all hot and bothered about patches. Living in the un ironically named Nash Street, in the middle of the Hood, I probably should ..but I just block it all out.
The issue I have is particularly with Nash, who rants and raves about a number of issues…only to disappear from the room when in a position to actually act on his beefed up "manly man" "Get Hard" rhetoric ..gangs, housing, jobs, fisheries…all have been through the same wash with Nash.
I've often said, given his stance on a number of issues, he should have joined the National Party. And as it turns out…by now he could well be Leader of the National Party.
Instead Labour are stuck with him. Like the kinda annoying cousin from the provinces that makes you dread the family Christmas year in year out.
But then again, it would seem he fits perfectly with Labours policy of incremental inaction..
Napier has the highest ratio of people in the country waiting for stable housing. Half of the motels are housing people who would be living on the street. Other areas have a high need as well.
An older teenager might find joining a gang giving them security or a place to escape. The one thing the government can do is build more state houses to deter youth joining a gang. Once in a stable home then the older teenager could look at job training or furthering their education. Youth are under so much strain when living in poverty. When home is an unhappy place a teenager will find ways to spend as little time there as they can.
Indeed. Like you say…The two problems that lead to gang membership here in the hood …dire lack of affordable, secure housing, and, equaly, wages in the orchards basically at a standstill since the 80's. When we first moved here people who worked on orchards and in the meat works could hope to buy their own home ..now a kiwibuild in Marenui was.$385,000 upwards ..and that was last year. .prices around these parts have escalated.
People tend to talk about "housing insecurity" in a slightly detached way, as if its purely a financial problem. I'm not sure they understand the effect on children of a life of feeling "less than" with parents at breaking point, time and time again, looking for yet another house…always on the back foot…
So, whatever, they can ban gang patches ..its not going to stop the problem one little bit…but I guess, out of sight, out of mind for some..
"Bernard Hickey wrote about this in January, suggesting that the Government could actually use this money to build up to 800,000 new homes: “Rent subsidies paid by the central government are forecast to rise from $2.6b last year to $4.2b by 2025. They have already risen from $1.9b over the last four years, Treasury figures show. Just as first home buyers use their rent to calculate how much they could afford to pay in interest, the Government could currently borrow over $400b with that $4.2b of rent subsidies. At $500,000 per dwelling, that $400b would ‘buy’ 800,000 new homes, which would be half the current housing stock of the entire country”
https://democracyproject.nz/2021/04/01/bryce-edwards-political-roundup-the-missing-part-of-the-govt-housing-package-state-builds/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=bryce-edwards-political-roundup-the-missing-part-of-the-govt-housing-package-state-builds
An excellent piece that highlights how woeful the Governments action (?) on state housing is (and has been)….why is the Government not ramping up its ability to directly build the housing needed or, if incapable ,at the very least directly contracting to the private sector a construction programme significantly larger than current?
Fear of success perhaps?
Yeah the rental subsidy has been out of control for a while.The government could build or subsidise young people to build a heck of a lot of assets with it. Personally I think in some of the smaller districts they could add up the amounts paid – work out how much to build to collapse the rental market and then move outwards in ever widening crcles.
except they dont wish to collapse the market….hence the constrained build programme
I think its a rort and I can only assume that the government, regardless of hue is complicit. Surely they must see what other see or are they so naive?
They see it..and are very afraid, It is largely the basis of our economy.
"Chris Penk-Simeon Brown Ticket"
April Fools Day joke…surprising the numbers- on a political blog- who didnt get it.
[TheStandard: A moderator moved this comment to Open Mike as being off topic or irrelevant in the post it was made in. Be more careful in future.]
April Fools got cancelled.
Oh the poor wee numpties:
I fell for it.
yes, its a good one too. just enough truth in it to be believable and make me click to if a couple of nobodies could roll a never was
Why do we need to tax the rental income of landlords? Why not make residential rental income rent free?
