I may have missed someone else posting this reference, but it is very powerful and moving stuff. Similar results to NZ banks and the swaps fiasco.
I understand David Pascoe is an equine vet who writes a regular blog.
I suspect that Nationals new policy around education, specifically “Community of Schools” is National’s very cunning way of closing schools by stealth.
Speaking of Kereru…looks like Sonny Tau now has an out. He was merely picking up and deliverying the birds for a Government Minister who has acquired a taste.
Speaking of Radio New Zealand…..someone seems to have taken the edge off the morning presenters.
Much less of the incisive, insistent interviews (with our household cheering them on) and more of a ‘wee chat’ approach. ( Although Mr. Little did get a grilling….funny that.)
@ mickysavage – Yes I noticed that one too, just before the 7am news bulletin this morning. The call of the Kereru. Irony or what? Rubbing it in to NatzKEY perhaps?
But the Dame (Turia) says it’s OK for elders to eat the bird for special occasions! OK to break one’s own cultural rules then is it Ms Turia?
An Open Letter to Britain’s Leading Violent Extremist: David Cameron
July 20, 2015
This open letter to the Prime Minister is published by INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, a new crowd-funded investigative journalism project.
Dear Prime Minister David Cameron,
It is with deep disappointment that I read excerpts of your speech provided by Downing Street to the press, purporting to set out a five-year strategy to tackle fundamentalist terrorism, which — whatever its intentions — is thoroughly misguided, and destined to plunge this country, as well as the Middle East, into further chaos and misery.
I am writing this open letter to request you, as a matter of urgency, to abide by your obligations as a human being, a British citizen, a Member of Parliament, and as our Prime Minister: to undertake proper due-diligence in the formulation of Britain’s foreign, counter-terrorism and security policies, based on the vast array of evidence from scientific and academic studies of foreign policy, terrorism and radicalisation, rather than the influence of far-right extremist ideology, and of narrow vested interest groups keen to profit from war and fear.
…..
Your war, Prime Minister, is a farce.
You, more than any other British citizen, are complicit in the rise of ISIS, and the radicalisation of a minority of Britons. You have helped create the militant groups which, you rightly acknowledge, are murdering not just Westerners, but Muslims in Iraq, Syria and beyond.
The only people that will benefit from all this are giant defence contractors, many of which are closely connected to your party, and which hold overbearing counter-democratic influence on your foreign policy.
Oh no. Who was it here yesterday that said: “The worst PR advice there is, is to try to dig yourself out of a hole with your mouth.”
Over on Phil Quin’s blog, the president of the Labour Party has sent an email reply to Quin’s resignation letter that says he’d target Singaporeans, and Germans too, if he had to. With all their digging, I think Labour just burrowed their way out the other side of the Earth – without reaching China first.
New headlines: “Labour Would Target Germans.”
Advice for Labour: Before you say anything else, or develop any more policy or media releases or speeches, have a read of the Human Rights Act and the Bill of Rights Act and if anything in your rhetoric can’t get through those existing legal filters/guidelines, don’t say it, don’t do it, just stop and think about it for a bit.
I knew it! What Labour are really doing is digging a hole to the other side of the world so that the Chinese have better and more direct access! We’ve been fooled (and not for the first time).
So trawling through surnames and assigning a country of origin or ethnicity to people on the basis of those names is all about (to quote the Labour Party President) “consider(ing) the potential impact of those assets and investment on New Zealand housing ownership, or, indeed, on other aspects of our economy”
I can’t for the life of me see the connection between finger pointing and analysis, but hey.
Oh. And there is no need to look at any other overseas investment because the other overseas investment isn’t the dominant overseas investment.
In searching for that particular blog post, I read some others and I have to say, that in spite of Quin’s reputation of being perhaps a bit of a fuckwit on a number of issues, on this one he’s absolutely bang on the money.
edit: I should add that if Labour were claiming they’d name trawled to get some idea of the wider picture, as in attempting to get some idea, no matter how rough, of the extent of broader overseas investment, then at a stretch…maybe. But to categorically rule out any and all other sources of overseas investment as being problematic…wow.
And this is the same Labour Party which sold off shit loads of NZ stuff to foreign investors – Australians and Americans – or watched it happen without proposing to ban foreign ownership of our power companies, or our telecom companies.
It’s possible that they’ve finally learned that they’ve been wrong for the last thirty years and are now starting to look to undo the damage that they’ve done over that time.
Just to save others getting to the actual content of Haworths letter
here it is copied from Quins site.
. Anyway, Nigel Haworth, the party’s president, wrote to me. This is the crux of his argument:
To refer to Chinese purchasers in such an analysis is not racist. Given, as others have also pointed out, that China is today engaged in massive international investment, much of it strategic, and is also the home of vast, and increasingly mobile, cash assets, it is right and proper for New Zealand to consider the potential impact of those assets and investment on New Zealand housing ownership, or, indeed, on other aspects of our economy. If it were Singaporean. or German or other investment that seemed to be dominant, it would be equally proper to name its source economy (for example, much as has been done since the Second World War in relation to US investment flows).
I give big ups to the doorman in this article who withstood abuse of a very nasty kind and still managed to retain his mana and dignity.
It shows the male Ministry of Social Development employee saying “f***ing n*****s” and claiming the decision to deny him and his colleague entry is “racist”. In the video, Mr Tai-Rakena told a woman: “You’re not coming in here girl, you’re too intoxicated. Away you go.”
the doorman and his workmates managed to stay very calm and measured during a vile tirade of abuse
Well, one of the skills of that job is to realise that the dickheads don’t particularly mean what they say. 99% of that Swayze film Roadhouse was bullshit, but this little exchange was spot on:
Steve: Being called a cocksucker isn’t personal?
Dalton: No. It’s two nouns combined to elicit a prescribed response.
I generally found it boring more than anything else. Although one funny thing is that after the initial refusal of entry they’d call me all sorts of stuff, and 30s later they were going “aww mate, do us a favour”. They almost never got it the right way around. But usually I’d just sort of tune it out (beyond listening for relevant information) and really only look for a pre-assault indicator. Which almost never happened compared to the amount of verbal thrown.
That’s awful stuff, marty. I certainly agree that racism isn’t well understood by some people (the last ten days have shown that all too well). The reflex reaction to call anything racist without looking at the underlying issues or context is probably a modern malaise. It’s PC gone mad etc.
I’d also wonder if the male in the video is affected not just by alcohol, but by the sense of power and authority he gets from being a paid benefit bouncer for WINZ. When you spend your days licensed to show contempt for people, that can definitely affect your thinking after hours as well.
So what you are sayig is that because you found something way more blatently racist that makes the Chinese data OK?
I am not saying what Labour did was racist but the people it targeted seem to feel that way. Intent means a lot. However there are a lot of people who truely belive they are not racist. They just don’t understand that their actions and words paint a different picture.
The data is OK because the data is OK. As marty’s example shows, some people think just about any situation is an opportunity to go OTT. Good point about intent, btw.
And Keith Ng is completely and utterly wrong on the data. You couldn’t get better data.
The point was that it is the BEST data that is currently available because it is the only data that indicates where the money for residential properties is coming from. Therefore there is no better data.
The only other statistical data around just shows that the money for the higher total values of property sales isn’t coming from banks. It could be coming from socks as far as we can currently tell.
Keith Ng is talking crap – unless he can show a source of data that allows a similar type of analysis about money sources for purchasing residential properties.
At the earliest that won’t apparently happen until October, which will probably be catastrophic for our economy. By the sounds of Nationals posturing any data and analysis from that will not be public.
The point was that it is the BEST data that is currently available because it is the only data that indicates where the money for residential properties is coming from. Therefore there is no better data.
How exactly does the name list identify whereabouts money is coming from – onshore or offshore? From residents or from non-residents? As far as I can see, it does no such thing.
Keith Ng is talking crap – unless he can show a source of data that allows a similar type of analysis about money sources for purchasing residential properties.
How on earth can you attack his critique of the name list data based on whether or not Keith can access other sets of data? How would hypothetical access to other sets of data be relevant to Keith’s critique of the name list data?
And Keith Ng is completely and utterly wrong on the data. You couldn’t get better data.
How can you tell if the name list data covering just 3 months is representative of the proceeding 24 or 36 months? Perhaps the snapshot over-represents activity by people with Chinese sounding names. Perhaps it under-represents activity by people with Chinese sounding names.
How exactly does the name list identify whereabouts money is coming from – onshore or offshore? From residents or from non-residents? As far as I can see, it does no such thing.
Indeed it doesn’t.
It merely illustrates that if both the real estate data and the names-ethnicity data reflect the same domestic population, then a single subgroup of that population that is significantly less well off than the population median and is otherwise statistically unremarkable also appears to purchase houses at something like six times the rate of any other subgroup, the disparity accounting for something like a third of the real estate dataset. Even if that accounted for 100% of the market activity of that subgroup, the disparity is around threefold.
Given global economic conditions compared to local economic conditions, the represented disparity at the very least least strongly indicates that we should be measuring overseas property ownership to rule out whether sovereignty issues could become a problem in the moderate to near future.
The word is statistically. The whole point about statistics is that it is a branch of maths for dealing rigorously with error.
Keith keeps pointing to error. He knows that error in itself is damn well measurable. So far he hasn’t pointed to any error that wasn’t pointed out and dealt with in the analysis from Labour, presumably from Ron Salmond. Sure it isn’t physics, but what is these days? Physics is mostly stats now.
How on earth can you attack his critique of the name list data based on whether or not Keith can access other sets of data?
I didn’t. What I asked was where he knew of any better data. I am pretty confident that at present there isn’t anything better at elucidating or debunking the property purchase issues that Labour pointed out. If someone wants to be critical about data then they need to present something to back their criticisms.
The ONLY way you can be as absolutely sure of error as Keith is being is if he had a better data set. Where is it? The lack of it means that his attacks on the error in this data is in my mind (to put it mildly) complete crap.
Sure the data isn’t the best. It covers a mere 3 months covering 45% of the sales from the largest real estate company in Auckland. But the risks of poor data are measurable. There is no way that you can look at a sample size of 45% and think at a statistically or a business level that it is likely to have the kinds of crappy confidence levels that Keith has been trying to suggest.
B&T have been the largest real estate company across the whole of Auckland for my adult life. And I spent my life dealing with private industries in both local and vertical international markets.
Large local companies damn well don’t get to be the largest in any local market by being a specialist as Keith appears to have been suggesting they could be. It is extremely unlikely that for those 3 months Barfoot and Thompson fundamentally changed their business of the 35 years that I have been aware of them. They cover everything….
It it’d been Ray White or Crockers who do specialise more, then there might have been some validity in that argument. But the lower percentages of the total sales would have been more of a problem.
It is highly likely that the data extracted from B&T represents those 3 months of real estate sales in Auckland pretty well because it was 45% of the sales of Auckland from the realtor that is literally everywhere across our local market.
And I don’t know of any reason why those three months were different. I have been keeping track of Auckland real estate since 2012, including during those three months. We knew when we moved back into my apartment, that we’d want a bigger place eventually. So we keep looking to see what is there, through agents, trademe, and turning up at open homes and sites.
Nothing much has changed in the local market since mid 2012 where I look. The supply has gotten slightly better, prices have risen at a pretty steady 25% pa, there appear to be no signs of it changing that every moderately affordable apartment is being built for yuppie flatmates and renting out, and the number of places getting sold cheaply because of leaky home damage has been steadily diminishing. I’d be interested if anyone could point to anything that says things have changed in Auckland, because I haven’t seen anything that says it has.
You’d need real data rather than the frigging barrister style arguments in your comment to convince me that this data is different to the reality. I see it every third weekend. That kind of bullshit arguments is something that you use for politicians and the credulous rather than engineers.
On the other side, I have used these kinds of lists of names for doing canvassing. I have used them for targeting and prediction. Being a rather paranoid programmer, I analyse validity of anything that I use as a matter of course. With this kind of info, both from thousands of direct tests of data and indirectly via stats. I did so for the every set of the data, including name data for local Labour. I’d bet that some of Salmond’s name data derives from that. And being of a practical bent, I’m far less inclined to trust pure stats that Salmond is…
Like many other factors, names are not particularly useful for predicting individuals. You need a multiplicity of factors overlapping an individual and some history to get that to moderately high levels. But they are extremely accurate for correlations between sets in a population.
They are certainly good enough for doing reasonably accurate statistical estimates. Especially when you are merely looking for large differences between two population groups as Rob Salmond did. Unless people were busily deliberately lying to their realtor – (which seems quite unlikely – and indicates a different problem if it did), there is a massive difference visible between two populations.
Now I have no particular stake in this as I haven’t touched any canvassing systems for quite some time, and to be frank I really don’t have the damn time. But some of the complete drivel from intelligent people over the last week is just pissing me off.
Keith is one of those. I have read what he has written on this subject, and he hasn’t managed to convince me that he knows what he talking about here. It looks more like wishful thinking.
Sure I’d like to see better data. But at present and until at least October (unless the realtors release some information voluntarily) this is what we have.
To me it looks like Auckland and the rest of NZ has a bloody urgent economic problem, and one that I didn’t suspect was quite so severe until Labour released this (and I’d had time to think it over).
That is because I suspect that the overflows from the Asian markets are just the largest part of the foreign investment seeking large returns in the local property bubble. By an accident of history, it just happens to be the bit that is most easily analysed against the local population.
My back of the envelope calcs seem to indicate that if we do have that size of speculative bubble with so many from offshore trying not to be the last holding the hot potato, when it does crunch, there is going to be a whole lot of working cash ripped from the local economy fast as turnover plummet hard. I think that will be worse than anything I have ever seen.
Perhaps Keith should turn his usually excellent mind towards that issue.
Pluto is made of cheese. If you think this is wrong, you are obliged to provide better data. Otherwise, “Pluto is made of cheese” is the best data available, therefore is must be true.
Your logic is bad. Not having a substitute does not make the “next best alternative” true or meaningful.
But better data has long since been provided for Pluto’s surface and probable inner structures since Clyde Tombaugh located it in the 1930s. But I don’t think that even children thought it was ever made of cheese. Perhaps you are thinking about the moon?
This data from Barfoot and Thompson and analysed by Labour looks to me like it is statistically valid. I’ve done this particular kind of analysis before in several areas. It is likely to have a error rate of less than 10%. It is a 3 month slice of previously opaque behaviour. Sure it’d be nice to have more data to fine tune the confidence.
But I’ll take market hints from anything that solid when the alternative is anecdote, unsubstantiated theory or supposition.
What it shows is that we appear to have a self-referential property bubble in Auckland with overseas money playing ponzi games of hot potato.
It is probably happening far wider than what can be conservatively statistically inferred for this data. For instance, I can’t think of a reason why Europeans wouldn’t be involved via property companies. It’d suit their kind of portfolio attitudes to markets. I can’t see the US citizens getting into it too much. They have enough growing economic areas to invest in at present.
When someone gets burnt as the music stops, those holding from offshore will be left with the costs. But it’d likely to be relatively low risk as they just hold until they can exit without major loss. But they are just playing the odds of really low returns at low risks against high returns at higher risks. This one is for them medium risks for high returns. Property in rapidly growing cities holds value.
In the case of local purchasers who have to live where they work, they will probably catch the potato when local interest rates rise even a bit, or they have a employment problem, or the value of the property drops below the mortgage level. They are likely doing it with a excessive mortgage that leaves bugger all room for risk and relies on too much luck.
But the abrupt stop in incoming investment flows will also hit a lot further out into jobs (especially casual and part-time retail, distribution, and services) when people start pulling back on spending as they feel poorer. Expect all of those recent real estate people flooding back into the job market along with their baristas, nannies, car-groomers and the like.
The sooner it gets stopped or controlled (like all ponzi schemes), the less damage it causes here.
But try to ignore the data because of an ideological point? That simply isn’t going to happen. It is real data. It will be factored all of the way through the local market by now.
For instance it tells me there really isn’t any point for me to keep looking around for a larger apartment for the moment. The prices don’t reflect shortage so much as offshore speculation, so there is more than likely going to be a good bust. I already have a place. I can wait for it.
If you want to be a petulant child playing wave the cheese games like you have been doing for the last week – then go ahead. It really doesn’t add anything useful to dealing with the real issue of this hot potato and stopping the next one anyway….
The data is okay? How many ‘Lees’ were assigned as Chinese? How many of those were deemed to be resident?
The data collection was a bit like gathering information on random green stuff that grew out the ground and taking a punt on how much of that green stuff was grass. (Sure, they put in some parameters that filtered out trees…maybe bushes too.)
40% of them, according to Rob’s detailed post explaining his methodology where he acknowledged that Lee is also a very common European surname.
“How many of those were deemed to be resident?”
That conclusion was not drawn. The only conclusion they reached is that 9% of Auckland appear to be ethnic Chinese based on the census, and from their analysis 40% of the house buyers from a agency covering 45% of sales in a 3 month period appeared to be ethnic Chinese.
The most likely explanation for the significant (4x) difference in the proportions is that non-resident ethnic Chinese are buying houses in Auckland.
But that is not a conclusion, only the most likely explanation from the analysis of the available data. Other explanations are possible, and many of them will contribute to some of the discrepancy more than others (for example, maybe it was just that time of year, there are more new Chinese immigrants than other ethnicities, Chinese may prefer this real estate company over others, etc).
What it comes down to is whether the Labour Party wanted to highlight and focus on money specifically coming from China, or whether they have a genuine concern on overseas money and were just stupidly using rough ‘Chinese related’ data to get an indication of the larger picture while unbelievably ignoring hard data that was available.
Yes, it would be part of the picture, I did say “etc” in my list of examples.
It is perhaps the biggest one factor. But there’s not much to back up that as a theory either – why should Chinese be so much more into housing investment than other ethnicities? Rob’s data shows that they make up 5% of those on incomes over $50,000, in other words they make up a smaller share of high-income earners than their overall makeup (9%) would suggest.
the saps between 50 – 100k? labours target vote market being denigrated for not earning enough to be truly loathed but earning to much to be considered “true” working class. arsehole
Rob also did more analysis to arrive at the hypothesis that foreign chinese buyers accounted for the difference in apparent buyers and apparent residents. He did also look at ethnic Indian last names and noted that there was only a 3% (ish) difference in apparent purchase and apparent resident proportions (9% oh buyers vs 6% of population.) Rob Salmond’s analysis was better than the one put forward by Labour and he made the point better that there was no real data and so surnames were the only proxy they had to actual data.
I initially read it the way you did, but what I think You Fool means is that Rob actually had a comprehensive analysis, and Labour didn’t publish the whole thing, and chose instead to focus on aspects of it.
For example, on The Nation, Twyford never mentioned the comparative Indian name analysis that Rob did.
Trying to keep it simple I imagine. We’re always complaining Labour make policies/issues too complicated for the average voter. And that includes some media reporters like the (knee) jerk, Patrick Gower.
One of the things that you find out when you are around a film maker, obvious in retrospect, is that the story line for an onscreen feature length film should be about the length of a short short story if it has a lot of dialogue in it.
It’d have to be shortened of course because otherwise it will look like characters are gibbering idiots.
The amount of information you can push across in film is far greater than you can write in words. But less than most novelists has in a single chapter.
Same problem with something like The Nation. You read a transcript and they are shorter than some of my posts 🙂 And someone being interviewed gets something like a tenth of that if they are extremely lucky.
I got a lot less interested in TV news / current affairs once I realised that. Sure I can read body language. But it involves spending a lot of time waiting for it. Or I can read what people write.
Getting Twyford to explain the other tests that would have been done on the data would have meant that he wasn’t able to explain what they found that was so interesting 😈
I suspect that it wasn’t even so much as 40% of individuals being “labelled”, more as ethnicities being given a final score based on weightings of the names, i.e. an index like CPI rather than an outright count. And then the indices were scaled to cumulatively add up to 100, and there’s your “percentage”.
That’s how I’d consider doing it at first blush, anyway.
Thanks L , simple for you, but not for some of the others that are commenting in the MSM & here on TS sadly, or are they just trying to keep the muddy waters stirred?
How many ‘Lees’ were assigned as Chinese? How many of those were deemed to be resident?
Oh FFS. Maybe some revision on basic statistics is required.
None of them were “assigned” as individual people or a family. That appears to be your fundamental misunderstanding, deliberate or otherwise.
As a group with the family name “Lee” each data record would given a probability of being Chinese, a probability of being Korean, a probability of being European, and probably probabilities for several other categories as well – including something like “we have no idea”. So was every other unique family name.
There is a relatively constrained set of family names used in any country including NZ by cultural group, and the data is “conservative” as the name generally travels through many generations. This kind of data is usually tested by getting people from each culture picking out the more common names in their culture and then tested by getting people to self-identify to get the probabilities.
As an analytical technique it is pretty accurate. >90% and usually >95% for many cultural groups even in a society that mixes as much as ours does over a century.
Sure there is inaccuracy in it.
However it doesn’t apply tags to individuals in the way that you seem to think it does. What this kind of analysis looking for is statistical groups rather than trying to pick out individuals. It is exactly the same kind of analysis what the stats department does with the 5 year censuses and the monthly or quarterly data that goes out across the country. They break it down into statistical groups all over the place,.
That was applied to the set of data of property sales to get a set of probabilities for possible correlations for the whole data set.
To one degree or another, that is how statistics, all parts of physical sciences, and most parts of the social sciences operate where there are big enough data sets. They don’t concern themselves with individual bits of data. They concern themselves with probabilities and correlations.
The whole point about statistics is that you don’t have to sample whole populations to get accurate results. You can sample smaller samples to get close to the results of the fully accurate whole population. Samples can be quite small compared to large populations. That is the basis of most polling, which is usually accurate within a few percent of the population result (of course these days a few percent either way in an election is usually the difference – but that is because parties balance around that point).
That is all straight forward and the analysis of the correlations is rigorous enough in the absence of any better data and the difference in size between the correlations.
The next stage is to look for causation for high probability correlations.
Labour have pointed out the obvious causation for the huge difference between the percentages of family name segments of the population as a whole and those buying houses during this period. That is what you an many others appear to be having an issue with.
So far I haven’t seen any alternate explanations that make any sense apart from imported overseas investment money. The money isn’t getting borrowed from local banks. It appears to be large enough to drive the kinds of crazy 25+% per annum house price increases that we have seen since 2011.
What it seems to identify compared to previous economic research as recent as 2013 is that we are rapidly hitting the point where Auckland house prices are largely caused by overseas investment money buying property from other overseas investors.
At about 40% it is freaking high, but even worse is that it appears to be rising rapidly. That it has nothing to do with the real economic value of the land or properties themselves to our economy. That means that it will therefore almost certainly cause a nasty economic crash that will reverberate throughout the rest of NZ. Bearing in mind our current fragile economic state, that is something worth actually worrying about, and one that bears considerable real-world consequences.
You notice that what Labour actually asked for was to get some immediate data collection and analysis going on in the area of foreign investment in property? Seems rather mild compared to what I think is actually needed.
Probably because we have people worrying about how statistics data is collected and analysed for reasons that seem to owe more to the thoughts of Lysenko than anything vaguely rational.
Just looks like a whole pile of avoidance behaviour to me. Probably with the kinds of downstream consequences of that exercise of group thinking.
Labour have pointed out the obvious causation for the huge difference between the percentages of family name segments of the population as a whole and those buying houses during this period. That is what you an many others appear to be having an issue with.
No Lynn. That’s not what I have a problem with. They could have harvested data and tried to draw inferences from it. No problem. But to then stand up and point to a single ethnic group as being responsible for people being unable to buy houses, yeah…that’s where the problem comes up.
They could have done their wee exercise with ‘Chinese sounding’ surnames – flawed or unflawed as it may be – and announced that there was a foundation to assume that overseas money was causing problems. But they didn’t. They dog-whistled on an easily (mis) identifiable ethnic minority.
For Christ’s sake look at the history for Chinese living in NZ! It ain’t flash. And acknowledge that Asians ain’t high on the list of people that Pakeha feel well disposed towards. Throw in a major political party giving people reason to further resent an already fairly maligned part of NZ society and reflect to yourself on how good an idea that might be.
They could have made some general statement about overseas money and subsequently broken it down and pointed to the preponderance of money seemingly coming in from China. But they didn’t.
And to cap it all, we’re now hearing that Labour don’t actually give a toss about overseas money, but just that overseas money that’s originating in China. It’s fucked.
edit – you do not ever dress up an economic problem in ethnic garb – never.
I agree that there may have been better ways of handling it. Damned if I think what they would have been…
Imagine that they did it exactly how you suggest…
…and announced that there was a foundation to assume that overseas money was causing problems.
And then I’d imagine that Keith Ng and I would have been on exactly the same side of this debate – asking what in the hell the basis of that foundation because they hadn’t published any details. An analysis without any clear and transparent basis is just idiotic propaganda. Something that only fools would believe.
At best we’d have ignored it. At worst, I and most of the online commentators would have been tearing (metaphorically) a Labour spokesperson’s head off for extreme stupidity and getting between the left and an election victory.
They could have made some general statement about overseas money and subsequently broken it down and pointed to the preponderance of money seemingly coming in from China.
Staging it would have had exactly the same result as now. For the reason outlined above, the pressure to say why would have appalling. After the reason forced out of Labour, I’d have been tearing….. For that matter so would have you for a variety of reasons.
For Christ’s sake look at the history for Chinese living in NZ! It ain’t flash….
I agree with all of that. But they’d get hit just as hard as anyone else with the consequences of a bursting real estate bubble of the size of what appears to be inflating.
The *only* choices that I can see for Labour would have been to not publish at all. In which case I’d ask what bloody use are they as an opposition to this pack of economic fuckwits in government, or to publish explaining what they’d found.
They took the responsible latter course. Because we damn well need to know about this issue. I had no idea that we were getting into the investor tail-biting stage this damn far in Auckland. It *could* be a blip. But that seems damn unlikely.
And to cap it all, we’re now hearing that Labour don’t actually give a toss about overseas money, but just that overseas money that’s originating in China.
Where is that? Haven’t seen anything about it yet.
An analysis without any clear and transparent basis is just idiotic propaganda. Something that only fools would believe.
QFT
It’s what I’ve been thinking since the get go. Labour had to publish the results else anything that they said on the matter would have been written off as BS.
Unfortunately, the people who’ve been indoctrinated into Identity Politics immediately jumped on it as racist and won’t let that go no matter how much you show that it had nothing to do with racism. It was, and is, merely data and an analysis of that data showing trends that we need to do something about.
I called her bitch. She said I was being misogynistic. I pointed out to her that what I said had nothing to do with misogyny but she, daft bint, wouldn’t let it go.
On the rest of it, as I linked to last night and again this morning, (again in this comment) David Hood had already done work that would appear to show a flood of foreign money coming in. Labour could have used that and other available data.
As for what they (Labour) did do and their framing, there’s a fuck of a difference between saying “There’s foreign money skewing the market…and by the way,as expected given the current configuration of global capital, a lot of it appears to be coming in from China.” and “There’s a lot of Chinese money skewing the market.”
The former makes a statement and, handled appropriately, would only offer somewhat neutral, further detail. The latter is a dog-whistle in that it encourages peoples’ already existing prejudices.
Note: the italics is a late edit. Point is, the ethnic angle could have been neutralised instead of being played on.
On the rest of it, as I linked to last night and again this morning, (again in this comment) David Hood had already done work that would appear to show a flood of foreign money coming in. Labour could have used that and other available data.
And it was what I referred to. They did point out exactly those same facts over and over and over again. Macro-economic data is pretty useless at pinpointing where money is coming from.
It is an money based economic analysis that showed relatively small amounts that are indistinguishable from people actually owning their own properties, shifting money from other investments, or pulling it out of socks in NZ.
It is an economic analysis. About half of the measures I have ever looked at over time for those have flaws of data collection and rarely survive for more than 15 years without and abrupt judder in what data is collected.
Quite simply moneys biggest asset is that it is portable. It moves between investments. It does it without a lot of trace.
Besides, have you actually read what David Hood actually said. He has the effect of that type of information nailed.
Then they go “yes, it is a mystery”, or rather most of the time “I don’t understand”. At which point you can’t actually say much more as there is no positive evidence of where the mystery money is coming from*, only negative evidence from inside NZ for where it isn’t. And the conversation dies as too abstract.
Indeed… I can testify to that.
Then people say “yes, but Ireland was different” so you get the figures for the United States as well, and find that U.S. debt again increased with house prices as local people were buying the houses.
Just read the mind-bending contortions of that numerical apologist David Farrar over many years and go Indeed….
At which point those few people still with you go “It is strange isn’t it, huh” at which point, because it is clear that the argument is way to technical to get any traction and you have satisfied your own curiosity about the matter, you get on with your own life.
Or in the case of a blog like this, you stop writing about topics that have ever diminishing numbers of people reading and commenting on because they clearly have (like me) gotten tired of pointing out the obvious. Which is why David Hood’s last graph ends at Q2 2013, and I haven’t written posts explaining basics of climate change in years.
Which is what those types of calculations go on all of the time, but really only cross the minds of a few people playing with lots of money.
However if you can pretty conclusively say that for 3 months that 3 out of 10 houses brought in Auckland were sold to foreign owners, you will get wide attention. It will mostly be of the type that says “how do you know”. And you have to explain because otherwise it will change to “lying politicians”. And then… Well
Ok I have already explained that. Quite simply you cannot treat people as being daft living polps who will accept what a politician says. We are way too well-educated to believe them. You have to explain EXACTLY how you analysed it.
Which is what David Hood is pointing out. If the path between what people observe themselves and where the data is collected, then it has an impact. If you have to give them a university education in economics then it is not.
Should be pretty obvious. And this is something that authors on this site has been pointing out since 2007 in the tail of the last rises, and at the start of this one on 2010 and since.
Why not make the story about overseas ownership of land in general throughout NZ, then they could have talked about multiple nationalities? Part 2, highlight the areas needing urgent action (eg Auckland).
My take is that Labour don’t see overseas ownership as a problem until it becomes an economic one. It doesn’t matter if NZers can’t afford houses, until there is a housing crisis. I’m not being stupid there. If overseas money was providing enough rental properties in Auckland so that everyone had somewhere affordable to live, would Labour care about who owns what?
Why not make the story about overseas ownership of land in general throughout NZ, then they could have talked about multiple nationalities?
Did you actually read what Lynn(sp?) said? Specifically:
And then I’d imagine that Keith Ng and I would have been on exactly the same side of this debate – asking what in the hell the basis of that foundation because they hadn’t published any details. An analysis without any clear and transparent basis is just idiotic propaganda. Something that only fools would believe.
In answer to your first para, I’m pretty well convinced by now that they didn’t do that because some really fucking turned on types reckoned they had a bit of a draw card on the voting front with the ethnic angle.
Thankfully, it seems to have fallen flat. And now Labour get to reap the fruits of this shit they’ve sown. I suspect that the Greens going up by 3% is only a beginning. Labour’s going to bleed in all directions over the medium to long term.
weka: I couldn’t even estimate to the nearest hundred how many posts we have done on the subject of the risks of overseas ownership and investment over the years. The majority were probably triggered from something that Labour raised, some from the greens, and some from NZF.
You have to remember that generally I agree with overseas investment in NZ. Just as I do with having immigration or trade agreements. I usually disagree with the posts (except on the FTTA – I don’t like restraint of trade or that level of secrecy).
But too much of anything is an issue. Too much immigration in a hit (like too little) causes all kinds of problems. I always remember helping out with some of the code for estimating school classroom needs in the next decade and seeing what the immigration demographic changes did to the models.
It is the volume of foreign investment that is an issue.
The economy gets “used” to it. But that kind of money literally has the whole world to move to. The problem will happen when its flow just stops one day.
Think of it as a large supply of free icecream that we didn’t know about (we thought they were just getting the odd sweets) and the Auckland local market as a kid ecstatically living off it. Then one day it just stops. The pain is going to be huge here because it will take it quite some time to live on carrots again.
For Auckland and the rest of NZ, it is likely to be worse than the effects on us of the GFC.
Coming back at this just so I am sure I’m getting you right. Labour were responsible in doing what they have done, in spite of all the associated negatives? Ends justify the means then? I can’t agree with that approach, but hey.
All ethnicities are going to be hit by a housing bubble bursting, so singling out Chinese in the meantime is okay – collateral damage?
Well, I’ll be riveted to Labour’s proposals for average to low earners and renters. See, none of those people (Chinese Kiwi or otherwise) will be hit negatively by a bursting bubble. And for those richer types who will have to view their house (or one of their houses) as a home, well…
There were around 4000 sales on the list, yes? Now, I know this would require a bit of time and effort, but over a few weeks couldn’t those 4000 names could have checked off against the electoral roll?
Then Labour could have said that, allowing for non-enrollment percentages, x% of sales in Auckland over the period were seemingly not purchases by NZ residents or citizens.
No singling out of any ethnicity. No dog-whistle. A clear demarcation set between domestic and foreign buyers.
It is a major issue for our economy, and in particular for people on low incomes because the first thing that happens when a property bubble stops is that the retail jobs in shops, distribution and manufacturing disappear like smoke. When people feel like they are poorer, they stop spending immediately.
The bigger the bubble gets before it gets pricked, the harder the over-reaction in the subsequent recession is. Think 1987 crash for instance. The cranes went down around Auckland a hell of a lot slower than the jobs and the economy collapsed countrywide.
Do you think those people who are quite economically sensitive are collateral damage for your views on peoples sensitivities about race?
You have to look at both cost sides of any issue.
BTW: I am pretty sure that is the way that the Labour strategists thought. It is how I would have thought about it. It is a pretty basic inside Labour that they do think that way. Sudden economic shocks are the absolute nightmare in terms of injuring people.
Don’t you think Lprent, that this bubble should have pricked some time ago?
I’ve been saying the main reason national are doing nothing about it – as they have no plan – and really have no idea what to do if the bubble burst and the jobs go.
Auckland can’t afford 100,000 people unemployed, and I think that is a conservative figure. I agree with you, It’s the spill to the down the industries who will fall quickly this time round – as to many are operating in “just in time” business model. Which does not absorb crashes well.
Same in Australia, they looking at 1,000,000 jobs shed when the bubble bursts.
This is real nightmare stuff from the Tories, they are clueless. Look at Joyce, he’s floundering – they dare not put Nick Smith in front of a camera. Key looks out of touch, and weak on this issue. His nice bloke image, is making him look like a right blonker.
I think the Tories are staining their collective underwear over this issue. The market has failed and if the do anything – they have to admit the whole free market approach is flawed.
My guess, they will stick with ideology, and let Auckland burn.
“The reflex reaction to call anything racist without looking at the underlying issues or context is probably a modern malaise.”
What I saw was too many people on the standard telling people who have direct experience of racism their whole lives and a political awareness and analysis of that racism, that they didn’t know what racism is. It reminds me of the rape culture conversations where feminists are told they don’t know what rape culture is. A real eye opener, because I thought we were better than this here on racism.
Sadly, I agree. Except that rather than feeling somehow let down by what has been on display vis a vis the denial and defense of racism by self appointed leftists, it only served to reaffirm my view, built from many conversations and observations, that the political left in NZ is riddled through with racist nonsense.
I wonder how much is due to people squealing to themselves “But I’m of the left therefor I can’t be racist!”? 🙄
I wonder how much is due to people squealing to themselves “But I’m of the left therefor I can’t be racist!”?
How about,
‘I’m a Leftie who love’s and respect’s all people.
That’s why I hate Right Winger’s or anyone else who disagrees with my political beliefs.’
What I saw was too many people on the standard telling people who have direct experience of racism their whole lives and a political awareness and analysis of that racism, that they didn’t know what racism is.
Nope. We told you that you that data and its analysis isn’t racist. You refused to believe us because of your irrational knee-jerk reaction.
Draco. The sales list was just a sales list. Even the analysis was just analysis – wonky or otherwise. The presentation by Labour of what it extrapolated from that list was nothing but a ‘racist’ (xenophobic) dog-whistle though.
While what was said was wrong, the MSD workers have raised an important point: There are too many unseen Maori bouncers stopping white people from getting shit-wrecked in bars. It’s like they want to push white drunks out onto the street. I’ve seen them, ghost-Maoris, drinking kegs in garages like they own the whole brewery. Just inspect the data! It’s obvious. That white guy had a Maori-sounding wahine with him, so that proves how far they’ll go. Just the other day some guy said kia ora to me in the street – like he didn’t know how to say hello! Jesus. They must be stopped so that the next generation of white drunks can own bars. I bet they’d even stop Samoans drinking in Taupo, too, if they had to.
If every bar in the country had video cameras on their bouncers on a friday/saturday night and people were made accountable for their actions via the media, I predict thousands of people would be fired from their jobs each and every week. I can’t defend what they said, but singling out people through the media seems like gutter journalism too.
Unless it was a work function, I don’t see why it is important they work for Work and Income. High stressed employee gets drunk and disorderly, apparently I am alone in thinking they are being unfairly vilified.
I don’t know if the people are being unfairly vilafied or if WINZ is. The statements that guy made were racist and offensive no matter who he worked with. If the headlines had been “Bouncer racially abused by drunk patrons” it would have been pretty much all the required info. WINZ could then decide internally if those attitudes alighn with their culture.
However it seems to be an attempt to paint WINZ staff with a broad brush based on one racist moron. Allthough staff did say that those comments were the only ones caught on tape and that more members of the group had been using racial slurs earlier which is what made the bouncer start recording what they were saying. Once the phone came out most of the group realised what they were saying should not be recorded and stopped.
I definitely think that WINZ need to take a hard look at those staff and how their attitudes and behaviour might be impacting on their work. But I don’t think that should be done in public unless there is a good reason.
The media involvement acts as big wrecking ball through this incident. The media used their occupation because it made the story, if their occupation wasn’t mentioned in the story someone would have recognised them in the video and that information would likely have filtered through to WINZ managers to deal with the issue as they saw fit. Now with it all blown up in the media and a huge spotlight on them if they don’t take serious action they’ll be seen as weak.
Headlining that they were MSD employees is utter bullshit. Could they now be fired for bringing their employer into disrepute? Possibly. Is that fair? Not in my mind. When you have a job, you get ‘you’ back at 5:30 or whenever. What you do in your own time is, or should be, absolutely none of your employer’s business.
Can we expect some drunk and obnoxious kid who some people might recognise from a McDs to get fired or otherwise sanctioned for mumbling some drunken racist shit at a bouncer on a Saturday night now?
edit: Maybe the WINZ angle came up simply due to the bouncer recognising them as WINZ staff? Always the possibility there was a bit of pay-back involved. Who knows.
really? it seems to me that it’s getting better. not nearly as many wrecked people out in the cities getting turned away as there was ten years ago. drinking has settled down into something that’s only done with food and for social reasons, not a means to an end in itself. I bet those winz workers were on a “corporate retreat” seeing as it’s taupo. bigging it up on the taxpayers dime to find new ways to screw the poor
The search for extraterrestrial life received a major boost Tuesday with the launch of an ambitious $100 million (NZ$152 million) programme, backed by famed physicist Stephen Hawking and tech billionaire Yuri Milner.
I believe in humans getting out and into space but on this one I think the money could be better spent.
Organisers say the “Breakthrough Initiatives” project, also endorsed by other prominent British scientists, is the biggest ever scientific search for alien life. It includes a “listening” program ” the effort to analyse vast amounts of radio signals in search of signs of life ” and a “messaging” programme that will include $1 million (NZ$1.5 million) in prizes for digital messages that best represent the planet Earth.
The messages will not be sent, however, in part because some scientists ” including Hawking ” fear messages sent into space could possibly spur aggressive actions by alien races.
Yep a messaging program with messages that will not be sent. This is why I think this project is a distraction from the real and immediate issues and problems we face living on this planet.
The smart Greens promote woman in purse strings role. Bumbling Bill English can expect plenty of supplementary questions from the very determined Julie Ann Genter. All that cycling around the place will hold Genter in good stead for being fast out of the saddle and going at Bill’s jugular vein.
Well done Greens for walking the talk on gender equality.
Education:
————————————
BA in philosophy
Post-graduate certificate in International Political Studies
Masters of Planning Practice
———————————–
Don’t see any thing finance related?.
Why is she doing finance , she has no skills in this area.
Actually Blind Man while you think you see all, others could arguably say Genter would do a much better job than slugger Bill is doing. Considering how much debt We are in, it wouldn’t be at all hard.
And what you really mean is that she doesn’t have any formal training in how to be a good capitalist. I’d count that as a plus for being a finance spokesperson.
I know Cullen didn’t have a great deal of financial education, lucky for us when Cullen had his turn everything was booming, we could have substituted Cullen for Bubbles the chimp and Bubbles would have still made a surplus.