I know that today is April 1st, but the above comment is not made in the spirit of April Fools Day.
Owner-occupiers do not pay tax on the income imputed to them by dint of their living in their own homes. This income is essentially the rent that they save from doing so.
Landlords probably pass the tax on as part of the rent, so it just represents an additional burden on tenants, and is probably a form of 'double taxation' (a situation where two lots of tax are paid on the same income tranche).
It would also put to bed all the arguments flying about over the removal of interest deductibility.
You know, I don't get taxed on the hire fees I don't earn from not providing a taxi service using my car. Not that I'm complaining.
I don't think a automobile is deemed to be an investment. I suppose one has to draw the line somewhere between what are considered investments, and what are considered consumption. Houses for some reason are considered investments. I suppose it’s because they are eminently rentable.
Why not make rent payments tax deductible?
Why not make rent payments tax deductible?
The danger with that is that landlords, knowing that tenants are receiving a tax break, would see it as an opportunity to up the rent.
Because the higher the rent the more tax you can deduct and the more profit. I don't think this is a good idea.
Top policy was to put a value and charge tax the advantage people get from owner occupying over renting if memory serves me correctly.
It does serve you correctly. It was one of the more subtle and important policy ideas TOP had – yet totally misunderstood or ignored.
Problem was it did not account for people on lowish fixed incomes – they'd've been obliged to sell.
Every time someone brings up this objection – and you are by no means the first – I'm left wondering at the dishonesty of omitting that TOP explicitly covered this off by giving people the option of deferring the CCT until either the property was sold or passed on in an estate. Effectively converting it into a standard CGT or an Estate Tax. But either way they got to live in their home during their lifetime without a hit to their cash flow.
I've forgotten how many times I've typed that out now. Please don't make me do it again.
"did not account for people on lowish fixed incomes – they'd've been obliged to sell"
Quite. And they are most likely to be retired people who over their lifetime have had relatively limited financial resources and acquired only one home, which, when it went onto the market, would most likely be bought by someone with several.
My suggestion is pretty much based on the same principle, and may be more useful in the current climate.
Landlords probably pass the tax on as part of the rent,
Landlords cannot operate like the IRD taxing a tenants rent.
Is there a way to stop this?
Landlords cannot operate like the IRD taxing a tenants rent.
They don't actually tax tenants' rent. But I would assume that they tailor the rent that they charge so that it takes into account the amount of tax that they themselves are paying on that rent.
The first rule in business is to watch the cash flow.
Any increase in costs, such as this new tax, must be managed, either the profit is reduced, costs are reduced elsewhere or the price is raised – or some combination of both. What cannot happen is that the cash operating profit goes negative. In that case the shareholder must either add funds, or the business is insolvent.
This new tax will likely take some unknown fraction of landlords into negative cash flow territory. I know that it's taken us very close to it, and our mortgage is relatively low compared to what it used to be. If this had happened to us ten years ago we would have fallen over almost for certain.
So are tenants now going to be taxed by the landlord, if so the rent has to increase?
So are tenants now going to be taxed by the landlord, if so the rent has to increase?
This would not be the case if landlords' rental incomes were tax free.
Yeah but many landlords charge rent completely unrelated to their costs i.e. market rent.
My mother on NZS has just had her rent put up another $30-00 a week on the mortgage free unit because the "market" says so. Also landlords aren't business people in most senses of the word. They don't even get when the government puts subsidies up by $30-00 that it is a 70 cent in the dollar subsidy. So the $30-00 rent increase means at best the person gets only $21-00 and is now $9-00 poorer. Business people they are not. You might be but many are not – for a large number the relationship between cost and rent isn't that existent.
There are many….whether they are implemented however is a different question.
Consider….an investor buys a property 20 years ago with a 20% deposit and a $100k mortgage over 25 years…the mortgage outgoings including principal payment at current interest rates equate to around $100 pw…there are additional costs associated but they remain deductable,
What is the current market rent for that property?
Debt ratios are key.