Call me crazy but I would prefer Ministers to actually have skills in their particular portfolios, this goes for all political parties.
You wouldn’t play a halfback as a lock, would you.
A heads up, commerce degrees are a dime a dozen, and quite frankly a very expensive piece of paper to say you can rote learn. Does explain a lot about bill english, and his lack of imagination via the ongoing economic malaise – which has kept on, rolling on.
Ask most 18 year olds that are going off to uni, you’ll find truckloads that are going to Dunedin to get away from home, party and do the stock standard BCom because that’s what you do when you haven’t decided on a career.
The commerce courses at otago changed a few years ago to require first-year (i.e. fuckall) skimming of all disciplines within the division. Before that, he might have gone through just looking at marketing with never a look at finance. What was blinglish’s major?
Besides, with debt at $100bil, maybe if he’d looked at some planning papers we’d have avoided this mess…
“The commerce courses at otago changed a few years ago to ”
Out of curiosity what is a few years? Bill English would have been there about 35 years ago, after all (He was born in 1961).
He also has a BA(Hons) in English Literature from VUW. He got a 1st I believe. Even Bob Jones would approve of that.
Either of Bill’s degrees would seem to be more useful than the vast collection of “political science” qualifications in the New Zealand Labour Party.
I suspect many of his discretionary points available under the schedule in the mid-eighties would have gone on the lit rather than planning, finance, or similar.
I suppose the english lit helps him make shit up in the budget speech. As for who’s more useful than whom, Cullen’s qualifications were in history, and he managed to pay down government dept rather than inflate it. I guess the bcom was a handicap for blinglish.
I’ll have to call you on the ‘vast collection of “political science” qualifications in the New Zealand Labour Party’ there, alwyn. Got the data for that?
It used to be that the Labour Party was accused of being full of teachers, of which I was one, as if that was some sort of bad thing. So I did the research, and there were more teachers within the National caucus than Labour’s.
A quick glance at the background of the better known current MPs comes up with Robertson, Goff, Shearer, Hipkins, Twyford, Cunliffe and Lees–Galloway. It is also amazing how many came up through University Student Unions.
I don’t know how many others there might be among the unknowns.
What I find rather funny is that the Labour Party had three leaders in a row who could themselves down as “failed Political Science PhD, University of Auckland”.
Clark, Goff and Shearer all started but failed to finish the course.
Amongst the ‘unknowns’ only Cosgrove has politics in his degrees according to Wikipedia. He has a triple degree in Political Studies, American Studies and History.
So, eight out of 32 or thereabouts. A quarter. Not a ‘vast collection’ though I’d expect a bias that way for a group of left wing politicians to have studied politics at Uni. There are also theology, law and commerce degrees, education degrees, historians, people with health quals, anthropologists etc.
I’d expect also that more than average numbers would have been involved in university student politics. Politicians tend to be interested in politics wherever they are.
To be fair, eight is close to the largest number a tory is capable of counting to without taking off they socks, so it probably counts as a “vast collection” to them.
So, via Wikipedia I took a look at 15 National MPs chosen at random. 3 had been in student politics, (another one stood for local Council as a school boy) and two had political science in their degrees. Lawyers, scientists, one engineer, commerce types and arts degrees generally.
One quarter of the National intake. Someone else can scan the rest!
I’ll take your word for the backgrounds of the unknowns. I only looked at the top 6 in the pecking order, plus the previous leaders and, because I happened to have met him recently, Lees-Galloway.
Of these 10 people, who I regarded as the senior ones, only Little, King and Mahuta didn’t seem to have a Pol Sci background as a University discipline.
Yes Double Dipton has a degree in Commerce – even worked in Treasury (and we know how grounded in reality that lot are) . He wouldn’t know what an economy is, if he fell over it. The most useless twit to warm the Finance bench this country has ever had to suffer. What has he actually done in the 6 years he has twiddled his thumbs apart from repeat the same nonsense year after year as he “presents” his “budget”, and cut vital services that we as NZers have paid for?
Tell us Blind Man – what is an economy for anyway?
A little googling found that philosophy degrees include topics which would benefit any politician including social justice, critical thinking, ethics, logic, truth and political philosophy.
Skills acquired from a study of philosophy include critical thinking, clear argument, discerning validity and importance, dealing with multiple viewpoints and ideas, deep thinking and concentration.
Philosphy at undergraduate level is often taken with economics and politics, this being a famous combination.
Ms Genter may have other courses in her degree which are finance related. Cullen studied economic history for example. I have a friend who studied economics and political science both to stage three level. Who decides whether he is an economist or a political scientist?
Bob Jones used arts graduates in his employment, he once wrote, because they have learnt to think, and could be trained in the specifics of his business.
Having a degree in Philosophy means she has the ability to see big pictures, not just narrow focus, she also has the ability to question and test the logic of specious arguments. The less we have of economists and accountants making decisions about the good of the country and the more we have people with a broad based thinking, analytical and logical mindset, with a view of culture and history, the better.
It’s possible that, as part of her studies, she did economics 101 which means that she would have more knowledge of finance than our PM. That’s the thing about BAs – you never really know which courses were included in the study.
And then there’s the fact that people don’t go to school and then stay exactly the same – they continue learning.
Genter, “Her financial hero is American Herman Daly, who was one of the first economists to talk about the incompatibility of infinite economic growth in a finite world.”
Makes you wonder where we are heading. Constant need to increase population and grow the economy might be a disaster in the long run.
There is no need to constantly increase the population to grow the economy. Places like Germany have static or falling populations and still manage to grow their economy.
It looks like Russel Norman is really taking a back seat too, he’s basically only got Trade and Spying portfolios now. And helping out James Shaw in leadership.
Yeah it’s a pity our old cobbah Rusty couldn’t quite infuse Winnie to bridge the divide. Should have a far better chance with James Shaw. Might try getting them together for a charity I’ve raised over $200 K for. Shouldn’t be hard getting them to attend a gig, a common charity maybe just the ice breaker needed.
Two weeks ago I overheard a cow cocky say they had been told to expect a price “in the 3s “. I’m pretty sure he’s a Fonterra supplier.
Now Open Country has confirmed it, obviously the big companies know a lot more about future price trends than they are letting on.
Yet English keeps saying ” nothing to see here “.
A milkfat price ” in the 3s ” is really bad news for the whole country, it will impact on practicaly everybody.
Not much dairy conversion’s.going on lately, I suspect plenty of South Pacific Pesos being exchanged to Greenbacks. A little late to reap the full rewards like money trader Key will have, however I may grab a slab while the going is good.
I blame Capitalism. It is always Capitalism’s fault. The collapse of the Roman empire was caused by Capitalism don’t you know.
It was caused by out of touch elites who because they were insulated by wealth and bureaucracy from the realities on the ground, did not understand until too late how bad they were fucking up.
I’m actually kind of confident that bees will be saved because they have such a direct and demonstrable economic benefit. So there’s a lot of research money going into them and solving this problem. The first chemical company that comes up with a pesticide that doesn’t impact bees is going to make money hand over fist.
Your brain appears to be stuck in repeat mode Gosman. Must be the failing Rockstar economic outlook causing a glitch. I imagine you have been walking around in circles muttering “John Key is my hero where is the Rockstar I can not compute….bring on the encore.’
You struggle understanding science and data ah Clean_power. Well no worry, you can go to a night class and …. no wait national axed the funding to those classes. Nope sorry, you will just have to stay an ignorant Tory lick spittle.
Interesting review of Tomorrow’s schools 25 years on, to be found on Evening Report.
Like any changes to the educational system – the long term effects effects are what is required to be considered rather than the short term goals. Charter school aficionados take note.
The issues there have hardly anything to do with Tomorrow’s schools and more to do with parents moving so they can get their children in to higher decile schools. Considering lower decile schools get more funding per pupil than higher decile schools the situation would be much worse if the reforms were not made. How exactly is tomorrow schools responsible for the situation?
Read the papers provided by Lockwood Smith when he was the minister, and what was the desired outcome of tomorrow schools – the programme and implementation.
No, how about you expand on why you think the article Molly linked to shows a failing with Tomorrow Schools rather than what I suspect is merely parents moving to areas where they think their kids will get better education based on the knowledge that is available to them?
Who is Chris Trotter, really, and what does he want with the Bogans? Maybe he was taking the piss?
Chris argues Labour could do worse than go after the Bogan vote: that elusive sub-feeder group of the stereotypical Waitakere Man he’s spent his recent blogging life demonising. Now he paints them as the long-haired unshaven equivalent of the silent-but-infamous “kiwi-battler”, and that their values hold the keys to Labour refinding its roots.
No Chris, Labour know how to go after the people, as a whole, and fund, supply, and maintain access to essential services and life requirements irrespective of who they are or what they think or how long their hair is, or which cartoon stereotype they correspond to. They just don’t want to anymore.
“So are you saying we shouldn’t listen to the poor, the gays, Maori, women, transgender people, immigrants?”
“No, Chris. We should give them the same care and focus on their needs as they see it as we do anyone else.”
“Doesn’t sound very middle-class oriented.”
“No, Chris, it isn’t.”
“Who would we fight, who would we blame, who’d be the enemy?”
“Ourselves. We’re the enemy, haven’t you noticed?”
“You’re nuts!”
“I’m glad you think so.”
I think he is trying to influence the wider left to embrace traditional supporters who they have drifter away from. But if you don’t want to do this and would prefer to denigrate this section of society go for it.
As someone who grew up a Westy I think you are under estimating their social empathy. One thing I found was that when you fell on hard times there was always someone with a couch and a meal they were willing to share. You had to really mooch off a mate before he would even start thinking of telling you to sort your self out.
By the way a lot of the guys and girls I knew back then were Labour voters long before I moved away from National. There is a vast gap between the so called Waitakere man and a good old fasioned Westy.
Probably not a good time to go counting the numbers of homeless on cities main streets, cars parked at Wynyard Quarter, or see what the City Mission has to deal with.
Just had visitors from Oz. Both expressed surprise and concern at “the level of poverty that is apparent in NZ”.
Incidentally also highly critical of our TV programming.
Am I right in sensing a gathering storm; that we are heading for a southern hemisphere Greece? Or am I just depressed?
Interesting anecdata only. We tend to shop only once or maybe twice a fortnight so when we do it’s a full trolley.
Was back in Auckland last week and did a supermarket trip for my dad, plus visitors. Full trolley = NZ$320 @ Pack&Save
Came home and needed to do another shop. Full trolley = A$205 @ ALDI’s
Similar items although obviously not identical. Allow for currency conversion at 1.1 and GST @ 1.15 the NZ equivalent price of the ALDI’s trolley would be about NZ$260
Given the minimum wage here is around A$23 per hour – well you can see where I’m coming from.
Considering Australian and New Zealand have similar rates of poverty it seems unusual your visitors will have seen levels majorly different from what they experience in Australia (unless they don’t visit where the poorer people live in Oz)
Anyone who has walked down George Street in Sydney will be able to atest to the numbers of people sleeping rough. I am surprised that an Australian would just straight up comment on poverty in NZ. Even smaller area’s like Townsville, Cairns, Darwin and Rockingham have very visable signs of poverty.
Of course it may be that out side of Sydney most of those effected are of Aboriginal decent and so probably aren’t taken into consideration by the average Australian.
'You can judge a city by the way it treats its poorest citizen. Well, Sydney, on Monday you failed'. http://t.co/7Dw6tlR4Lh— Native Affairs (@N8TVAFFAIRSTV) July 21, 2015
You got it in one Gosman. Many of the rural communities where there is poverty, are way off the grid. Having visited a few in my time – via a long plane flight. There is a bit in urban landscape too – but those areas were generally unheard of/not spoken about – if you had not lived there for a while. Not like, say Auckland and our huge, city wide homeless problem.
That said, my time in Aussie was in the West, Victoria and South Australia.
Oh right that explains (certainly no excuse) for the Winz managements behavior in Taupo. Got their bonus payments for rejecting welfare claims to make Tolley’s books look brighter. Too much champagne on the taxpayer by the looks. Let’s hope they get turfed to the other side of the Winz counter…and rejected.
Who’s in Auckland and today can help to hold a banner /placard?
Whistleblower/ Media Alert!
Please do not censor or underplay the importance of this arguably corrupt ‘conflict of interest’ – regarding NZ Prime Minister John Key, in his advocacy for the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA)!
Follow-up TPPA – WALK AWAY protest today outside Auckland Uni – exposing PM John Key’s shareholding in the Bank of America!
WHEN: TUESDAY 21 July
TIME: 1 -5 PM
WHERE: Symonds St / Grafton Rd intersection – directly outside Auckland Uni.
WHY? Because Auckland students are back and there are THOUSANDS of them – who yesterday read the message on our banners and placards!
LET YOUR BANNERS /PLACARDS DO THE TALKING!
The FOCUS – again – is that NZ PM John Key is a shareholder in the Bank of America!
(These Bank of America shares are NOT in a ‘blind trust’!)
“Register of Pecuniary and Other Specified Interests of Members of Parliament:
Summary of annual returns as at 31 January 2015
(Page 29)
Rt Hon John Key (National, Helensville)
2 Other companies and business entities
Little Nell – property investment (Aspen, Colorado)
Bank of America – banking ..”
A LOT of people don’t know this, and it is, in my view, as an anti-corruption ‘Public Watchdog’ an arguably significant corrupt ‘conflict of interest’.
_________________________________________________________
(In this You Tube clip – John Key admits that he’s a shareholder in the Bank of America, in front of a Grey Power Public Meeting, 3 February 2011.)
Taken from the NZHerald, reprinted from an Australian commentator, and pretty apposite to New Zealand:
“The problem is that Australia, after decades of effort to diversify, is looking ever more like a petrodollar economy of the Middle East, but without the vast horde of foreign currency reserves to fall back on when commodity prices fall.
Instead, Australians must borrow to maintain the standards of living that the country has become accustomed to, which even some Greeks will admit is unsustainable.”
Taken from UK daily Telegraph, a right wing cheerleader that hates seeing countries like Australia and France defy the orthodoxy and periodically prints Cassandra like stories on the fate of both.
You are aware you can leave international agreements aren’t you? If NZ decided to leave the UN for example there is little the UN could do for example.
Seriously what the F is going on here, I’ve hit peak Max Key for sure. 5 major NZ news outlets posted some or all of Max’s holiday video yesterday, but wait there’s still more! Media going to great lengths to write anything on the beloved PM’s son.
someone’s seriously plugging the boy’s image. It’s been going on for days.
It might be going from dirty politics to distraction politics, but I think it’s equally likely that some publicist is trying to prepare the ground for him as a broadcaster, building “celebrity”. Throw money at a few photo spreads, next thing you know he’ll be on dancing with the stars or some bullshit like that, then get a few part time but 5 or 6 figure microphone jobs.
Talking about airwaves. Media guy Paul? said on 9toNoon this morning that Radionz is sacking 20 with 6 new jobs opening up net 14. All seasoned workers no doubt, like gold. No rise in funding from gummint for 8 years.
Strumming my pain with his fingers
Singing my life with his words
Killing me softly with his song.’
Yes, yek killing me softly?
Perhaps the MSM is getting us used to him so that when JK hands over the countries reigns to him we won’t be too bothered by the disappearance of democracy and the open implementation of our new aristocracy.
Labour’s talking past you to the real people bro, you know – the people who can’t afford to buy a house in Auckland. Just ask around your office, Labour is getting huge kudos at the water cooler.
A. Live in a city where you can’t afford to buy a home, very expensive just to live, spending hours commuting, your mayor is Len Brown
B. Live in a city where you can afford to buy/build, not expensive to live, commuting in under an hour, has plenty of work available and your mayor isn’t Len Brown
Tell me again why living in Christchurch is such a joke
Labour’s talking past you to the real people bro, you know – the people who can’t afford to buy a house in Auckland
“real people” could not afford to buy a house in Auckland by 2004/2005. Now, they are talking to “real people” who are tired of being outbid on $800K villas.
You keep muttering your same mantra. 2004? Where were you? Did you raise the issue like you are doing now? Was the government then selling off state houses? Was the foreign money from China coming in at such huge amounts as now? Is there a huge crisis now or not? Should the government do something about it now or simply reminiscence about 2004 and some other year like 1904?
A jack up to help Key out of the data jam. Notice Key using Gowers stupid line of questioning in the House today. Most Kiwi’s will be thinking Key’s antics are not funny in the least, actually I think they would rather he cut the crap and ban non resident foreigners buying our property.
OK well according to Hooton on Nine to Noon yesterday National failed to take the bait and bite. Looks like he was wrong as the head clown of the National Party circus couldn’t help himself ( just like ponytail pulling) so people will still be angry with him till he plucks false data out of his arse.
Just another illustration of the media either playing the Patsy questions game or getting dealt to by member or cronies of this corrupt regime in power.
Speaking of which, (you heard it here first) expect Radio New Zealand will have little choice but to issue an apology to Mr Tung…..you know Judith Collins husband. After bully boy Tung continues to throw his weight around threatening legal action against any media who dare question his involvement in the dodgy swamp Kauri trade.
Yeah, he’s only a director of one of the companies involved (“Oravida Bleach Inc.”, or something). It would be far more damaging to his reputation to point out that he’s married to that vindictive trash Judith Collins.
Unlike those media outlets who have been threatened and muzzled, unfortunately for Tung, if he doesn’t settle down and crawl back under his rock he and Judith share ‘he and the kauri company he works for’ will get so much bad press their operation in Ruakaka will be driven out of Northland with their tales between their legs.
At any stage we choose a very public (widely covered by all media) protest and hard line picket can be arranged where nothing gets in or out of their depot.
So go ahead punk make our day and press the button!
The language Gower used falls into the catagory of defamation imo. Labour should announce they are seeking to take legal action against Patrick Gower and TV3.
He was rude and bullying and wouldn’t let Little answer anything properly. He accused Andrew Little of “cooking up statistics because he knew it was going to hurt people”. That is shameful and Little should demand an apology. He went on to say “He (Little) only did it for the headline.
1. It wasn’t Andrew Little who released the information, it was Phil Twyford.
2. I have never seen any reporter act in such a rude and jeering way to any interviewee. And that’s saying something where Gower is concerned.
3. No other member of the media pack was able to ask a question.
Typical, too many reporters try to create a story and make it all about them, rather than just asking the question and letting the respondent reply. Gower,s ego gets in the way of his interviewing far too often
“So far all the ugliest elements put on display since Labour raised the issue of China’s speculation in our residential housing market have been displayed by those screaming racist …
I wouldn’t worry too much, TV3s ratings are abysmal anyway, or Gower, “Pfft!” indeed! (& personally I think Gower is crap anyway so watching Little take no shit from him was awesome to see, but yeah just a look of disdain next time would suffice.)
Border Security: 660,260 (TV ONE, 7:30pm – 8:05pm)
The Force: 632,890 (TV ONE, 8:05pm – 8:35pm)
My Kitchen Rules: 343,220 (TV2, 8:00pm – 9:20pm)
Criminal Minds: 314,190 (TV ONE, 8:35pm – 9:30pm)
Married At First Sight: 240,410 (TV3, 8:30pm – 9:35pm)
MOST WATCHED ON TV3
3 News: 246,630 (6:00pm – 7:00pm)
Married At First Sight: 240,410 (8:30pm – 9:35pm)
Come Dine With Me NZ: 148,840 (7:00pm – 7:30pm)
Reality Trip: 133,640 (9:35pm – 10:35pm)
Inside Story: 129,870 (8:00pm – 8:30pm)
see – you’re just fucking game-playing while the country circles down the drain under this government.
I hope that in real live you (even inadvertantly) do something that actually helps people in a real way, rather than just facilitating speculators or other parasites. It would be a shame if you were a net-loss from the well-being of the rest of the human species.
I see PR you like to call Andrew Little Little Andy. Excellent as I have no problems with people trying to belittle the opposition politicians or politicians they don’t like by calling them derogatory names, that’s why I love to refer to Key as a lying perverted money trading fucking spiv.
The only difference between you calling Andrew Little Little Any and me calling Key a lying perverted money trading fucking spiv. is the fact that
Andrew Little is neither little in stature or height, whereas Key is a lying perverted money trading fucking spiv.
Paddy Gower is an arsehole that needs to be put in its right place where the Sun don’t shine. He isn’t a credible journalist. A loathsome right wing fart.