A friend of mine owns 20 rental properties – she had 22 but assisted her tenants to buy them. She paid the mortgages off years ago and charges rents that are affordable and reasonable.
Market rent is like CEO's salaries – once they start going up the market says they have to keep going up. They become self-perpetuating. They then push the price up as the capital gain starts outweighing the actual value and we end up in a viscous cycle with the working class as pawns in the capitalist game.
I partly blame Christchurch where profiteering after the earthquake massively increased rents and emboldened rampant capitalism. That is when a rent freeze should have gone on.
It was happening long before the ChCh quakes….the rent rort post quakes in ChCh was driven by insurance money….it increased the ability to pay.
Disaster capitalism
There are several ways to do this. What I think you're going for is to take the costs and add a margin. But then every owner will have different costs based on their mortgage, and it would lead to odd outcomes – if for example the owner came into an inheritance or windfall and used it to pay down their borrowings, thus reducing their costs – would you argue for the rent to fall at the same time? Or if the same house was then sold to a new owner with a much larger mortgage – should the rent immediately rise to match?
That's not how virtually any business works.
What actually happens I think is that the 'market price' is set by the vendor with the highest marginal cost. It's a bit like the electricity market in this respect – total supply must always equal total demand – and during peak periods when the most expensive generator comes online (because it has to) then everyone else is paid the same price that this generator charges.
The residential rental market isn't quite so rigidly organised like this, plenty of landlords actually charge well below 'market'. The data that the Ministry of Housing publishes is only for new bonds, it doesn't track older established ones at all – which as a rule are lower than for new tenancies.
The other way to look at this is to consider what would happen if the owner simply sold the property and put the cash into a bank deposit. This would be considered the 'Minimum Risk Rate of Return", which by convention is set at 3%. So if we took your 20 yr old property that is probably now worth north of $750,000 that would equate to around $22kpa return before tax. If you're going to go to the hassle and risk of renting the house to someone you'd certainly want to do better than this. Consider that your fixed costs – rates, insurance, R&M, new compliance rules, and management fees etc – are going to be at least another $10kpa, this means you need a rental income of around $32kpa just to do better than putting the money in the bank. That's a rent in the order of $620pw.
This is pretty easy to work out for the property you live in, just go to qv.co.nz and enter your own address. Then do the numbers for yourself – it should give you a sense of what your minimum rent should be if your landlord was being economically rational.
And the investor that bought the property for 120K 20 years ago may well decide that original 20K investment that is now worth say 750K today is better off in a TD or somewhere else…thats for him or her to decide…the point is IF the investor has not increased his/her leverage the pressure to increase rents does not exist…..it is a choice.
Nope – you need to have a bit more of a think about it. What would happen if the market consisted of just two rentals – an old one with no mortgage that had fixed costs only say $200pw or a new one with borrowings that had a cost of $600pw? And each landlord charged enough just to cover these costs only?
And now consider there are only two tenants who can choose between them. Assume both houses are of similar desirability for the sake of the argument. Which one would they both want? The cheap one at $200pw of course. But only one can live in it, forcing the other to pay $600pw to live in the other one. Well the landlord charging only $200pw might be content with this situation, but what happens when demand increases and a third new tenant appears in this market?
Of course none of this addresses the current problems in the NZ housing market that go well beyond the dynamics of the rental market, which has existed since the year dot.
a lot of mental gymnastics going on there to attempt to refute the fact the original landlord has a choice….and none of it changes the fact he/she does.
the fact the original landlord has a choice
So the original landlord charging only $200pw retires and decides to sell to a new operator? One with a much larger mortgage.
The point is that you're essentially relying on the willingness of this person to leave $400pw on the table indefinitely. You may well have an opinion on the morality of this, but I think you can see that in the context of a real world market – it's just not a stable scenario.