Cut and edited the story to make Little look as bad as possible then finishes with his own little one sided stand up. I could never be a politician I’d make the little twerp swallow his mike.
paddy sure does. Didn’t catch one news but hoskings took English s vague comments about murmurs he heard in China and turned them into a international disaster . How does this country rid itself of these sycophantic loser s ??
Andrew Little has carefully cultivated the facial expressions of a small business owner that has just been told the employee he fired illegally is taking him to court. hahahhahaaha
John Key’s expressions are usually of a rich boy saying, nup. nup. nup. don’t care. nup. people will die but it won’t be me. nup. nup. you’re poor anyway. nup. nup.
How Seinfeld became a bad joke:
The threat of a hyper-vigilant left-wing outrage machine has been greatly exaggerated
A millionaire tells a dumb joke and nobody laughs — and that’s proof we’re all oppressed by social activists?
by ARTHUR CHU, Salon, June 12, 2015
Jerry Seinfeld is the latest brave middle-aged white man to weigh in on the “creepy” ascendance of humorless p.c. SJW anti-free-speech scolds. We know the drill now–we’ve heard it from comedians like Seinfeld and Patton Oswalt and, to a lesser degree, Louis C.K. and Chris Rock. We’ve heard it packaged in a different format from Very Serious media commentators like Jonathan Chait, Laura Kipnis and, most recently, an anonymous white male adjunct professor whose left-wing students “terrify” him.
It’s a familiar, tired drill. Point to instances of creeping overreaction by angry left-wing young people in the classroom, at protests and especially on Tumblr or Twitter. Portray these forces as a terrifying, swelling horde of enforcers with the power to totally destroy the lives of good old hardworking members of the chattering class like yourself. Talk about how this army of Social Justice Stormtroopers has successfully create a stifling Orwellian monoculture, especially on the Internet, where all of us live in constant fear of saying anything the least bit “offensive” lest our lives be ruined and as a result all online discourse has been stripped down to the level of catchphrase-spewing party apparatchiks seeking to avoid Stalinist purges.
This is clearly an extremely compelling narrative when it comes to a lot of people’s personal fears, because it’s a narrative they spin out of comparatively little evidence. It’s not that there’s no such thing as a left-wing witch hunt or that people haven’t been harmed by them — it’s that, for something that’s so scary that it warrants trend piece after trend piece on a biweekly basis, it seems pretty hard for these pundits to come up with actual examples of harm to themselves.
Daniel Tosh, whose nasty rape joke at an audience member spurred the comedy world to rally around him waving flags with apocryphal Voltaire quotes – yeah, he got a lot of mean tweets, and got analyzed in a bunch of think pieces, and got a really unkind (but hilarious) Onion article written about him.
And … that was it. His stand-up career is still going fine. He’s still on Twitter. He still has a damn top-rated show on Comedy Central, which makes him better off than 99.9 percent of all stand-up comedians in the country. (A show, by the way, which derives a lot of its humor from mocking people who are already being mercilessly made fun of or criticized on the Internet, which adds a little bit of irony to this whole “lynch mob” thing.)
Jonathan Chait combs through years of outraged viral right-wing posts on Facebook about left-wing atrocities but only comes up with one story of significant material harm, a kid being fired from a college newspaper, after Chait himself has gotten embroiled in controversy for trying to get journalists fired from newspapers for doing their job wrong. (As always, it’s actually about ethics in journalism.)
Laura Kipnis has a stronger argument for having been mistreated, even though the Title IX system she criticizes did, in fact, end up letting her completely off the hook — and even though the actual reason for the complaint against her wasn’t her “wrong opinion” but her spreading untruths about a student embroiled in a sexual harassment claim against a professor, which pretty much every “political correctness gone mad” pundit talking about the Kipnis case has ignored.
“Labour believes if you have the right to live here you have the right to buy here, but not otherwise. That means all citizens and residents can. This will apply to all ethnicities.”
Not racism!…Go Labour for calling out the problem as it is…and the Chinese know it:
‘Wall of Chinese capital buying up Australian properties’
The “wall of Chinese capital” hitting property markets in Sydney and Melbourne will not ease up until the government introduces its anti-money laundering legislation, says an expert in ‘flight capital’.
James Tee, an ethnic Chinese property developer whose business specialises in “capital expatriation” – that is, getting money out of China and into his property developments in Malaysia – told Fairfax Media the exodus of capital from China was accelerating, thanks to the government’s anti-corruption drive.
“We have been tracking this for two years,” says Tee. Those outflows from China are compounded by the flight of capital out of Canada which is now “bursting” to find a home in Australia.
.
Due to the bubble in Canadian house prices and ensuing concerns over social dislocation, Canada’s government shut down its investor visa program last year. Some 40,000 Chinese visa applicants with a minimum loan to governments of $C800,000 were handed back their capital.
“That’s roughly $32 billion,” says Tee. “The Canadian government said: ‘We don’t want your money anymore’ and that capital is now hitting the Sydney market.”…
This shows that all the hand ringing that’s gone on here is just the overly PC getting them self into a lather about the wrong thing they need to wake up, its bad enough that labour have to fight the likes of Gower but being attacked buy so called progressive s on the far left is just pathetic.
Agreed, facetious. Little has already lifted Labour up in the polls to the point where he can be the next Prime Minister and I can only see improvement in the future. Good times!
I didn’t hear about Shane Te Pou, ‘a former Labour party official’ complaining, according to Radionz, that his Chinese wife ‘had her personal details released in Labour’s housing data leak’ This from 17/7/2015. http://www.radionz.co.nz/audio/player/201762871.
1 No details of any kind were released as I understand it, except the bald percentages based on likely ethnic names.
2 Mr Te Pou has himself breached his wife’s privacy, not Labour.
3 He sounded confused and incomprehensible, and not a good advocate for any point he tried to make, or Labour.
I have been unimpressed with Western corporate media coverage of the tensions involving Iran in the Straits of Hormuz. They repeat the line that Iran is the source of current tensions, that it is a major sponsor of terrorism, that ...
Victory, But Not Ours: Trump uses his deplorable words in exactly the same way as C.S. Lewis' wicked queen, Jadis, used her single 'Deplorable Word'. To win – no matter what the cost. He knows the power of words. He ...
Seeking Refuge: Were Jesus, Mary and Joseph fleeing persecution in Palestine or Judea? Were they Palestinians or Jews? Green MP, Golriz Ghahraman, in describing the Holy Family as Palestinian refugees, touched off a firestorm of controversy, demonstrating the sinister ease ...
Much like Tuvalu, the manmade climate change Cult love to tell people the Maldives is almost totally underwater. In fact the dishonest Maldives Govt d on the same bandwagon, believing they would receive billions of dollars aid from other Countries ...
According to every manmade climate change cultist on Earth, the pacific islands of Tuvalu are being flooded by rising sea levels. In fact, incredibly even a google search will bring up an immediate claim the islands are almost underwater! The ...
Firstly, it’s important you know that I am not paid by fossil fuel companies, nor do I have any association with them at all, and in fact I’m not a fan of any industry that doesn’t do it’s best to ...
As the entry on Wikipedia shows (and no, one doesn’t necessarily have to regard Wikipedia as the be-all and end-all of truth, because it isn’t on a great many things, to agree with the following): “…a fallacious argument that concludes ...
by Daphna Whitmore The story of how the world awoke to a big injustice is starting to be told. The Pacific Games held this month in Samoa is another chapter. On the podium was Laurel Hubbard, the giant transgender weightlifter, ...
Our conversations and push against specific supremacist and ultra-Nationalist groups, and the pseudo-intellectual underpinnings of them, need to mature at all levels. But in doing so, it’s going to have to include a more thorough and brutally honest self-examination ...
Why do so many people mistrust the police? Because they pull shit like this:The police are flouting the rules on breath testing, carrying out tests in people's homes to catch them out sometimes up to two hours after they were ...
I have been reading and listening to the aftermath of Trump’s comments about the four female first term Democratic representatives, all of whom are “people of color.” I found the US coverage interesting both as evidence of partisanship and the ...
The Herald reports that the housing shortage / bubble has hit a new level:New Zealand is short of 130,000 homes, the tally having risen lately by 30,000, two economists say. Jarrod Kerr and Jeremy Couchman, Kiwibank economists said: "This time ...
Milk producer Fonterra is one of New Zealand's biggest coal-users, using it to power all its South Island (and a few of its North Island) dairy factories. They'd previously "committed" to not building any new coal boilers after 2030. Now, ...
The proposed Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Bill treats biogenic methane emissions differently from all other carbon emissions. The latter are to be measured net so that emissions from fossil fuels can be offset by carbon stored in trees. ...
by Gearóid Ó Loingsigh This article aims to answer a simple question, whether the conflict is only a rural one or whether it is also urban. The verb ‘to be’ is conjugated in the present tense as ,despite what some ...
Yesterday the government released its discussion document on action on agricultural emissions. As sadly usual, it proposed enormous subsidies for farm emissions, including for nitrogen-based fertiliser. This is a huge mistake. In addition to being one of the chief drivers ...
Earlier this year, the Ministry of Justice conducted a public consultation exercise on whether to hold a review of the Official Information Act (this replaced their previous plans to hold a secret consultation with handpicked people). 285 people submitted on ...
Always Playing Catch-Up: Throughout the 1970s, the purchasing power of the ordinary worker’s pay packet – the only meaningful measure of his or her wealth – was being eaten away every passing year by seemingly inexorable rises in the cost-of-living. ...
The Interim Climate Change Committee's report on Action on agricultural emissions: Evidence, analysis and recommendations was finally released today, and as you might guess from the title, it is recommending that we actually act, rather than let farmers keep ...
On Sunday July 7, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Associate Health Minister Julie Anne Genter announced their intention to review the Ministry of Health’s Funded Family Care policy and repeal Part 4Aof the 2000 NZ Public Health and Disability Act. These are festering injustices ...
Agriculture is our biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions, responsible for 48% of the total. It follows that meeting any credible emissions reduction target requires cutting agricultural emissions, most likely by having fewer cows. But National thinks people shouldn't be ...
How scummy is the UK Home Office? This scummy:The Home Office lied to EU member states to remove victims of human trafficking and modern slavery in breach of European law, according to whistleblowers. Legal experts have said the practice is ...
Belle is a lovely fifteen year-old border collie who belongs to our friends and neighbours at Bryan’s Beach, Michael and Judy Corboy. Belle, in her old age, can hardly see or hear, but – as a constant participant at social ...
“We wuz robbed!” is the classic cry of the disappointed losers of a closely contested sporting contest – it is very much to the credit of the Black Caps that we heard no such sentiment from them following the stunning ...
The Youth Parliament is being held this week, and some of the youth MPs are campaigning for a lower voting age:Molly Doyle, 17, is one Youth MP who wants this to change. She is part of a non-partisan campaign run ...
Up till now, Australia has made its living by digging up coal and exporting it to other countries, destroying the global climate in the process. But now they have a new option: exporting solar power:The desert outside Tennant Creek, deep ...
Later this month, thousands of people are expected to march to parliament as part of the #HandsOffOurTamaraki movement. At its heart, the movement is about preserving whānau and demanding that the state stop removing children from their whānau, hapū and iwi. ...
by Gearóid Ó Loingsigh The recent statements made by the former FARC commander, Carlos Lozada (legal name Julian Gallo), where, from his seat in Congress, he praised the Colombian Army demonstrate how low the farianos have sunk. Lozada began by ...
A Woman’s Place is on the Podium was a public meeting in London on 10 July to discuss women’s sports and the impact of transwomen competing against women. The venue was sold out with a packed hall of 750 people. ...
Last month I talked about the no-fly movement: people who refuse to fly or limit it to absolute necessity to avoid destroying the climate. Now, that movement has a somewhat surprising new member: Dutch airline KLM:Dutch airline KLM has launched ...
In the 1960's, humanity faced a terrible threat: global thermonuclear war. Nuclear weapons were uniquely destructive and dangerous, and if more countries got them, the logic of MAD and the pre-emptive strike would put us on a hair-trigger to destruction. ...
An occasional series where I will ponder allegations of anti-Semitism directed at the British Labour Party and its members.In this case, we are thinking about an allegedly anti-Semitic image shared by a Labour Party member. Its origins appear to be ...
Matariki has been and gone, but this year we saw a couple of op-eds arguing that it should be a public holiday, replacing the foreign monarch's fake birthday. And now, New Zealand Republic - a group which campaigns for an ...
The discussion on the quality of economic advice, which we reported last week, has spilled over into a discussion about whether so many senior appointments should be of non-New Zealanders. Recall I discussed the failure to develop career paths within ...
When Nicky Hager revealed US footage of the Operation Burnham raid, obtained under the US Freedom of Information Act, one of the obvious questions was whether Ministers had seen it - and in particular, whether they'd been told that it ...
Northern Ireland is the Alabama of the UK: a backwards region where women and gay people are denied fundamental rights. But Westminster has just decided to fix that:MPs have voted resoundingly to extend same-sex marriage and access to abortion to ...
There's a problem with "synthetic cannabis", and not just the one you think. It's the name.We're in the midst of a wave of news stories that link synthetic drugs to serious harm, through deadly road accidents and accidental overdoses (which ...
Ranjit Kauri, The Dancing Maharani and Other Stories, Swansea, Head and Heart, 2019, £6.99; reviewed by Don Franks Working people are not the same country to country. Our struggles for a better life take place in surroundings of very different ...
Let's Do Them! All Jacinda Ardern has to do to clinch the 2020 General Election is frighten the bejesus out of the electorate by describing in the most graphic terms imaginable what will happen to all the positive beginnings her ...
It may be that we have all misinterpreted the somewhat surprising “bromance” between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un. It has been all too easy to assume that it is Kim who is cosying up to Trump rather than the ...
by Michael Roberts So the full circle is completed. The corrupt pro-business conservative New Democracy party in Greece that was ousted by the anti-capitalist Syriza party in 2015 has been returned to office in yesterday’s general election, with an outright ...
When the Australian government passed a series of new spy laws over the last few years, they pinky-promised that they wouldn't use them to spy on journalists and subvert freedom of the press. They lied:The anti-encryption laws passed by the ...
From 1975 to 1989, the spy agencies of South America's right-wing military dictatorships cooperated in Operation Condor, a joint campaign of extermination against the continent's left. Roughly 400,000 people were imprisoned, 30,000 disappeared, and 60,000 murdered - kidnapped, tortured, executed, ...
When she was standing for office, Jacinda Ardern promised she would take abortion out of the Crimes Act. And to be fair, there was some early action on that, with an immediate referral of the issue to the Law Commission ...
When the government introduced the Zero Carbon Bill, people rightly asked what they planned to do to reduce transport emissions, which basicly had no policy at all other than the ETS. Today, they responded, announcing a "feebate" system which would ...
At almost every level, the problem with medicinal cannabis is a lack of good information. In the US, FDA regulations make it hard to research. Most doctors aren't familiar with what research there is and most patients don't know either. ...
Redline is critical of Corbyn for his political weaknesses, but he’s no anti-Semite. There is no substance to the McCarthyist witch-hunt being run by the right wing, and the pro-Israel lobby inside and outside the Labour Party in the UK. ...
The government's billion trees program is the sort of policy which could make a real difference to our emissions and the fight against climate change. But climate scientist Jim Salinger isn't convinced:The Forestry Minister Shane Jones' one billion trees won't ...
Last month the government was celebrating another surplus. Meanwhile, children are starving:One in five children are living in households where putting food on the table is a struggle, according to a new report from the Ministry of Health. It found ...
Show Me The Money! The alternative to state funding of infrastructure is, of course, to fund it by taking on massive amounts of private debt. On this issue, at least, Auckland mayoral challenger, Tamihere, has some solid points to make. ...
If we are to avoid making the earth uninhabitable, we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to practically nothing over the next decade. But that will still leave us with the problem of the carbon we have already emitted, which ...
Former Waikato DHB CEO Nigel Murray allegedly misused public funds, spending more than $120,000 of public money on unjustified travel. He was forced to resign and the Serious Fraud Office began an investigation. But despite the SFO finding that the ...
Jeremy Corbyn, we are told, is being advised – not least by his deputy (as well as by some of his would-be successors) – that he must come “off the fence” on the Brexit issue if he wants to bolster ...
The End of Life bill has been read a second time and is now heading for the House for further debate. Personally, I support the proposal. I don't ever epect to take advantage of the Bill's provisions myself, but as ...
Before the substantive issue which this column is about – whether there has been a deterioration in the economic advice given to the government – a paragraph about the budget leaks.read more ...
Below is a translation of the editorial in the June 24 round of weekly workplace bulletins issued all over France by the revolutionary workers’ organisation Lutte Ouvriere. Last Saturday, 8,000 people took to the streets of Belfort (eastern France) to ...
Why hasn't Parliament followed the lead set by our local authorities and declared a climate emergency? The answer is the National Party:The Prime Minister’s admission that she is open to the idea of declaring a climate change emergency is nothing ...
Back in May the government released its Zero Carbon Bill. While much of the bill was welcome, there was one big exception: it contained a secrecy clause, requiring the Climate Change Commission to maintain secrecy over practically everything it does. ...
by Phil Duncan This past week has marked the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Stonewall Inn riots in Christopher Street, New York, the event generally regarded as kicking off the gay liberation movement. Quite a few articles have ...
Southland - land of coal-burning dairy farmers - has become the first region in the country to explicitly vote against declaring a climate emergency. Their reason? They didn't want to "devalue" the word "emergency". Its an argument addressed powerfully in ...
New Zealand has a problem with police chases: officers going after fleeing drivers like rabid dogs, without any consideration for proportionality or public safety, often with fatal results. And according to an in-depth article in the Guardian today, the UK ...
Welcome to another heaping helping of research publications related to climate change drivers and mechanisms, the effects of climate change and how we might yet grope our way into systems approaches to dealing with the mess we're making, despite ourselves. ...
Holly Lawford-Smith is a senior lecturer in political philosophy at the University of Melbourne. She’s currently writing a book about radical feminism. This article appeared on Feminist Current Academics should be standing together in defence of universities’ fundamental values: the ...
The Otago Daily Times has an in-depth article about the future of wind energy in New Zealand, and it is looking bright:The news that wind will play the leading role in New Zealand’s energy future was put up in lights ...
If the sight of schoolkids striking for a future has been filling you with hope, good news: they want you to join them on September 27:Students will take to the streets again demanding action on climate change, and this time ...
The People's "Friend": In this masterpiece of revolutionary propaganda, the homicidal political psychopath, Jean-Paul Marat, has been transformed by Jacques-Louis David, the French Revolution's most accomplished artist, into a martyred hero of the ordinary people of Paris. Thanks to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, ...
The principle of one person, one vote doesn’t apply for local elections. In fact, you don’t even need to be a person to have voting rights. Welcome to the ratepayer roll. While the ratepayer roll accounts for less than 1% ...
A new digital platform aims to make it easier for small businesses to access services from multiple government agencies, leaving them more time to focus on their own priorities. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Minister for Small Business Stuart Nash ...
Million-dollar start to gun collection eventsPolice Minister Stuart Nash says a solid start has been made to the gun buyback and amnesty after the first weekend of community collection events. “Gun owners will walk away with more than ...
Police Minister Stuart Nash has praised Police and gun owners after the first firearms collection event saw a busy turnout at Riccarton Racecourse in Christchurch. “Police officers and staff have put a tremendous effort into planning and logistics for the ...
Seventy-eight new Police constables are heading out to the regions following today’s graduation of a new recruit wing from the Royal New Zealand Police College. Police Minister Stuart Nash says the record high number of new Police officers being recruited, ...
Social Credit Party leader Chris Leitch is calling on the sale of Westland Milk to Chinese company Yili to be put on hold pending an approach to the Government by Westland Milk for funding assistance. ...
Associate Health Minister Jenny Salesa seems intent on ensuring the Government’s vaping legislation will heavily target flavours and nicotine levels – a move that would be completely counterproductive to helping Kiwis quit smoking and achieving ...
A new website has launched in response to recent RNZ reporting about Police in Dunedin unlawfully entering people’s homes and breath-testing them. “I was disgusted when I saw what they cops were doing in Dunedin. Their behaviour undermines all of ...
Hundreds of whanau and Maori leaders gathered at a hui in Mangere last weekend where they voted unanimously for an inquiry into Oranga Tamariki. The historic meeting called for a child welfare framework to be developed by Maori, for Maori. ...
The Head of the New Zealand Maori Council has called for the Government to hold an immediate investigation into the global cosmetics company Sephora after they were caught dumping waste hundreds and thousands of waste paper products embedded with ...
Simon Shepherd: The government says its agreement with farmers, that they should pay for agricultural emissions, is historic. But there's no agreement on how. One proposal says farmers should pay a 5 per cent emissions tax. Another suggests farmers ...
The O’Brien Institute for Public Health at Calgary University has just released their report on fluoridation. This institute has, up to now, been staunchly in favour of fluoridation. However, yesterday, with regards to fluoride’s effect on the brain, ...
July 19 (BusinessDesk) - The government is looking to tighten control and impose harsher penalties after the Mycoplasma bovis outbreak revealed cracks in the country's stock management system. ...
Kia Anga Mua Ngā Hapū o Ngāpuhi (KAM) has reached a pivotal milestone following a hui yesterday at Waitangi with the Minister for Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations Andrew Little. ...
The New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union can reveal that the Government spent $133,530 on producing its ‘Wellbeing Budget’ document, a cost blowout largely driven by spending on graphic design and photography. The $133,530 price tag compares to $86,268 ...
Kahungunu Māori Language Awards. Nominations closed on 5 July 2019, and were judged by the Senior Management Team of Ngāti Kahungunu Iwi Incorporated. The judges wish to acknowledge the very high calibre of all nominations received making it a very ...
High Court of Australia Judge, Justice Stephen Gageler, will address recent criticism of court judgment delays in Australia, at the University of Canterbury (UC) on 23 July at 6.15pm. ...
This summary is provided to assist in the understanding of the Inquiry’s proceedings but does not constitute the official record. The full Minute is available at the link below. ...
The Tertiary Education Commission is laying charges under section 292A of the Education Act 1989 against three individuals for making a false representation for the purpose of receiving, or continuing to receive, free tertiary education from a tertiary education ...
New Zealand food businesses today welcomed a trio of new food safety tools, designed to make it faster, easier and more affordable to follow the rules and keep consumers safe. ...
AUT research shows that Māori children are almost four times more likely than those of European descent to be placed out of home by child protection services ...
The Government announced today that grants of up to $2,500 for energy efficient heaters are now available as part of the Government’s Warmer Kiwi Homes programme. ...
Fonterra’s use of coal has been the target of numerous grassroots campaigns in recent years. Last year 350 Aotearoa affiliated groups, Fossil Free Aoraki and 350 Nelson launched a petition dismissing the dairy giant’s initial target of no new ...
Information sessions on proposals for The Medicinal Cannabis Scheme take place in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch over the next fortnight. The sessions are open to anyone with an interest in learning more about the proposed scheme. ...
“Our children are our most vulnerable, most innocent victims and we do not want to see any more children harmed by these ‘known sex offenders’. The safety of our community must be the paramount consideration.” ...
“The announcement that Fonterra will immediately stop installing any new coal boilers or increasing capacity to burn coal is the signal that the biomass fuel supply industry welcomes” said Brian Cox, Executive Officer of the Bioenergy Association. ...
18 July 2019-- Coal Action Network Aotearoa (CANA) today welcomed Fonterra’s commitment to build no new coal plants, a “no brainer” for the climate crisis the world faces. The group has been urging this transition for six years now and ...
The increase in demand for cage-free eggs is set to continue according to animal rights organisation SAFE, who says the egg industry should expect this and prepare. ...
Wellington, New Zealand – 350 Pacific made a formal submission to the New Zealand Government’s Environment Parliamentary Select Committee on the Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Bill, led by the Pacific Climate Warriors (PCWs) based in ...
There used to be a school of thought on the centre right side of politics that the best way to neuter the Greens as a political force would be to let them have a spell in government. Then, according to ...
Today (18 July) is Nelson Mandela International Day when the United Nations highlights the importance of humane conditions of imprisonment. In New Zealand our prisons are overcrowded and understaffed. At 214 prisoners per 100,000 people, we have the fifth ...
NZEI Te Riu Roa will take legal action over the lengthy delay in implementing pay increases for teachers. Novopay announced yesterday that teachers would have to wait until 11 September to see pay increases that they won when they settled ...
EDS has filed its submission on the Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Bill. The Bill sets targets for greenhouse gas reductions, provides for the government to set a series of carbon budgets, and sets up a new, independent, Climate ...
The New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union has identified an absurd case of mission creep at Wellington City Council: the decision to spend $21,750 on two Consumer NZ investigations into different brands of bike lights. ...
The Motor Trade Association is welcoming the release of the Government’s new draft road safety strategy. MTA Chief Executive Craig Pomare says the association is pleased to see vehicle safety has been made a priority in the Road to Zero ...
The Department of Conservation continue to repeat the same old story about attacks on staff and how it is affecting their role in protecting our precious wildlife. NZ herald https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12249704 ...
The government's silence on the fact that the country's second-largest milk processor is on the brink of becoming 25% Chinese Government owned has been deafening. ...
School Strike 4 Climate NZ welcomes the coalition Government’s endeavour to take action on reducing agricultural emissions but is disappointed at the weak stance that the Government has taken on the issue. ...
The Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) has issued a formal warning under the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Act 2009 (AML/CFT Act) to seven reporting entities within the Regus Management Limited (RNZML) designated business ...
The Northland Regional Council (NRC) has voted to exclude all GM/GE precautionary provisions in its regional plan, despite years of community engagement showing support for such protection. There is a sense of betrayal following the way the NRC Chairman ...
New Zealand’s ‘mission-driven’ charities working in international aid are showing early signs of changing the way they work, in particular prioritising building the capacity and resilience of local communities to do their own development. ...
Teachers will have to wait until 11 September for pay increases won as part of their collective agreement negotiations settled in June, according to an update sent to schools today from Novopay. ...
July 16 (BusinessDesk) - Energy Minister Megan Woods says the government “won’t die in a ditch” if its goal of 100 percent renewable electricity generation isn't reached by 2035. ...
The Electricity Networks Association (ENA) is welcoming the Government’s response to the Interim Climate Change Committee (ICCC) Report released today. Graeme Peters, chief executive of the ENA, said one of the key recommendations, endorsed by the ...
An article* published this month in the Journal of Health Organization and Management raises questions over the way health board members are elected and whether the boards are even needed. ...
NZEI Te Riu Roa's kindergarten teacher members will vote on a proposed settlement to their collective agreement after four days of negotiations with the Ministry of Education and kindergarten employers. ...
Vector has today welcomed the ICCC’s report on Accelerated Electrification . Vector agrees that accelerating the electrification of transport and process heat will play a major role in reducing the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. Initiatives to ...
The New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union is calling on the Porirua City Council to cancel its underwriting of a proposed Canadian-led privately owned adventure park slated for public land after a similar project created a huge liability for Christchurch ...
Youth climate change campaigners Generation Zero welcome the Interim Climate Change Committee’s (ICCC’s) reports: Accelerated Electrification and Action on agricultural emissions ; which were finally released by the Government today, almost three months ...
Fish & Game New Zealand notes the announcement today that the Government and the intensive agriculture leadership have reached a ‘historic consensus’ and are exploring using a formal sector-government agreement instead of bringing agriculture ...
Orchestral music performance is an art form, but how do you engage with something you’ve never experienced before? Samiyah Alghamdi and Anna Knox attend NYO Celebrates in Wellington and unpack what they hear.The National Youth Orchestra and the National Youth ...
Tara Ward reviews Funny As, a series that documents the history of New Zealand comedy, and manages to be a key part of that history in its own right.Kiwi comedy has come a long way since Fred Dagg first fell out ...
Cave à Vin founder Zane Kelsall says he has been in ‘intense therapy’ following sexual misconduct claims in Halifax.Last week, The Spinoff published a story about Cave à Vin, a new wine bar on Auckland’s North Shore. The story hailed ...
Hundreds of artefacts connected with the lesbian community in New Zealand are displayed in a small volunteer-run museum in West Auckland.Charmaine always had crushes on girls. When she was head girl of Auckland Girls’ Grammar, she fell in love with ...
From a school for budding beekeepers to a street-side garden growing produce for locals, Auckland’s abuzz with projects making the city safer for pollinators.Auckland’s a hive of activity aimed at helping our pollinators and it’s all a part of For ...
After watching a mind-bending film about a dying magician that reminded him of Tickled, David Farrier interviewed the director, only to have his interview disappear.This has never happened before. I’ve never lost audio from an interview, and it’s the most ...
Pacific Media Centre Newsdesk New Zealand’s unprecedented “internet-native mass shooting” attack on two mosques, the New Caledonia independence referendum, Fiji’s general election and news media responses are featured in the latest Pacific Journalism Review being published next week. Analysis ...
Aldous Harding is coming back to New Zealand. In the lead-up to her shows, she spoke to The Spinoff about live TV, maturity, and the weirder interpretations of her songs.Aldous Harding is calling from her home in Wales. Only a ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Flannery, Planetary Scientist, Queensland University of Technology This weekend marks 50 years exactly since humans first walked on the Moon. It also marks Australia’s small but significant role in enabling NASA ...
The Lightbulb asks innovators and entrepreneurs how they turned their ideas into reality. This week we talk to Aaron Jones, founder of Christchurch-based reusable bag company Zerobag.First of all, give us your elevator pitch for Zerobag.Zerobag is a New Zealand-owned ...
Aaron Kreisler looks beyond the gags in this survey of an artist and his dogsat the Christchurch Art Gallery.“The dog really must love him, it’s so incredibly patient…”, a woman says to her daughter, punctuating a screening of Coin ...
‘He wants to sleep with you,’ a close friend had said. ‘Then you’ll be able to tell if it is going to lead anywhere’: a short story by New Plymouth author Elizabeth Smither. Photography by Peter Black. ...
Opinion - The leadership visits are more interesting in that they serve as a spotlight on the two countries - politically, and on policy issues, writes Brigette Morten. ...
Created by future ACT Party leader Richard Prebble after an epic reform bender in the 80s, NZ on Air has just marked its third decade. Duncan Greive relates its history and asks: is the funder still fit for purpose?It’s a ...
It helps that he played in the New Zealand cricket team when they lost the 1992 semi-final and went on to coach India, writes Georgie Wright, daughter of JohnMy dad has taught me a fair few things over my 25 ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra [embedded content]University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor Professor Deep Saini discusses the week in politics with Michelle Grattan – one with a reduced pace, despite the 24 ...
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and ...
Jacinda Ardern’s Melbourne trip wrapped up with nothing to show on longstanding trans-Tasman concerns, but was a potent reminder of her international appeal. ...
Pricing agricultural emissions first at the processor level - such as Fonterra - rather than right down at farm level stacks up as a gap measure says Catherine Leining. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joanne Orlando, Researcher: Children and Technology, Western Sydney University Instagram is running a social media experiment in Australia and elsewhere to see what happens when it hides the number of likes on ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adam Cross, Research Fellow, Curtin University Sign up to the Beating Around the Bush newsletter here, and suggest a plant we should cover at batb@theconversation.edu.au. Billabongs in the northern Kimberley are welcome ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sunanda Creagh, Head of Digital Storytelling You’ve probably heard that this week marks 50 years since humans first set foot on the Moon – a feat that still boggles the mind given ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dennis Gentilin, Adjunct Fellow, Macquarie University As strange as it might sound, whistleblowers in Australia have reason to rejoice – so long as they are in the private sector. Thanks to new ...
The fourth season of Queer Eye drops today on Netflix. Sam Brooks reflects on his difficult relationship with the show, and where it sits in mainstream culture.For depressingly many people, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy was an introduction not just to ...
The collapse of a multi-billion dollar deal to sell AMP's life insurance division to a British company for $3.6 billion is the fault of the companies, according to the Reserve Bank. ...
A poem by Miramar poet Geoff Cochrane.Channel HoppingStupa or Stuka?Weet-Bix or Welsh rabbit?Galactic aerodrome or Matchbox truck?*I’m young in my dreams, still young.*Beautiful Keanu’s wearing shades—antique shades with iodine-coloured lenses.*I’m young in my dreams, still young,and I still have some ...
For the month of July, Josie Adams is taking on the challenge of being low-waste. That means minimising plastics, emissions, and even recyclables. Each week we release her diary. This is week two.Read week one here.I’ll be honest, week two ...
By Royson Willie in Port Vila Two Vanuatu Daily Post journalists were literally given a pat-down by the police criminal investigation unit yesterday over a story they had written about the vehicle of the Chairman of the Public Service ...
By Gorothy Kenneth in Port Moresby Papua New Guinean Prime Minister James Marape will visit Australia this weekend for a week-long state visit and the Bougainville independence referendum in less than three months is expected to be high on ...
Tougher laws governing the movement of animals and harsher penalties for non-compliance are on the table under an overhaul of two key pieces of legislation. ...
Wtf did we just watch?That sound you heard was a million furries screaming in ecstasy as their fantasy and everyone else’s nightmare came to life in the form of the first trailer for the live action version of Cats.Is it ...
The only published and available best-selling indie book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 sales list recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington.AUCKLAND1 Three Women by Lisa Taddeo (Bloomsbury, $35)Fucking ...
Tougher laws governing the movement of animals and harsher penalties for non-compliance are on the table under an overhaul of two key pieces of legislation. ...
As we mark the fiftieth anniversary the July 20th Moon landing Dr Nick Long reflects on what that's meant for New Zealand and considers the space 'gold rush' ahead. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Christine Griebsch, Specialist and Senior Lecturer in Small Animal Medicine, University Veterinary Teaching Hospital Sydney, Sydney School of Veterinary Science, University of Sydney Recently reported cases of the often fatal bacterial infection ...
My selection of the eight best morning news links from here and overseas, along with eight lunchtime lean-back long reads. Also, the full list of links, including Jacinda Ardern's trip to Australia, the big emissions report, Fonterra's coal move and a new ...
Heaven is a place on earth, and June is saving the world one ’80s pop hit at a time. Tara Ward recaps season 4, episode 9 of The Handmaid’s Tale. Praise be, for there was a tiny bit of good news ...
Finance companies say they shouldn’t have to be ‘fit and proper’ even though in some cases they charge more than the planned clampdown on high cost lending. A group of finance companies that charges well over the government’s proposed cap on ...
An ANZ shareholder is demanding the bank disclose more information about the sale of an Auckland residential property to its former chief executive and his family. ...
Editor’s Note: Here below is a list of the main issues currently under discussion in New Zealand and links to media coverage.New Zealand Parliament Buildings, Wellington, New Zealand.Today’s contentForeign Affairs and trade Sam Sachdeva (Newsroom): The new, ...
Tara Ward sets out on a valiant quest to find the best apple in Aotearoa. The idea that every apple is a good apple is fake news. We’ve all got stories about shit experiences with apples, when it looked good on ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Sarkissian, Operations Scientist, CSIRO The role Australia played in relaying the first television images of astronaut Neil Armstrong’s historic walk on the Moon 50 years ago this July features in the ...
Open mike 21/07/2015 
Open mike is your post.
I have been unimpressed with Western corporate media coverage of the tensions involving Iran in the Straits of Hormuz. They repeat the line that Iran is the source of current tensions, that it is a major sponsor of terrorism, that ...13 hours ago
15 hours ago
16 hours ago
Much like Tuvalu, the manmade climate change Cult love to tell people the Maldives is almost totally underwater. In fact the dishonest Maldives Govt d on the same bandwagon, believing they would receive billions of dollars aid from other Countries ...1 day ago
As the entry on Wikipedia shows (and no, one doesn’t necessarily have to regard Wikipedia as the be-all and end-all of truth, because it isn’t on a great many things, to agree with the following): “…a fallacious argument that concludes ...1 day ago
by Daphna Whitmore The story of how the world awoke to a big injustice is starting to be told. The Pacific Games held this month in Samoa is another chapter. On the podium was Laurel Hubbard, the giant transgender weightlifter, ...2 days ago
Our conversations and push against specific supremacist and ultra-Nationalist groups, and the pseudo-intellectual underpinnings of them, need to mature at all levels. But in doing so, it’s going to have to include a more thorough and brutally honest self-examination ...2 days ago
This week, in the wake of National's opposition to even talking about reducing agricultural emissions and Simon Bridges' refusal to recognise that there is a climate emergency, I've been saying that National is unfit to govern. And it looks like ...2 days ago
Something I missed: not only did Youth MPs declare a climate emergency; they also launched a campaign to lower the voting age to 16:Youth Parliament week in Parliament has seen the establishment of Make it 16, a campaign to ...3 days ago
The proposed Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Bill treats biogenic methane emissions differently from all other carbon emissions. The latter are to be measured net so that emissions from fossil fuels can be offset by carbon stored in trees. ...4 days ago
by Gearóid Ó Loingsigh This article aims to answer a simple question, whether the conflict is only a rural one or whether it is also urban. The verb ‘to be’ is conjugated in the present tense as ,despite what some ...4 days ago
5 days ago
On Sunday July 7, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Associate Health Minister Julie Anne Genter announced their intention to review the Ministry of Health’s Funded Family Care policy and repeal Part 4Aof the 2000 NZ Public Health and Disability Act. These are festering injustices ...6 days ago
Belle is a lovely fifteen year-old border collie who belongs to our friends and neighbours at Bryan’s Beach, Michael and Judy Corboy. Belle, in her old age, can hardly see or hear, but – as a constant participant at social ...6 days ago
An occasional series where I will ponder allegations of anti-Semitism directed at the British Labour Party and its members.In this case, we are thinking about an allegedly anti-Semitic image shared by a Labour Party member. Its origins appear to be ...2 weeks ago
2 weeks ago
2 weeks ago
Welcome to another heaping helping of research publications related to climate change drivers and mechanisms, the effects of climate change and how we might yet grope our way into systems approaches to dealing with the mess we're making, despite ourselves. ...3 weeks ago
The People's "Friend": In this masterpiece of revolutionary propaganda, the homicidal political psychopath, Jean-Paul Marat, has been transformed by Jacques-Louis David, the French Revolution's most accomplished artist, into a martyred hero of the ordinary people of Paris. Thanks to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, ...3 weeks ago
The principle of one person, one vote doesn’t apply for local elections. In fact, you don’t even need to be a person to have voting rights. Welcome to the ratepayer roll. While the ratepayer roll accounts for less than 1% ...3 weeks ago
A new digital platform aims to make it easier for small businesses to access services from multiple government agencies, leaving them more time to focus on their own priorities. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Minister for Small Business Stuart Nash ...6 days ago
Social Credit Party leader Chris Leitch is calling on the sale of Westland Milk to Chinese company Yili to be put on hold pending an approach to the Government by Westland Milk for funding assistance. ...7 hours ago
Orchestral music performance is an art form, but how do you engage with something you’ve never experienced before? Samiyah Alghamdi and Anna Knox attend NYO Celebrates in Wellington and unpack what they hear.The National Youth Orchestra and the National Youth ...8 hours ago
The National Party is criticising the Government's uptake of electric vehicles into its fleet, saying it's taking too long. ...8 hours ago
Tara Ward reviews Funny As, a series that documents the history of New Zealand comedy, and manages to be a key part of that history in its own right.Kiwi comedy has come a long way since Fred Dagg first fell out ...14 hours ago
Cave à Vin founder Zane Kelsall says he has been in ‘intense therapy’ following sexual misconduct claims in Halifax.Last week, The Spinoff published a story about Cave à Vin, a new wine bar on Auckland’s North Shore. The story hailed ...17 hours ago
Hundreds of artefacts connected with the lesbian community in New Zealand are displayed in a small volunteer-run museum in West Auckland.Charmaine always had crushes on girls. When she was head girl of Auckland Girls’ Grammar, she fell in love with ...18 hours ago
From a school for budding beekeepers to a street-side garden growing produce for locals, Auckland’s abuzz with projects making the city safer for pollinators.Auckland’s a hive of activity aimed at helping our pollinators and it’s all a part of For ...18 hours ago
After watching a mind-bending film about a dying magician that reminded him of Tickled, David Farrier interviewed the director, only to have his interview disappear.This has never happened before. I’ve never lost audio from an interview, and it’s the most ...19 hours ago
The Government is ramping up policy and research work in the countdown to next year’s referendum on cannabis legalisation. ...1 day ago
Pacific Media Centre Newsdesk New Zealand’s unprecedented “internet-native mass shooting” attack on two mosques, the New Caledonia independence referendum, Fiji’s general election and news media responses are featured in the latest Pacific Journalism Review being published next week. Analysis ...1 day ago
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Flannery, Planetary Scientist, Queensland University of Technology This weekend marks 50 years exactly since humans first walked on the Moon. It also marks Australia’s small but significant role in enabling NASA ...2 days ago
The Lightbulb asks innovators and entrepreneurs how they turned their ideas into reality. This week we talk to Aaron Jones, founder of Christchurch-based reusable bag company Zerobag.First of all, give us your elevator pitch for Zerobag.Zerobag is a New Zealand-owned ...2 days ago
Aaron Kreisler looks beyond the gags in this survey of an artist and his dogs at the Christchurch Art Gallery.“The dog really must love him, it’s so incredibly patient…”, a woman says to her daughter, punctuating a screening of Coin ...2 days ago
‘He wants to sleep with you,’ a close friend had said. ‘Then you’ll be able to tell if it is going to lead anywhere’: a short story by New Plymouth author Elizabeth Smither. Photography by Peter Black. ...2 days ago
Created by future ACT Party leader Richard Prebble after an epic reform bender in the 80s, NZ on Air has just marked its third decade. Duncan Greive relates its history and asks: is the funder still fit for purpose?It’s a ...2 days ago
It helps that he played in the New Zealand cricket team when they lost the 1992 semi-final and went on to coach India, writes Georgie Wright, daughter of JohnMy dad has taught me a fair few things over my 25 ...2 days ago
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra [embedded content]University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor Professor Deep Saini discusses the week in politics with Michelle Grattan – one with a reduced pace, despite the 24 ...2 days ago
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Cherie Hugo, Teaching Fellow, Nutrition & Dietetics, Bond University The Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety this week turned its attention to food and nutrition. The testimony of maggots in ...2 days ago
Jacinda Ardern’s Melbourne trip wrapped up with nothing to show on longstanding trans-Tasman concerns, but was a potent reminder of her international appeal. ...2 days ago
Pricing agricultural emissions first at the processor level - such as Fonterra - rather than right down at farm level stacks up as a gap measure says Catherine Leining. ...2 days ago
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adam Cross, Research Fellow, Curtin University Sign up to the Beating Around the Bush newsletter here, and suggest a plant we should cover at batb@theconversation.edu.au. Billabongs in the northern Kimberley are welcome ...2 days ago
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dennis Gentilin, Adjunct Fellow, Macquarie University As strange as it might sound, whistleblowers in Australia have reason to rejoice – so long as they are in the private sector. Thanks to new ...2 days ago
The fourth season of Queer Eye drops today on Netflix. Sam Brooks reflects on his difficult relationship with the show, and where it sits in mainstream culture.For depressingly many people, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy was an introduction not just to ...2 days ago
The collapse of a multi-billion dollar deal to sell AMP's life insurance division to a British company for $3.6 billion is the fault of the companies, according to the Reserve Bank. ...2 days ago
For the month of July, Josie Adams is taking on the challenge of being low-waste. That means minimising plastics, emissions, and even recyclables. Each week we release her diary. This is week two.Read week one here.I’ll be honest, week two ...2 days ago
By Royson Willie in Port Vila Two Vanuatu Daily Post journalists were literally given a pat-down by the police criminal investigation unit yesterday over a story they had written about the vehicle of the Chairman of the Public Service ...3 days ago
By Gorothy Kenneth in Port Moresby Papua New Guinean Prime Minister James Marape will visit Australia this weekend for a week-long state visit and the Bougainville independence referendum in less than three months is expected to be high on ...3 days ago
Tougher laws governing the movement of animals and harsher penalties for non-compliance are on the table under an overhaul of two key pieces of legislation. ...3 days ago
Wtf did we just watch?That sound you heard was a million furries screaming in ecstasy as their fantasy and everyone else’s nightmare came to life in the form of the first trailer for the live action version of Cats.Is it ...3 days ago
As we mark the fiftieth anniversary the July 20th Moon landing Dr Nick Long reflects on what that's meant for New Zealand and considers the space 'gold rush' ahead. ...3 days ago
My selection of the eight best morning news links from here and overseas, along with eight lunchtime lean-back long reads. Also, the full list of links, including Jacinda Ardern's trip to Australia, the big emissions report, Fonterra's coal move and a new ...3 days ago
John Banks' former lives, vegetable-based insults in Auckland's mayoral race and metaphorical cabbage - James Elliott has it all. ...3 days ago
Heaven is a place on earth, and June is saving the world one ’80s pop hit at a time. Tara Ward recaps season 4, episode 9 of The Handmaid’s Tale. Praise be, for there was a tiny bit of good news ...3 days ago
An ANZ shareholder is demanding the bank disclose more information about the sale of an Auckland residential property to its former chief executive and his family. ...3 days ago
Tara Ward sets out on a valiant quest to find the best apple in Aotearoa. The idea that every apple is a good apple is fake news. We’ve all got stories about shit experiences with apples, when it looked good on ...3 days ago
I may have missed someone else posting this reference, but it is very powerful and moving stuff. Similar results to NZ banks and the swaps fiasco.