The willingness or not of the investor to set their rent at whatever will depend on multiple factors…one being the quality of the tenant…it is financially advantageous to the investor to have a reliable trouble free tenant who may be able to afford a lesser amount than to risk a series of unsuitable tenants and vacancy periods….real world enough for you?
I know investors who operate on this basis and have done for years…a good long term tenant is worth their weight in gold.
But all of that aside the original comment was regarding landlords passing on the tax changes to tenants and my comment pointed out that there is no need for many investors to pass on costs as the carry little or no leverage, and have no financial pressure to do so…..and as stated previously, those that are excessively leveraged and operating a marginal investment have the option to rebalance or exit …..non viable businesses are wound up all the time.
If two farmers are producing the same crop, but one due to having some competitive advantage – better rainfall or management methods for example – has a lower cost of production, and demand equals or exceeds supply, do you think this farmer will sell at a lower cost than his neighbour? Of course not – that farmer sells at the same price and uses their competitive advantage to make a higher profit.
This is how all businesses work, why do you think residential rentals must be an exception?
The most important factors in determining the level of rent is:
– Size of mortgage to service
– Number of bedrooms
– Location
Quality of the tenant might help in terms of future rent increases, a little. I have one house which we haven't increased for three years because they are solid and there's zero debt on it.
There's two others, only one of which has a mortgage and it's small – we do review that annually.
Agree with you about the very marginal investors. They will now get out, or their banks will tell them hard to sell one or two and bring their position down, or the next time they go to their bank for a rollover they are going to get a reality check. That's a desired outcome from government policy.
@Ad..yes dont disagree with factors setting rent but for some reason RL wants to debate a self evident truth regarding financial pressure on low or zero leveraged investors.
And yes banks will be having some uncomfortable conversations.
my comment pointed out that there is no need for many investors to pass on costs as the carry little or no leverage, and have no financial pressure to do so
For any given net profit the landlord's tax payment will always appear in the rent that he charges, for example (for a net profit of $100 pw there are two ways that this can come about:
(a) At a tax rate of 33% the landlord will need to add $150 to his outgoings in setting the rent, or
(b) At a tax rate of zero he will need to add only $100 to his outgoings.
Actually there are more than two when one takes into account the fact that different landlords may be on different tax rates.
@Mike
I am talking about pressure, not profit/return.
Simplistic…in fact there are numerous determinants in crop sales and the price is seldom the same for all sellers or even for the same seller across the entire crop….and one critical factor is the relationship.
But obviously its important to you for some reason to convince yourself that all investors behave the same way when patently they dont and as said originally the investor has choice….or do wish to continue to deny that fact?
And as an after thought what happens to the dairy farmer whose cost of production exceeds the MS price?
Buyers don't care or even know about the cost structure of the producer. If two truckloads of turnips from two different farmers turn up at the produce market – then all other things being equal – they will sell at the same price. What actually sets the price on the day is the balance of supply and demand.
Introducing other factors is irrelevant to the argument here.
And as an after thought what happens to the dairy farmer whose cost of production exceeds the MS price?
Either they find a way to reduce their costs or they go out of business. Tough on that farmer but good for the economy as a whole because it tends to drive toward better productivity over time.
what happens to dairy farmers who's costs exceed the MS price is an unwelcome visit from the bank….much the same will be occurring with many investors who are over-leveraged.
And turnips?….lmao..youre a funny guy
Great so what you've finally concluded – which is what I said days ago – is that as over-leveraged landlords exit the market the supply of rentals will go down. At a time when there is already a shortage of rentals this is only likely to put upward pressure on rents.
The argument that ex-rentals automatically become first homes is flawed because it assumes that ex-tenants are all going to become first home buyers just because they want to. What happens in reality is a lot more messy than this.
Have you been drinking?….you are arguing with yourself.
Go back and read what I wrote.
Aye but you're arguing that the market rent by necessity must be $600-00 per week because the most leveraged "investor" determines he market price. In you scenario both tenants would pay $600-00.
"Well the landlord charging only $200pw might be content with this situation, but what happens when demand increases and a third new tenant appears in this market?"