I understand David Pascoe is an equine vet who writes a regular blog.
http://keworganics.com.au/an-open-letter-to-the-australian-people-by-dr-david-pascoe/
Wow. Just wow.
Powerfully written and very sobering.
Reading that and thinking of a future coming to ‘you’, if ‘you’ happen to be a NZ dairy farm owner.
The return of feudalism.
That was sickening. I had no idea things were anywhere near that bad.
+100 Dan1…very moving
…where is Winnie?
Thnks for that truly amazing.
http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/279239/school-policy-could-bring-major-to-funding
I suspect that Nationals new policy around education, specifically “Community of Schools” is National’s very cunning way of closing schools by stealth.
Isnt going to happen in our area!
Bird call of the day on Radio New Zealand is Kereru …
Speaking of Kereru…looks like Sonny Tau now has an out. He was merely picking up and deliverying the birds for a Government Minister who has acquired a taste.
Speaking of Radio New Zealand…..someone seems to have taken the edge off the morning presenters.
Much less of the incisive, insistent interviews (with our household cheering them on) and more of a ‘wee chat’ approach. ( Although Mr. Little did get a grilling….funny that.)
Oh dear….where will we get our news from now?
“Bird call of the day on Radio New Zealand is Kereru …”
Is it making a karking kind of sound?
@ mickysavage – Yes I noticed that one too, just before the 7am news bulletin this morning. The call of the Kereru. Irony or what? Rubbing it in to NatzKEY perhaps?
But the Dame (Turia) says it’s OK for elders to eat the bird for special occasions! OK to break one’s own cultural rules then is it Ms Turia?
+100 mary_a…the credibility of an opportunist
An Open Letter to Britain’s Leading Violent Extremist: David Cameron
July 20, 2015
This open letter to the Prime Minister is published by INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, a new crowd-funded investigative journalism project.
Dear Prime Minister David Cameron,
It is with deep disappointment that I read excerpts of your speech provided by Downing Street to the press, purporting to set out a five-year strategy to tackle fundamentalist terrorism, which — whatever its intentions — is thoroughly misguided, and destined to plunge this country, as well as the Middle East, into further chaos and misery.
I am writing this open letter to request you, as a matter of urgency, to abide by your obligations as a human being, a British citizen, a Member of Parliament, and as our Prime Minister: to undertake proper due-diligence in the formulation of Britain’s foreign, counter-terrorism and security policies, based on the vast array of evidence from scientific and academic studies of foreign policy, terrorism and radicalisation, rather than the influence of far-right extremist ideology, and of narrow vested interest groups keen to profit from war and fear.
…..
Your war, Prime Minister, is a farce.
You, more than any other British citizen, are complicit in the rise of ISIS, and the radicalisation of a minority of Britons. You have helped create the militant groups which, you rightly acknowledge, are murdering not just Westerners, but Muslims in Iraq, Syria and beyond.
The only people that will benefit from all this are giant defence contractors, many of which are closely connected to your party, and which hold overbearing counter-democratic influence on your foreign policy.
View at Medium.com
+100 ….good points Morrissey…the British might well ask themselves …and many have …who has driven a terrorist backlash?
….and is Cameron now going to take Britain into a fascist democracy shutdown? …where people can not speak out?
Oh no. Who was it here yesterday that said: “The worst PR advice there is, is to try to dig yourself out of a hole with your mouth.”
Over on Phil Quin’s blog, the president of the Labour Party has sent an email reply to Quin’s resignation letter that says he’d target Singaporeans, and Germans too, if he had to. With all their digging, I think Labour just burrowed their way out the other side of the Earth – without reaching China first.
New headlines: “Labour Would Target Germans.”
Advice for Labour: Before you say anything else, or develop any more policy or media releases or speeches, have a read of the Human Rights Act and the Bill of Rights Act and if anything in your rhetoric can’t get through those existing legal filters/guidelines, don’t say it, don’t do it, just stop and think about it for a bit.
You didn’t provide a link, but did he really say “If I had to”?!
Cause like, it’s all ‘the Chinese’ innit?
I knew it! What Labour are really doing is digging a hole to the other side of the world so that the Chinese have better and more direct access! We’ve been fooled (and not for the first time).
😆
Okay. Found it. Fuck me!
So trawling through surnames and assigning a country of origin or ethnicity to people on the basis of those names is all about (to quote the Labour Party President) “consider(ing) the potential impact of those assets and investment on New Zealand housing ownership, or, indeed, on other aspects of our economy”
I can’t for the life of me see the connection between finger pointing and analysis, but hey.
Oh. And there is no need to look at any other overseas investment because the other overseas investment isn’t the dominant overseas investment.
Here’s the link for others. http://www.philquin.com/blog/2015/7/20/nigel-haworths-revealing-rebuttal
In searching for that particular blog post, I read some others and I have to say, that in spite of Quin’s reputation of being perhaps a bit of a fuckwit on a number of issues, on this one he’s absolutely bang on the money.
edit: I should add that if Labour were claiming they’d name trawled to get some idea of the wider picture, as in attempting to get some idea, no matter how rough, of the extent of broader overseas investment, then at a stretch…maybe. But to categorically rule out any and all other sources of overseas investment as being problematic…wow.
And this is the same Labour Party which sold off shit loads of NZ stuff to foreign investors – Australians and Americans – or watched it happen without proposing to ban foreign ownership of our power companies, or our telecom companies.
Rank vote gubbing hypocrisy from Labour.
It’s possible that they’ve finally learned that they’ve been wrong for the last thirty years and are now starting to look to undo the damage that they’ve done over that time.
I think it more likely they are on an opportunistic vote grab.
You don’t see them floating a ban on foreign ownership of NZ companies, do you.
It wasn’t.
Unfortunately, no but they are talking about restrictions that can easily lead to a full ban.
+100 DTB
Just to save others getting to the actual content of Haworths letter
here it is copied from Quins site.
. Anyway, Nigel Haworth, the party’s president, wrote to me. This is the crux of his argument:
To refer to Chinese purchasers in such an analysis is not racist. Given, as others have also pointed out, that China is today engaged in massive international investment, much of it strategic, and is also the home of vast, and increasingly mobile, cash assets, it is right and proper for New Zealand to consider the potential impact of those assets and investment on New Zealand housing ownership, or, indeed, on other aspects of our economy. If it were Singaporean. or German or other investment that seemed to be dominant, it would be equally proper to name its source economy (for example, much as has been done since the Second World War in relation to US investment flows).
So Bill , NO he didn’t say “If I Had to”
Racism seems to be well misunderstood.
I give big ups to the doorman in this article who withstood abuse of a very nasty kind and still managed to retain his mana and dignity.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11484148
+1 Marty – I saw the piece on the news, the doorman and his workmates managed to stay very calm and measured during a vile tirade of abuse.
Well, one of the skills of that job is to realise that the dickheads don’t particularly mean what they say. 99% of that Swayze film Roadhouse was bullshit, but this little exchange was spot on:
I generally found it boring more than anything else. Although one funny thing is that after the initial refusal of entry they’d call me all sorts of stuff, and 30s later they were going “aww mate, do us a favour”. They almost never got it the right way around. But usually I’d just sort of tune it out (beyond listening for relevant information) and really only look for a pre-assault indicator. Which almost never happened compared to the amount of verbal thrown.
That’s awful stuff, marty. I certainly agree that racism isn’t well understood by some people (the last ten days have shown that all too well). The reflex reaction to call anything racist without looking at the underlying issues or context is probably a modern malaise. It’s PC gone mad etc.
I’d also wonder if the male in the video is affected not just by alcohol, but by the sense of power and authority he gets from being a paid benefit bouncer for WINZ. When you spend your days licensed to show contempt for people, that can definitely affect your thinking after hours as well.
🙄
So what you are sayig is that because you found something way more blatently racist that makes the Chinese data OK?
I am not saying what Labour did was racist but the people it targeted seem to feel that way. Intent means a lot. However there are a lot of people who truely belive they are not racist. They just don’t understand that their actions and words paint a different picture.
The data is OK because the data is OK. As marty’s example shows, some people think just about any situation is an opportunity to go OTT. Good point about intent, btw.
The data was not OK. To quote Keith Ng:
“The method is fine, the data is broken, and those problems render it unscientific and utterly useless. Not sound. Not robust. Not accurate.”
The data was fine. It was the actual record of the sales of the largest real estate company in AK. Nothing changes that fact.
The analysis, on the other hand …
And Keith Ng is completely and utterly wrong on the data. You couldn’t get better data.
The point was that it is the BEST data that is currently available because it is the only data that indicates where the money for residential properties is coming from. Therefore there is no better data.
The only other statistical data around just shows that the money for the higher total values of property sales isn’t coming from banks. It could be coming from socks as far as we can currently tell.
Keith Ng is talking crap – unless he can show a source of data that allows a similar type of analysis about money sources for purchasing residential properties.
At the earliest that won’t apparently happen until October, which will probably be catastrophic for our economy. By the sounds of Nationals posturing any data and analysis from that will not be public.
How exactly does the name list identify whereabouts money is coming from – onshore or offshore? From residents or from non-residents? As far as I can see, it does no such thing.
How on earth can you attack his critique of the name list data based on whether or not Keith can access other sets of data? How would hypothetical access to other sets of data be relevant to Keith’s critique of the name list data?
How can you tell if the name list data covering just 3 months is representative of the proceeding 24 or 36 months? Perhaps the snapshot over-represents activity by people with Chinese sounding names. Perhaps it under-represents activity by people with Chinese sounding names.
Indeed it doesn’t.
It merely illustrates that if both the real estate data and the names-ethnicity data reflect the same domestic population, then a single subgroup of that population that is significantly less well off than the population median and is otherwise statistically unremarkable also appears to purchase houses at something like six times the rate of any other subgroup, the disparity accounting for something like a third of the real estate dataset. Even if that accounted for 100% of the market activity of that subgroup, the disparity is around threefold.
Given global economic conditions compared to local economic conditions, the represented disparity at the very least least strongly indicates that we should be measuring overseas property ownership to rule out whether sovereignty issues could become a problem in the moderate to near future.
As Cullen said, this data should have been collected years ago. The name list doesn’t make a difference in that.
Actually, it’s the main reason msm are talking about it now, rather than hoping for the best with the nats’ ird-number plan.
The word is statistically. The whole point about statistics is that it is a branch of maths for dealing rigorously with error.
Keith keeps pointing to error. He knows that error in itself is damn well measurable. So far he hasn’t pointed to any error that wasn’t pointed out and dealt with in the analysis from Labour, presumably from Ron Salmond. Sure it isn’t physics, but what is these days? Physics is mostly stats now.
I didn’t. What I asked was where he knew of any better data. I am pretty confident that at present there isn’t anything better at elucidating or debunking the property purchase issues that Labour pointed out. If someone wants to be critical about data then they need to present something to back their criticisms.
The ONLY way you can be as absolutely sure of error as Keith is being is if he had a better data set. Where is it? The lack of it means that his attacks on the error in this data is in my mind (to put it mildly) complete crap.
Sure the data isn’t the best. It covers a mere 3 months covering 45% of the sales from the largest real estate company in Auckland. But the risks of poor data are measurable. There is no way that you can look at a sample size of 45% and think at a statistically or a business level that it is likely to have the kinds of crappy confidence levels that Keith has been trying to suggest.
B&T have been the largest real estate company across the whole of Auckland for my adult life. And I spent my life dealing with private industries in both local and vertical international markets.
Large local companies damn well don’t get to be the largest in any local market by being a specialist as Keith appears to have been suggesting they could be. It is extremely unlikely that for those 3 months Barfoot and Thompson fundamentally changed their business of the 35 years that I have been aware of them. They cover everything….
It it’d been Ray White or Crockers who do specialise more, then there might have been some validity in that argument. But the lower percentages of the total sales would have been more of a problem.
It is highly likely that the data extracted from B&T represents those 3 months of real estate sales in Auckland pretty well because it was 45% of the sales of Auckland from the realtor that is literally everywhere across our local market.
And I don’t know of any reason why those three months were different. I have been keeping track of Auckland real estate since 2012, including during those three months. We knew when we moved back into my apartment, that we’d want a bigger place eventually. So we keep looking to see what is there, through agents, trademe, and turning up at open homes and sites.
Nothing much has changed in the local market since mid 2012 where I look. The supply has gotten slightly better, prices have risen at a pretty steady 25% pa, there appear to be no signs of it changing that every moderately affordable apartment is being built for yuppie flatmates and renting out, and the number of places getting sold cheaply because of leaky home damage has been steadily diminishing. I’d be interested if anyone could point to anything that says things have changed in Auckland, because I haven’t seen anything that says it has.
You’d need real data rather than the frigging barrister style arguments in your comment to convince me that this data is different to the reality. I see it every third weekend. That kind of bullshit arguments is something that you use for politicians and the credulous rather than engineers.
On the other side, I have used these kinds of lists of names for doing canvassing. I have used them for targeting and prediction. Being a rather paranoid programmer, I analyse validity of anything that I use as a matter of course. With this kind of info, both from thousands of direct tests of data and indirectly via stats. I did so for the every set of the data, including name data for local Labour. I’d bet that some of Salmond’s name data derives from that. And being of a practical bent, I’m far less inclined to trust pure stats that Salmond is…
Like many other factors, names are not particularly useful for predicting individuals. You need a multiplicity of factors overlapping an individual and some history to get that to moderately high levels. But they are extremely accurate for correlations between sets in a population.
They are certainly good enough for doing reasonably accurate statistical estimates. Especially when you are merely looking for large differences between two population groups as Rob Salmond did. Unless people were busily deliberately lying to their realtor – (which seems quite unlikely – and indicates a different problem if it did), there is a massive difference visible between two populations.
Now I have no particular stake in this as I haven’t touched any canvassing systems for quite some time, and to be frank I really don’t have the damn time. But some of the complete drivel from intelligent people over the last week is just pissing me off.
Keith is one of those. I have read what he has written on this subject, and he hasn’t managed to convince me that he knows what he talking about here. It looks more like wishful thinking.
Sure I’d like to see better data. But at present and until at least October (unless the realtors release some information voluntarily) this is what we have.
To me it looks like Auckland and the rest of NZ has a bloody urgent economic problem, and one that I didn’t suspect was quite so severe until Labour released this (and I’d had time to think it over).
That is because I suspect that the overflows from the Asian markets are just the largest part of the foreign investment seeking large returns in the local property bubble. By an accident of history, it just happens to be the bit that is most easily analysed against the local population.
My back of the envelope calcs seem to indicate that if we do have that size of speculative bubble with so many from offshore trying not to be the last holding the hot potato, when it does crunch, there is going to be a whole lot of working cash ripped from the local economy fast as turnover plummet hard. I think that will be worse than anything I have ever seen.
Perhaps Keith should turn his usually excellent mind towards that issue.
Thanks Iprent for putting the record straight. Data is data is Data……..
Opinions , now that is a different matter.
Indeed. I always try to make clear the difference between data and my opinions.
Pluto is made of cheese. If you think this is wrong, you are obliged to provide better data. Otherwise, “Pluto is made of cheese” is the best data available, therefore is must be true.
Your logic is bad. Not having a substitute does not make the “next best alternative” true or meaningful.
He has a thousand qualifications. How many do you have?
wtf?
But better data has long since been provided for Pluto’s surface and probable inner structures since Clyde Tombaugh located it in the 1930s. But I don’t think that even children thought it was ever made of cheese. Perhaps you are thinking about the moon?
This data from Barfoot and Thompson and analysed by Labour looks to me like it is statistically valid. I’ve done this particular kind of analysis before in several areas. It is likely to have a error rate of less than 10%. It is a 3 month slice of previously opaque behaviour. Sure it’d be nice to have more data to fine tune the confidence.