The landlord charging $200-00 might be even happier because they know that they are providing good support to someone even though demand has increased.
The rate of return argument is financial trickery to justify such financial rorting. It also becomes self perpetuating as values increase – I must charge this much because I could otherwise do this. The classic paradigm of knowing the price of something but the value of nothing.
It's nonsense pretending their is a strong relationship between rental income and cost. The fact that so many properties are actually untenanted – if the relationship was as strong as you suggest then you would not be rational to have a property untenanted. Plenty of landlords are content to have this occur.
Market rents like much of economics is filling an emotional response by landlords. It is nice couching economics in notions of rational players but that notion is a pretence.
It's why things have to be regulated.
The landlord charging $200-00 might be even happier because they know that they are providing good support to someone even though demand has increased.
This indeed is the position we are in. If I was to achieve the same return from my rents as selling up and putting the money into a 3% TD, I would have to increase them all across the board by $160pw.
Sustaining this position is a choice. Up until now I've been reasonably happy to accept a relatively modest cash operating profit because I could anticipate doing better once the mortgage was paid down. Plus indeed we did see it as a social good.
Well both of those conditions are now off the table, this govt has now added a new tax that reduces our cash operating flow to zero and has openly told us that what we are doing is no longer considered of any social benefit.
So either we increase the rent or do something else. Probably the latter.
I'm by no means a big financy guy, but it seems to me and rando calculator site that a landlord owning a $120k house that is now $750k after 20 years that the landlord already has a calculated return of 9% per annum.
Sure, let's say the saint will never sell. Sunk cost is $120k (plus interest on the mortgage that is now paid off), with ongoing rates and maybe a margin for projected maintenance (piles, drains, etc). That's if they're people who are genuinely providing a public service with no thought of profit, just the costs being covered. Not that private ownership is necessarily the best model for that, I'd suggest a trust or charity as an instrument for community rent provision.
But none of that has anything to do with market rates. That's a function of supply and demand. Housing shortage, so it's down to how much individuals can afford to pay before they're living rough.
Many landlords will be somewhere between those two extremes. Some might well be practically a housing service. #notAllLandlords is the problem with that charitable view, though.
@McFlock
Persisting in pretending there is no difference between cash flow and capital gain really disqualifies you from any honest participation in this conversation.
As for your idea that the market can run purely on a not-for-profit charity model, runs afoul of the fact that sooner or later those charities will have to renew their stock, and find the funds to do this. In the long run they have to operate commercially on pretty much the same basis as private operators do.
And then most private operators make relatively low cash operating profit, the difference between them and a ‘not for profit’ charity amounts to sfa.
You're the one saying the current capital value has anything to do with cashflow on a house bought 20 years ago.
If someone buys a house as a public service, the only costs are the costs of purchase (incl mortgage) and ongoing costs like rates and maintenance. And they don't have to "renew their stock" if they maintain the house.
Houses in NZ have about an 80yr economic life. This means that roughly 1.25% of them must be replaced every year just to keep pace with existing stock, much less meet a growing population. In my lifetime NZ has roughly doubled it's population.
And just about anything older than 50yrs no longer meets modern expectations, and needs substantial investment.
So in reality your 'housing charity' has to keep either replacing or adding to it's stock – at current market prices – in order to stay in the game. And it cannot do this on fresh air.
Many years back we were involved in Habitat for Humanity in the Wgtn area, essentially the kind of housing charity you have in mind. Once we got involved at the board level we had to be schooled in this lesson the hard way.
"At Habitat for Humanity Australia, we believe in helping low-income families achieve the dream of building and owning their own home."
"To date Habitat for Humanity Australia has built more than 160 homes in New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland."
Habitat for Humanity and land Lords – not so different?
My (one and only) home is ~60 years old; it may not meet modern expectations but it (still) meets mine, and I’ve never had a complaint from occasional visitors.