But I’ll take market hints from anything that solid when the alternative is anecdote, unsubstantiated theory or supposition.
What it shows is that we appear to have a self-referential property bubble in Auckland with overseas money playing ponzi games of hot potato.
It is probably happening far wider than what can be conservatively statistically inferred for this data. For instance, I can’t think of a reason why Europeans wouldn’t be involved via property companies. It’d suit their kind of portfolio attitudes to markets. I can’t see the US citizens getting into it too much. They have enough growing economic areas to invest in at present.
When someone gets burnt as the music stops, those holding from offshore will be left with the costs. But it’d likely to be relatively low risk as they just hold until they can exit without major loss. But they are just playing the odds of really low returns at low risks against high returns at higher risks. This one is for them medium risks for high returns. Property in rapidly growing cities holds value.
In the case of local purchasers who have to live where they work, they will probably catch the potato when local interest rates rise even a bit, or they have a employment problem, or the value of the property drops below the mortgage level. They are likely doing it with a excessive mortgage that leaves bugger all room for risk and relies on too much luck.
But the abrupt stop in incoming investment flows will also hit a lot further out into jobs (especially casual and part-time retail, distribution, and services) when people start pulling back on spending as they feel poorer. Expect all of those recent real estate people flooding back into the job market along with their baristas, nannies, car-groomers and the like.
The sooner it gets stopped or controlled (like all ponzi schemes), the less damage it causes here.
But try to ignore the data because of an ideological point? That simply isn’t going to happen. It is real data. It will be factored all of the way through the local market by now.
For instance it tells me there really isn’t any point for me to keep looking around for a larger apartment for the moment. The prices don’t reflect shortage so much as offshore speculation, so there is more than likely going to be a good bust. I already have a place. I can wait for it.
If you want to be a petulant child playing wave the cheese games like you have been doing for the last week – then go ahead. It really doesn’t add anything useful to dealing with the real issue of this hot potato and stopping the next one anyway….
+1 aleph-null
The data is okay? How many ‘Lees’ were assigned as Chinese? How many of those were deemed to be resident?
The data collection was a bit like gathering information on random green stuff that grew out the ground and taking a punt on how much of that green stuff was grass. (Sure, they put in some parameters that filtered out trees…maybe bushes too.)
“How many ‘Lees’ were assigned as Chinese?”
40% of them, according to Rob’s detailed post explaining his methodology where he acknowledged that Lee is also a very common European surname.
“How many of those were deemed to be resident?”
That conclusion was not drawn. The only conclusion they reached is that 9% of Auckland appear to be ethnic Chinese based on the census, and from their analysis 40% of the house buyers from a agency covering 45% of sales in a 3 month period appeared to be ethnic Chinese.
The most likely explanation for the significant (4x) difference in the proportions is that non-resident ethnic Chinese are buying houses in Auckland.
But that is not a conclusion, only the most likely explanation from the analysis of the available data. Other explanations are possible, and many of them will contribute to some of the discrepancy more than others (for example, maybe it was just that time of year, there are more new Chinese immigrants than other ethnicities, Chinese may prefer this real estate company over others, etc).
Quite simple, really.
Would resident ethnic Chinese people buying investment properties not also be part of the picture?
What it comes down to is whether the Labour Party wanted to highlight and focus on money specifically coming from China, or whether they have a genuine concern on overseas money and were just stupidly using rough ‘Chinese related’ data to get an indication of the larger picture while unbelievably ignoring hard data that was available.
The first is obvious dogshit for a whole host of reasons. And from the Labour Party president’s response to Quin, the latter is of no concern…
http://www.philquin.com/blog/2015/7/20/nigel-haworths-revealing-rebuttal
Yes, it would be part of the picture, I did say “etc” in my list of examples.
It is perhaps the biggest one factor. But there’s not much to back up that as a theory either – why should Chinese be so much more into housing investment than other ethnicities? Rob’s data shows that they make up 5% of those on incomes over $50,000, in other words they make up a smaller share of high-income earners than their overall makeup (9%) would suggest.
What about those over $200,000 pa. Those are the people able to buy Auckland investment properties. Not the saps on between $50K and $100K pa.
So, the straw that you’re grasping for is that ~1% of the resident Chinese descended population are buying 400 times more housing than others?
Doesn’t have to be descendents. Could be recent immigrants with overseas money.
The 1% has a pretty good shot at owning more wealth than the bottom 90%
the saps between 50 – 100k? labours target vote market being denigrated for not earning enough to be truly loathed but earning to much to be considered “true” working class. arsehole
That was accounted for.
Rob also did more analysis to arrive at the hypothesis that foreign chinese buyers accounted for the difference in apparent buyers and apparent residents. He did also look at ethnic Indian last names and noted that there was only a 3% (ish) difference in apparent purchase and apparent resident proportions (9% oh buyers vs 6% of population.) Rob Salmond’s analysis was better than the one put forward by Labour and he made the point better that there was no real data and so surnames were the only proxy they had to actual data.
/facepalm
Rob Salmond’s analysis was the one put forward by Labour.
I initially read it the way you did, but what I think You Fool means is that Rob actually had a comprehensive analysis, and Labour didn’t publish the whole thing, and chose instead to focus on aspects of it.
For example, on The Nation, Twyford never mentioned the comparative Indian name analysis that Rob did.
Trying to keep it simple I imagine. We’re always complaining Labour make policies/issues too complicated for the average voter. And that includes some media reporters like the (knee) jerk, Patrick Gower.
One of the things that you find out when you are around a film maker, obvious in retrospect, is that the story line for an onscreen feature length film should be about the length of a short short story if it has a lot of dialogue in it.
It’d have to be shortened of course because otherwise it will look like characters are gibbering idiots.
The amount of information you can push across in film is far greater than you can write in words. But less than most novelists has in a single chapter.
Same problem with something like The Nation. You read a transcript and they are shorter than some of my posts 🙂 And someone being interviewed gets something like a tenth of that if they are extremely lucky.
I got a lot less interested in TV news / current affairs once I realised that. Sure I can read body language. But it involves spending a lot of time waiting for it. Or I can read what people write.
Getting Twyford to explain the other tests that would have been done on the data would have meant that he wasn’t able to explain what they found that was so interesting 😈
I suspect that it wasn’t even so much as 40% of individuals being “labelled”, more as ethnicities being given a final score based on weightings of the names, i.e. an index like CPI rather than an outright count. And then the indices were scaled to cumulatively add up to 100, and there’s your “percentage”.
That’s how I’d consider doing it at first blush, anyway.
Thanks L , simple for you, but not for some of the others that are commenting in the MSM & here on TS sadly, or are they just trying to keep the muddy waters stirred?
Oh FFS. Maybe some revision on basic statistics is required.
None of them were “assigned” as individual people or a family. That appears to be your fundamental misunderstanding, deliberate or otherwise.
As a group with the family name “Lee” each data record would given a probability of being Chinese, a probability of being Korean, a probability of being European, and probably probabilities for several other categories as well – including something like “we have no idea”. So was every other unique family name.
There is a relatively constrained set of family names used in any country including NZ by cultural group, and the data is “conservative” as the name generally travels through many generations. This kind of data is usually tested by getting people from each culture picking out the more common names in their culture and then tested by getting people to self-identify to get the probabilities.
As an analytical technique it is pretty accurate. >90% and usually >95% for many cultural groups even in a society that mixes as much as ours does over a century.
Sure there is inaccuracy in it.
However it doesn’t apply tags to individuals in the way that you seem to think it does. What this kind of analysis looking for is statistical groups rather than trying to pick out individuals. It is exactly the same kind of analysis what the stats department does with the 5 year censuses and the monthly or quarterly data that goes out across the country. They break it down into statistical groups all over the place,.
That was applied to the set of data of property sales to get a set of probabilities for possible correlations for the whole data set.
To one degree or another, that is how statistics, all parts of physical sciences, and most parts of the social sciences operate where there are big enough data sets. They don’t concern themselves with individual bits of data. They concern themselves with probabilities and correlations.
The whole point about statistics is that you don’t have to sample whole populations to get accurate results. You can sample smaller samples to get close to the results of the fully accurate whole population. Samples can be quite small compared to large populations. That is the basis of most polling, which is usually accurate within a few percent of the population result (of course these days a few percent either way in an election is usually the difference – but that is because parties balance around that point).
That is all straight forward and the analysis of the correlations is rigorous enough in the absence of any better data and the difference in size between the correlations.
The next stage is to look for causation for high probability correlations.
Labour have pointed out the obvious causation for the huge difference between the percentages of family name segments of the population as a whole and those buying houses during this period. That is what you an many others appear to be having an issue with.
So far I haven’t seen any alternate explanations that make any sense apart from imported overseas investment money. The money isn’t getting borrowed from local banks. It appears to be large enough to drive the kinds of crazy 25+% per annum house price increases that we have seen since 2011.
What it seems to identify compared to previous economic research as recent as 2013 is that we are rapidly hitting the point where Auckland house prices are largely caused by overseas investment money buying property from other overseas investors.
At about 40% it is freaking high, but even worse is that it appears to be rising rapidly. That it has nothing to do with the real economic value of the land or properties themselves to our economy. That means that it will therefore almost certainly cause a nasty economic crash that will reverberate throughout the rest of NZ. Bearing in mind our current fragile economic state, that is something worth actually worrying about, and one that bears considerable real-world consequences.
You notice that what Labour actually asked for was to get some immediate data collection and analysis going on in the area of foreign investment in property? Seems rather mild compared to what I think is actually needed.
Probably because we have people worrying about how statistics data is collected and analysed for reasons that seem to owe more to the thoughts of Lysenko than anything vaguely rational.
Just looks like a whole pile of avoidance behaviour to me. Probably with the kinds of downstream consequences of that exercise of group thinking.
No Lynn. That’s not what I have a problem with. They could have harvested data and tried to draw inferences from it. No problem. But to then stand up and point to a single ethnic group as being responsible for people being unable to buy houses, yeah…that’s where the problem comes up.
They could have done their wee exercise with ‘Chinese sounding’ surnames – flawed or unflawed as it may be – and announced that there was a foundation to assume that overseas money was causing problems. But they didn’t. They dog-whistled on an easily (mis) identifiable ethnic minority.
For Christ’s sake look at the history for Chinese living in NZ! It ain’t flash. And acknowledge that Asians ain’t high on the list of people that Pakeha feel well disposed towards. Throw in a major political party giving people reason to further resent an already fairly maligned part of NZ society and reflect to yourself on how good an idea that might be.
They could have made some general statement about overseas money and subsequently broken it down and pointed to the preponderance of money seemingly coming in from China. But they didn’t.
And to cap it all, we’re now hearing that Labour don’t actually give a toss about overseas money, but just that overseas money that’s originating in China. It’s fucked.
edit – you do not ever dress up an economic problem in ethnic garb – never.
I agree that there may have been better ways of handling it. Damned if I think what they would have been…
Imagine that they did it exactly how you suggest…
And then I’d imagine that Keith Ng and I would have been on exactly the same side of this debate – asking what in the hell the basis of that foundation because they hadn’t published any details. An analysis without any clear and transparent basis is just idiotic propaganda. Something that only fools would believe.
At best we’d have ignored it. At worst, I and most of the online commentators would have been tearing (metaphorically) a Labour spokesperson’s head off for extreme stupidity and getting between the left and an election victory.
Staging it would have had exactly the same result as now. For the reason outlined above, the pressure to say why would have appalling. After the reason forced out of Labour, I’d have been tearing….. For that matter so would have you for a variety of reasons.
I agree with all of that. But they’d get hit just as hard as anyone else with the consequences of a bursting real estate bubble of the size of what appears to be inflating.
The *only* choices that I can see for Labour would have been to not publish at all. In which case I’d ask what bloody use are they as an opposition to this pack of economic fuckwits in government, or to publish explaining what they’d found.
They took the responsible latter course. Because we damn well need to know about this issue. I had no idea that we were getting into the investor tail-biting stage this damn far in Auckland. It *could* be a blip. But that seems damn unlikely.
Where is that? Haven’t seen anything about it yet.
QFT
It’s what I’ve been thinking since the get go. Labour had to publish the results else anything that they said on the matter would have been written off as BS.
Unfortunately, the people who’ve been indoctrinated into Identity Politics immediately jumped on it as racist and won’t let that go no matter how much you show that it had nothing to do with racism. It was, and is, merely data and an analysis of that data showing trends that we need to do something about.
“the people who’ve been indoctrinated into Identity Politics ”
God your an idiot – spelling mistake aside.
When have any of us said the data was racist? It was and will always be the fubar presentation which was, and is the problem.
I called her bitch. She said I was being misogynistic. I pointed out to her that what I said had nothing to do with misogyny but she, daft bint, wouldn’t let it go.
Correspondence from NZ Labour Party president to Phil Quin.
http://www.philquin.com/blog/2015/7/20/nigel-haworths-revealing-rebuttal
The whole thing should be read.
On the rest of it, as I linked to last night and again this morning, (again in this comment) David Hood had already done work that would appear to show a flood of foreign money coming in. Labour could have used that and other available data.
As for what they (Labour) did do and their framing, there’s a fuck of a difference between saying “There’s foreign money skewing the market…and by the way,as expected given the current configuration of global capital, a lot of it appears to be coming in from China.” and “There’s a lot of Chinese money skewing the market.”
The former makes a statement and, handled appropriately, would only offer somewhat neutral, further detail. The latter is a dog-whistle in that it encourages peoples’ already existing prejudices.
Note: the italics is a late edit. Point is, the ethnic angle could have been neutralised instead of being played on.
And it was what I referred to. They did point out exactly those same facts over and over and over again. Macro-economic data is pretty useless at pinpointing where money is coming from.
It is an money based economic analysis that showed relatively small amounts that are indistinguishable from people actually owning their own properties, shifting money from other investments, or pulling it out of socks in NZ.
It is an economic analysis. About half of the measures I have ever looked at over time for those have flaws of data collection and rarely survive for more than 15 years without and abrupt judder in what data is collected.
Quite simply moneys biggest asset is that it is portable. It moves between investments. It does it without a lot of trace.
Besides, have you actually read what David Hood actually said. He has the effect of that type of information nailed.
http://publicaddress.net/system/cafe/speaker-house-buying-patterns-in-auckland/?p=343419#post343419
Indeed… I can testify to that.
Just read the mind-bending contortions of that numerical apologist David Farrar over many years and go Indeed….
Or in the case of a blog like this, you stop writing about topics that have ever diminishing numbers of people reading and commenting on because they clearly have (like me) gotten tired of pointing out the obvious. Which is why David Hood’s last graph ends at Q2 2013, and I haven’t written posts explaining basics of climate change in years.
Which is what those types of calculations go on all of the time, but really only cross the minds of a few people playing with lots of money.
However if you can pretty conclusively say that for 3 months that 3 out of 10 houses brought in Auckland were sold to foreign owners, you will get wide attention. It will mostly be of the type that says “how do you know”. And you have to explain because otherwise it will change to “lying politicians”. And then… Well
Ok I have already explained that. Quite simply you cannot treat people as being daft living polps who will accept what a politician says. We are way too well-educated to believe them. You have to explain EXACTLY how you analysed it.
Which is what David Hood is pointing out. If the path between what people observe themselves and where the data is collected, then it has an impact. If you have to give them a university education in economics then it is not.
Should be pretty obvious. And this is something that authors on this site has been pointing out since 2007 in the tail of the last rises, and at the start of this one on 2010 and since.
Why not make the story about overseas ownership of land in general throughout NZ, then they could have talked about multiple nationalities? Part 2, highlight the areas needing urgent action (eg Auckland).
My take is that Labour don’t see overseas ownership as a problem until it becomes an economic one. It doesn’t matter if NZers can’t afford houses, until there is a housing crisis. I’m not being stupid there. If overseas money was providing enough rental properties in Auckland so that everyone had somewhere affordable to live, would Labour care about who owns what?
Did you actually read what Lynn(sp?) said? Specifically:
I’m not suggesting that Labour do that though.
In answer to your first para, I’m pretty well convinced by now that they didn’t do that because some really fucking turned on types reckoned they had a bit of a draw card on the voting front with the ethnic angle.
Thankfully, it seems to have fallen flat. And now Labour get to reap the fruits of this shit they’ve sown. I suspect that the Greens going up by 3% is only a beginning. Labour’s going to bleed in all directions over the medium to long term.
And still they dig…
That’s exactly what you’re demanding that they do.
“That’s exactly what you’re demanding that they do.”
Fuck off Draco. I think I have a damn sight better idea of what I mean than you do.
weka: I couldn’t even estimate to the nearest hundred how many posts we have done on the subject of the risks of overseas ownership and investment over the years. The majority were probably triggered from something that Labour raised, some from the greens, and some from NZF.
You have to remember that generally I agree with overseas investment in NZ. Just as I do with having immigration or trade agreements. I usually disagree with the posts (except on the FTTA – I don’t like restraint of trade or that level of secrecy).
But too much of anything is an issue. Too much immigration in a hit (like too little) causes all kinds of problems. I always remember helping out with some of the code for estimating school classroom needs in the next decade and seeing what the immigration demographic changes did to the models.
It is the volume of foreign investment that is an issue.
The economy gets “used” to it. But that kind of money literally has the whole world to move to. The problem will happen when its flow just stops one day.
Think of it as a large supply of free icecream that we didn’t know about (we thought they were just getting the odd sweets) and the Auckland local market as a kid ecstatically living off it. Then one day it just stops. The pain is going to be huge here because it will take it quite some time to live on carrots again.
For Auckland and the rest of NZ, it is likely to be worse than the effects on us of the GFC.
Coming back at this just so I am sure I’m getting you right. Labour were responsible in doing what they have done, in spite of all the associated negatives? Ends justify the means then? I can’t agree with that approach, but hey.
All ethnicities are going to be hit by a housing bubble bursting, so singling out Chinese in the meantime is okay – collateral damage?
Well, I’ll be riveted to Labour’s proposals for average to low earners and renters. See, none of those people (Chinese Kiwi or otherwise) will be hit negatively by a bursting bubble. And for those richer types who will have to view their house (or one of their houses) as a home, well…
There were around 4000 sales on the list, yes? Now, I know this would require a bit of time and effort, but over a few weeks couldn’t those 4000 names could have checked off against the electoral roll?
Then Labour could have said that, allowing for non-enrollment percentages, x% of sales in Auckland over the period were seemingly not purchases by NZ residents or citizens.
No singling out of any ethnicity. No dog-whistle. A clear demarcation set between domestic and foreign buyers.
Anyway…
Checking against the electoral roll wouldn’t really be worth the effort.
Too many false negatives, from people who are residents but simply aren’t on the roll (because not everyone is).
Too many false positives, from people who aren’t residents but have the same name as someone who is a resident.
It doesn’t add any *real* strength to the existing argument that they already laid out.
It is a major issue for our economy, and in particular for people on low incomes because the first thing that happens when a property bubble stops is that the retail jobs in shops, distribution and manufacturing disappear like smoke. When people feel like they are poorer, they stop spending immediately.
The bigger the bubble gets before it gets pricked, the harder the over-reaction in the subsequent recession is. Think 1987 crash for instance. The cranes went down around Auckland a hell of a lot slower than the jobs and the economy collapsed countrywide.
Do you think those people who are quite economically sensitive are collateral damage for your views on peoples sensitivities about race?
You have to look at both cost sides of any issue.
BTW: I am pretty sure that is the way that the Labour strategists thought. It is how I would have thought about it. It is a pretty basic inside Labour that they do think that way. Sudden economic shocks are the absolute nightmare in terms of injuring people.
Don’t you think Lprent, that this bubble should have pricked some time ago?
I’ve been saying the main reason national are doing nothing about it – as they have no plan – and really have no idea what to do if the bubble burst and the jobs go.
Auckland can’t afford 100,000 people unemployed, and I think that is a conservative figure. I agree with you, It’s the spill to the down the industries who will fall quickly this time round – as to many are operating in “just in time” business model. Which does not absorb crashes well.
Same in Australia, they looking at 1,000,000 jobs shed when the bubble bursts.
This is real nightmare stuff from the Tories, they are clueless. Look at Joyce, he’s floundering – they dare not put Nick Smith in front of a camera. Key looks out of touch, and weak on this issue. His nice bloke image, is making him look like a right blonker.