So we have an arc in capital value that a well-maintained house goes from 120k to 750k @20 years to $0 at 50 years? I mean, bollocks, but even if it were true you could find that fiscal sweet spot.
Because they don't need to create a house from thin air, if the objective is to not lose money they can sell the old one and buy a new one using the increased capital value. And a landlord renewing their stock is renewing their capital assets.
But of course any landlord would be lucky to be in the business for 50 years, anyway – one reason to go to a longer term structure than personal ownership.
@DMK
Well like McFlock when we first started with H4H we too thought like he did, but it turned out we were quite wrong. A couple of older and more experienced members had to be quite sharp with us over it.
And H4H is not even a rental charity. That would be closer to the Masterton Community Trust model, and even that very well established entity charges rents that are not all that much lower than the private market in the same town. Certainly they don't hold their rents static for 20 years as McFlock would have them do.
Are rates and maintenance static for decades?
As for "not all that much lower", that difference is still significant for the people who rent it, so "not all that much" is a relative term.
There are several ways to do this. What I think you're going for is to take the costs and add a margin. But then every owner will have different costs based on their mortgage, and it would lead to odd outcomes – if for example the owner came into an inheritance or windfall and used it to pay down their borrowings, thus reducing their costs – would you argue for the rent to fall at the same time? Or if the same house was then sold to a new owner with a much larger mortgage – should the rent immediately rise to match?
Differing tax rates also come into it. A landlord on a 17.5% tax rate can afford to charge a lower rent and still make the same net profit as a landlord on a 33% rate
“It’s a bit like the electricity market in this respect – total supply must always equal total demand – and during peak periods when the most expensive generator comes online (because it has to) then everyone else is paid the same price that this generator charges.”
This is why the Labour Party's single seller proposal, of earlier years, may have been a good idea. At peak times electricity could be sold, by a single seller, at an average price. A 'single seller' arrangement, however, would obviously not be appropriate in the residential rental market; mortgages, and landlords' tax rates (as pointed out above), would be disorienting factors. This is why mortgages and differential tax rates should not be factors in determining rents. Fairly stable, and equal (after factoring in differences in the quality of the dwelling) rents would seem to be desirable.
Influences due to differences in tax rates could be avoided if the same tax rate was applied to all rental income – I would suggest 0% ), but I think the influence of mortgage payments could only be avoided by removing them from rent determinations altogether. this latter suggestion would make sense since mortgages should be the landlords' responsibility in any case.
PS: If there was a CGT in place the fact that mortgages, including their interest component, are capital expenditure would suggest that the aggregate unclaimed interest might be considered deductible against a capital gain.
This is practice in a few US States, though it seems to be widely seen as an un-natural tax distortion there and is understood to have elevated house prices.
In considering this I think too much emphasis can easily be put on the differentials and incentives (between occupiers and investors or between landlord renter) and not enough on how much borrowing can be accrued against housing which appears more important to pricing.
The problem is that councils now reclaim all of the cost of supplying services to new sections in the first year not over a 30-50 year span from rates as used to be the case. The 4 billion spend announced last week was specifically to negate this practice for goverment builds.
Thats why sections are so bloody expensive.
Penk and Simian. Very droll. Two April Fools.
[TheStandard: A moderator moved this comment to Open Mike as being off topic or irrelevant in the post it was made in. Be more careful in future.]
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/439646/sir-ron-brierley-pleads-guilty-to-possessing-child-sexual-abuse-material
Reminds me of the Jewish theme of the song 'If I Was a Rich Man' of what he would do. One who lives the ethical life, with little indulgences!
'Dear God, you made many, many poor people.
I realize, of course, that it's no shame to be poor.
But it's no great honor either!
So, what would have been so terrible if I had a small fortune?'
If I were a rich man,…
And then –
I'd build a big tall house with rooms by the dozen,
Right in the middle of the town.
A fine tin roof with real wooden floors below.
There would be one long staircase just going up,
And one even longer coming down,
And one more leading nowhere, just for show.
I'd fill my yard with chicks and turkeys and geese and ducks
For the town to see and hear.
And each loud 'cheep' and 'swaqwk' and 'honk' and 'quack'
Would land like a trumpet on the ear,
As if to say 'Here lives a wealthy man.'
But then –
The most important men in town would come to fawn on me!
They would ask me to advise them,
Like a Solomon the Wise.
'If you please, Reb Tevye…'
'Pardon me, Reb Tevye…'
Posing problems that would cross a rabbi's eyes!
And it won't make one bit of difference if i answer right or wrong.
When you're rich, they think you really know!
https://genius.com/Topol-if-i-were-a-rich-man-lyrics
Yay Patea Maori Club – symbol of the phoenix rising for all NZ.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/nat-music/audio/2018789866/patea-maori-club-announced-as-recipient-of-taite-music-prize-imnz-classic-record-2021
Only took 38 years to come up with the award. The song, and it was a great one, dates from 1983.
It is almost as bad as the Nobel Prize is getting. The 2013 Physics Prize, was awarded for work on the Higgs mechanism. The theoretical work had been done in 1964, half a century earlier.
Less government, less regulation, more business and more profit. Well that recipe seems to work well.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/audio/2018789809/amazon-s-influence-in-america
The withering of anti-trust laws which allowed for the rise of behemoth companies started in the 1970s, MacGillis says, and then really intensified in the 1980s with Ronald Reagan.
“We’re now still experiencing that very lax approach to anti-trust which has helped abet the growth of these giants. To put it crudely, all sorts of business activity which used to be spread around the country in various sectors of the economy is now increasingly dominated by a handful of companies and that commerce, activity, and wealth is sucked into the places where they reside.”
And what about someone touting for a Silicon Valley here? It will cause as much problem as silicone breast implants did – look good to begin with and then the effects start body deterioration. Has this bloke got eye augmentation?
https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/124699041/nasa-chief-scientist-says-nz-should-become-a-worldwide-silicon-valley
Great fun – thanks. At the moment any laugh is better than none.
[TheStandard: A moderator moved this comment to Open Mike as being off topic or irrelevant in the post it was made in. Be more careful in future.]
Years ago, on April 1 the ODT had two front page articles that to me seemed equally farcical. It turned out that the monorail from Otago to fiordland was a real proposal.
Thought I'd submitted my appreciative comment (@4:39 pm) to the post: National Party leadership spill under way post (Categories: humour), but must have put it somewhere else by mistake – apologies.
Must be awful to lose one’s sense of humour; worse than losing the sense of smell imho
It is one of the symptoms of Covid-19 infection.
Something stinks at Immigration NZ
Are we concerned about public confidence should we investigate properly?
Or will we get the victims out of the country and then wring our hands over 'lack of evidence'?
Getting the victims out asap appears to be the plan…a good iteration of the three wise monkeys appears under way.
I've been listening to the musical Chess, The writers have done a clever piece about the Russian applying for asylum to smug Brit embassy immigration johnnies.
Embassy Lament
Oh my dear how boring
He's defecting
Just like all the others
He's expecting
Us to be impressed with what he's done here
But he hasn't stopped to think about the paperwork his gesture causes…
Have you an appointment
With the consul?
If you don't we know what his response'll
Be, he will not see you, with respect it
Buggers up his very taxing schedule…
https://www.google.com/search?q=youtube+lyrics+chess+embassy+lament
When Collins gets the old heave ho she should take a short while, resign her seat then go and try to do something useful. It’ll be after April 1st.
[TheStandard: A moderator moved this comment to Open Mike as being off topic or irrelevant in the post it was made in. Be more careful in future.]
Surely Resigning would be the most useful thing she could do?
I am talking about pressure, not profit/return.
I know. I was pointing out that as long as the make a net profit, that the tax on that profit gets transferred to the tenant as part of his rent, regardless of the lack of pressure.