I think the Tories are staining their collective underwear over this issue. The market has failed and if the do anything – they have to admit the whole free market approach is flawed.
My guess, they will stick with ideology, and let Auckland burn.
Thanks Iprent well and clearly explained.
“The reflex reaction to call anything racist without looking at the underlying issues or context is probably a modern malaise.”
What I saw was too many people on the standard telling people who have direct experience of racism their whole lives and a political awareness and analysis of that racism, that they didn’t know what racism is. It reminds me of the rape culture conversations where feminists are told they don’t know what rape culture is. A real eye opener, because I thought we were better than this here on racism.
Exactly! The lazy throwing around of the term kinda diminishes the recognition of actual racism.
please name these lazy people, because I don’t know what you are talking about.
There is an old proverb that runs – when a cock stands atop the vane flapping its wings the wind knows not in which direction it blows. 😉
Sadly, I agree. Except that rather than feeling somehow let down by what has been on display vis a vis the denial and defense of racism by self appointed leftists, it only served to reaffirm my view, built from many conversations and observations, that the political left in NZ is riddled through with racist nonsense.
I wonder how much is due to people squealing to themselves “But I’m of the left therefor I can’t be racist!”? 🙄
I wonder how much is due to people squealing to themselves “But I’m of the left therefor I can’t be racist!”?
How about,
‘I’m a Leftie who love’s and respect’s all people.
That’s why I hate Right Winger’s or anyone else who disagrees with my political beliefs.’
Do you do seances as well as mind-reading, Madame Sheep?
Nope. We told you that you that data and its analysis isn’t racist. You refused to believe us because of your irrational knee-jerk reaction.
That doesn’t have anything to do with what I just said, except to confirm it.
I’m not interested in sloganeering that tells politicised people who experience racism that they don’t know what racism is.
Draco. The sales list was just a sales list. Even the analysis was just analysis – wonky or otherwise. The presentation by Labour of what it extrapolated from that list was nothing but a ‘racist’ (xenophobic) dog-whistle though.
Otherwise known as data, yes.
The analysis turned the data into information that answered questions.
And that’s a load of BS. The presentation simply provided the information to the public at large.
Some ignorant people are calling that information racist because of their ignorance.
At this point all I can offer is the wise words of Linton Quesie Johnson.
I disagree DTB. I’ve written a few times what I thought of Phil Twyford’s initial fronting of the issue on The Nation. Have you actually watched it?
+100 DTB
While what was said was wrong, the MSD workers have raised an important point: There are too many unseen Maori bouncers stopping white people from getting shit-wrecked in bars. It’s like they want to push white drunks out onto the street. I’ve seen them, ghost-Maoris, drinking kegs in garages like they own the whole brewery. Just inspect the data! It’s obvious. That white guy had a Maori-sounding wahine with him, so that proves how far they’ll go. Just the other day some guy said kia ora to me in the street – like he didn’t know how to say hello! Jesus. They must be stopped so that the next generation of white drunks can own bars. I bet they’d even stop Samoans drinking in Taupo, too, if they had to.
Very good Charles, but I suspect the point will be missed.
If every bar in the country had video cameras on their bouncers on a friday/saturday night and people were made accountable for their actions via the media, I predict thousands of people would be fired from their jobs each and every week. I can’t defend what they said, but singling out people through the media seems like gutter journalism too.
So how do they know that they were WINZ workers? And why were WINZ workers pissed on the street?
I dunno, maybe they’re regulars there. Are WINZ workers not allowed to be chronic binge drinkers like half of NZ seems to be.
lolz, no, they can do that in their own time. It seems odd to be describing those people by their employment unless they were there on work time.
Unless it was a work function, I don’t see why it is important they work for Work and Income. High stressed employee gets drunk and disorderly, apparently I am alone in thinking they are being unfairly vilified.
Unless they were on work time I agree, the whole WINZ stuff is irrelevant. Weird that the article doesn’t cover that.
I don’t know if the people are being unfairly vilafied or if WINZ is. The statements that guy made were racist and offensive no matter who he worked with. If the headlines had been “Bouncer racially abused by drunk patrons” it would have been pretty much all the required info. WINZ could then decide internally if those attitudes alighn with their culture.
However it seems to be an attempt to paint WINZ staff with a broad brush based on one racist moron. Allthough staff did say that those comments were the only ones caught on tape and that more members of the group had been using racial slurs earlier which is what made the bouncer start recording what they were saying. Once the phone came out most of the group realised what they were saying should not be recorded and stopped.
I definitely think that WINZ need to take a hard look at those staff and how their attitudes and behaviour might be impacting on their work. But I don’t think that should be done in public unless there is a good reason.
Or how their work impacts on their attitude and behaviour, given how staff at WINZ are directed to treat the public.
Perhaps we could use other identifiers as opposed to just their place of employment – which are just as relevant.
What if they were two labour (or national voters), or 2 gay gentlemen, or 2 left handed people.
Thats just making headlines. They were rude, racist idiots and they should be held to account as people, not anything else.
The media involvement acts as big wrecking ball through this incident. The media used their occupation because it made the story, if their occupation wasn’t mentioned in the story someone would have recognised them in the video and that information would likely have filtered through to WINZ managers to deal with the issue as they saw fit. Now with it all blown up in the media and a huge spotlight on them if they don’t take serious action they’ll be seen as weak.
Name tag not removed?
possibly. I couldn’t see anything in the video.
Headlining that they were MSD employees is utter bullshit. Could they now be fired for bringing their employer into disrepute? Possibly. Is that fair? Not in my mind. When you have a job, you get ‘you’ back at 5:30 or whenever. What you do in your own time is, or should be, absolutely none of your employer’s business.
Can we expect some drunk and obnoxious kid who some people might recognise from a McDs to get fired or otherwise sanctioned for mumbling some drunken racist shit at a bouncer on a Saturday night now?
edit: Maybe the WINZ angle came up simply due to the bouncer recognising them as WINZ staff? Always the possibility there was a bit of pay-back involved. Who knows.
really? it seems to me that it’s getting better. not nearly as many wrecked people out in the cities getting turned away as there was ten years ago. drinking has settled down into something that’s only done with food and for social reasons, not a means to an end in itself. I bet those winz workers were on a “corporate retreat” seeing as it’s taupo. bigging it up on the taxpayers dime to find new ways to screw the poor
corporate retreat, I wondered that too. Or work do.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=11484151
I believe in humans getting out and into space but on this one I think the money could be better spent.
Yep a messaging program with messages that will not be sent. This is why I think this project is a distraction from the real and immediate issues and problems we face living on this planet.
The smart Greens promote woman in purse strings role. Bumbling Bill English can expect plenty of supplementary questions from the very determined Julie Ann Genter. All that cycling around the place will hold Genter in good stead for being fast out of the saddle and going at Bill’s jugular vein.
Well done Greens for walking the talk on gender equality.
http://i.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/70175855/greens-portfolio-reshuffle-sees-thirdever-woman-finance-spokesperson
Yes I’m sure Bill English is shaking in his boots
Just had a look at Julie Genter wiki page
Education:
————————————
BA in philosophy
Post-graduate certificate in International Political Studies
Masters of Planning Practice
———————————–
Don’t see any thing finance related?.
Why is she doing finance , she has no skills in this area.
Actually Blind Man while you think you see all, others could arguably say Genter would do a much better job than slugger Bill is doing. Considering how much debt We are in, it wouldn’t be at all hard.
I’m not knocking Genter, she’s obviously very educated, just makes no sense to put people in roles that they have no skills in.
Or is this new role only about TV time and getting her face in the media?
Yes, you are knocking Genter.
And what you really mean is that she doesn’t have any formal training in how to be a good capitalist. I’d count that as a plus for being a finance spokesperson.
Like I say Blind Man you choose to see what you want, the trouble is your ‘blind.’
http://m.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11484052
Why not?
Economists have lately been particularly bad at handling economic issues.
Besides Cullen had no economic qualifications.
Genter is a very clear thinker and very principled. Good choice.
10 principles of economics explained
Have you ever looked at Bill English’s bio or Michael Cullen’s bio or virtually any of the other finance ministers we have ever had?
Could it be you just have an XX crush?
Had a look at Bill English’s page.
He does have a degree in commerce.
http://www.otago.ac.nz/courses/qualifications/bcom.html.
I know Cullen didn’t have a great deal of financial education, lucky for us when Cullen had his turn everything was booming, we could have substituted Cullen for Bubbles the chimp and Bubbles would have still made a surplus.
Call me crazy but I would prefer Ministers to actually have skills in their particular portfolios, this goes for all political parties.
You wouldn’t play a halfback as a lock, would you.
Similar to playing a hooker as fullback.
BM is a technocrat – who would of funked it.
A heads up, commerce degrees are a dime a dozen, and quite frankly a very expensive piece of paper to say you can rote learn. Does explain a lot about bill english, and his lack of imagination via the ongoing economic malaise – which has kept on, rolling on.
Ask most 18 year olds that are going off to uni, you’ll find truckloads that are going to Dunedin to get away from home, party and do the stock standard BCom because that’s what you do when you haven’t decided on a career.
Now that the economy is starting to bite a lot of kids are having to go to uni in their home city as it costs far more $$$ to live away from home.
The commerce courses at otago changed a few years ago to require first-year (i.e. fuckall) skimming of all disciplines within the division. Before that, he might have gone through just looking at marketing with never a look at finance. What was blinglish’s major?
Besides, with debt at $100bil, maybe if he’d looked at some planning papers we’d have avoided this mess…
“The commerce courses at otago changed a few years ago to ”
Out of curiosity what is a few years? Bill English would have been there about 35 years ago, after all (He was born in 1961).
He also has a BA(Hons) in English Literature from VUW. He got a 1st I believe. Even Bob Jones would approve of that.
Either of Bill’s degrees would seem to be more useful than the vast collection of “political science” qualifications in the New Zealand Labour Party.
this side of the millenium, possibly this decade.
I suspect many of his discretionary points available under the schedule in the mid-eighties would have gone on the lit rather than planning, finance, or similar.
I suppose the english lit helps him make shit up in the budget speech. As for who’s more useful than whom, Cullen’s qualifications were in history, and he managed to pay down government dept rather than inflate it. I guess the bcom was a handicap for blinglish.
I’ll have to call you on the ‘vast collection of “political science” qualifications in the New Zealand Labour Party’ there, alwyn. Got the data for that?
It used to be that the Labour Party was accused of being full of teachers, of which I was one, as if that was some sort of bad thing. So I did the research, and there were more teachers within the National caucus than Labour’s.
A quick glance at the background of the better known current MPs comes up with Robertson, Goff, Shearer, Hipkins, Twyford, Cunliffe and Lees–Galloway. It is also amazing how many came up through University Student Unions.
I don’t know how many others there might be among the unknowns.
What I find rather funny is that the Labour Party had three leaders in a row who could themselves down as “failed Political Science PhD, University of Auckland”.
Clark, Goff and Shearer all started but failed to finish the course.
Amongst the ‘unknowns’ only Cosgrove has politics in his degrees according to Wikipedia. He has a triple degree in Political Studies, American Studies and History.
So, eight out of 32 or thereabouts. A quarter. Not a ‘vast collection’ though I’d expect a bias that way for a group of left wing politicians to have studied politics at Uni. There are also theology, law and commerce degrees, education degrees, historians, people with health quals, anthropologists etc.
I’d expect also that more than average numbers would have been involved in university student politics. Politicians tend to be interested in politics wherever they are.
To be fair, eight is close to the largest number a tory is capable of counting to without taking off they socks, so it probably counts as a “vast collection” to them.
So, via Wikipedia I took a look at 15 National MPs chosen at random. 3 had been in student politics, (another one stood for local Council as a school boy) and two had political science in their degrees. Lawyers, scientists, one engineer, commerce types and arts degrees generally.
One quarter of the National intake. Someone else can scan the rest!
I’ll take your word for the backgrounds of the unknowns. I only looked at the top 6 in the pecking order, plus the previous leaders and, because I happened to have met him recently, Lees-Galloway.
Of these 10 people, who I regarded as the senior ones, only Little, King and Mahuta didn’t seem to have a Pol Sci background as a University discipline.
Whatever their academic qualifications, main difference between Right and Left MP’s is their basic agenda which is: Fair to all (L) v self serving (R)
Yes Double Dipton has a degree in Commerce – even worked in Treasury (and we know how grounded in reality that lot are) . He wouldn’t know what an economy is, if he fell over it. The most useless twit to warm the Finance bench this country has ever had to suffer. What has he actually done in the 6 years he has twiddled his thumbs apart from repeat the same nonsense year after year as he “presents” his “budget”, and cut vital services that we as NZers have paid for?
Tell us Blind Man – what is an economy for anyway?
A little googling found that philosophy degrees include topics which would benefit any politician including social justice, critical thinking, ethics, logic, truth and political philosophy.
Skills acquired from a study of philosophy include critical thinking, clear argument, discerning validity and importance, dealing with multiple viewpoints and ideas, deep thinking and concentration.
Philosphy at undergraduate level is often taken with economics and politics, this being a famous combination.
Ms Genter may have other courses in her degree which are finance related. Cullen studied economic history for example. I have a friend who studied economics and political science both to stage three level. Who decides whether he is an economist or a political scientist?
Bob Jones used arts graduates in his employment, he once wrote, because they have learnt to think, and could be trained in the specifics of his business.
Having a degree in Philosophy means she has the ability to see big pictures, not just narrow focus, she also has the ability to question and test the logic of specious arguments. The less we have of economists and accountants making decisions about the good of the country and the more we have people with a broad based thinking, analytical and logical mindset, with a view of culture and history, the better.
It’s possible that, as part of her studies, she did economics 101 which means that she would have more knowledge of finance than our PM. That’s the thing about BAs – you never really know which courses were included in the study.
And then there’s the fact that people don’t go to school and then stay exactly the same – they continue learning.
skill is what you get after university. or at polytech.
This is what equality gets you instead of best person for the job.
Genter, “Her financial hero is American Herman Daly, who was one of the first economists to talk about the incompatibility of infinite economic growth in a finite world.”
Makes you wonder where we are heading. Constant need to increase population and grow the economy might be a disaster in the long run.
There is no need to constantly increase the population to grow the economy. Places like Germany have static or falling populations and still manage to grow their economy.
Baby steps Gosman. You’re getting there…
Next you’ll be saying that there is no need to grow the economy at all…
This is what happens when you spend so much time hanging out with those that can walk and talk at the same time.
Germany has compensated for their declining population by become a massive surplus trade nation.
Few nations are able to do that, and certainly most nations will not be able to.
It looks like Russel Norman is really taking a back seat too, he’s basically only got Trade and Spying portfolios now. And helping out James Shaw in leadership.
Yeah it’s a pity our old cobbah Rusty couldn’t quite infuse Winnie to bridge the divide. Should have a far better chance with James Shaw. Might try getting them together for a charity I’ve raised over $200 K for. Shouldn’t be hard getting them to attend a gig, a common charity maybe just the ice breaker needed.
http://publicaddress.net/onpoint/dont-put-words-in-our-mouths-rob/
– Heh
Two weeks ago I overheard a cow cocky say they had been told to expect a price “in the 3s “. I’m pretty sure he’s a Fonterra supplier.
Now Open Country has confirmed it, obviously the big companies know a lot more about future price trends than they are letting on.
Yet English keeps saying ” nothing to see here “.
A milkfat price ” in the 3s ” is really bad news for the whole country, it will impact on practicaly everybody.
Not much dairy conversion’s.going on lately, I suspect plenty of South Pacific Pesos being exchanged to Greenbacks. A little late to reap the full rewards like money trader Key will have, however I may grab a slab while the going is good.
With bees under threat from another parasite, here’s a good explainer of their importance and the threats they face.
I blame Climate Change for the demise of the bees. It must be the reason.
I blame Capitalism. It is always Capitalism’s fault. The collapse of the Roman empire was caused by Capitalism don’t you know.
good to see we can throw you on the barricades.
It was caused by out of touch elites who because they were insulated by wealth and bureaucracy from the realities on the ground, did not understand until too late how bad they were fucking up.
These rwnjs are historically illiterate.
I blame Capitalism. It is always Capitalism’s fault. The collapse of the Roman empire was caused by Capitalism don’t you know.
I’m actually kind of confident that bees will be saved because they have such a direct and demonstrable economic benefit. So there’s a lot of research money going into them and solving this problem. The first chemical company that comes up with a pesticide that doesn’t impact bees is going to make money hand over fist.
Your brain appears to be stuck in repeat mode Gosman. Must be the failing Rockstar economic outlook causing a glitch. I imagine you have been walking around in circles muttering “John Key is my hero where is the Rockstar I can not compute….bring on the encore.’
Aren’t you concerned by the demise of bees?
You struggle understanding science and data ah Clean_power. Well no worry, you can go to a night class and …. no wait national axed the funding to those classes. Nope sorry, you will just have to stay an ignorant Tory lick spittle.
Aren’t you concerned by the demise of bees?
Interesting review of Tomorrow’s schools 25 years on, to be found on Evening Report.
Like any changes to the educational system – the long term effects effects are what is required to be considered rather than the short term goals. Charter school aficionados take note.
Lockwood Smiths misadventure, exposed. Thanks for the link Molly – well worth the read.
Why is Lockwood smith responsible for this? I thought the Tomorrow School’s reforms were implemented by the Fourth Labour Government.
The issues there have hardly anything to do with Tomorrow’s schools and more to do with parents moving so they can get their children in to higher decile schools. Considering lower decile schools get more funding per pupil than higher decile schools the situation would be much worse if the reforms were not made. How exactly is tomorrow schools responsible for the situation?
Read the papers provided by Lockwood Smith when he was the minister, and what was the desired outcome of tomorrow schools – the programme and implementation.
No, how about you expand on why you think the article Molly linked to shows a failing with Tomorrow Schools rather than what I suspect is merely parents moving to areas where they think their kids will get better education based on the knowledge that is available to them?
Who is Chris Trotter, really, and what does he want with the Bogans? Maybe he was taking the piss?
Chris argues Labour could do worse than go after the Bogan vote: that elusive sub-feeder group of the stereotypical Waitakere Man he’s spent his recent blogging life demonising. Now he paints them as the long-haired unshaven equivalent of the silent-but-infamous “kiwi-battler”, and that their values hold the keys to Labour refinding its roots.
No Chris, Labour know how to go after the people, as a whole, and fund, supply, and maintain access to essential services and life requirements irrespective of who they are or what they think or how long their hair is, or which cartoon stereotype they correspond to. They just don’t want to anymore.
“So are you saying we shouldn’t listen to the poor, the gays, Maori, women, transgender people, immigrants?”
“No, Chris. We should give them the same care and focus on their needs as they see it as we do anyone else.”
“Doesn’t sound very middle-class oriented.”
“No, Chris, it isn’t.”
“Who would we fight, who would we blame, who’d be the enemy?”
“Ourselves. We’re the enemy, haven’t you noticed?”
“You’re nuts!”
“I’m glad you think so.”
I think he is trying to influence the wider left to embrace traditional supporters who they have drifter away from. But if you don’t want to do this and would prefer to denigrate this section of society go for it.
Yawn, just addressed that. But shit, why read when you can…. what is it you do here again?
🙂
As someone who grew up a Westy I think you are under estimating their social empathy. One thing I found was that when you fell on hard times there was always someone with a couch and a meal they were willing to share. You had to really mooch off a mate before he would even start thinking of telling you to sort your self out.
By the way a lot of the guys and girls I knew back then were Labour voters long before I moved away from National. There is a vast gap between the so called Waitakere man and a good old fasioned Westy.
http://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/benefit-data-lowest-june-quarter-gfc
good news from the minister.
That is good news
Probably not a good time to go counting the numbers of homeless on cities main streets, cars parked at Wynyard Quarter, or see what the City Mission has to deal with.
Just had visitors from Oz. Both expressed surprise and concern at “the level of poverty that is apparent in NZ”.
Incidentally also highly critical of our TV programming.
Am I right in sensing a gathering storm; that we are heading for a southern hemisphere Greece? Or am I just depressed?
There are problems approaching
The bottom quarter of NZers already live in dire circumstances
More joining shortly
Meanwhile – Labour very concerned about the rate at which $800K Auckland houses are becoming less affordable.
Interesting anecdata only. We tend to shop only once or maybe twice a fortnight so when we do it’s a full trolley.
Was back in Auckland last week and did a supermarket trip for my dad, plus visitors. Full trolley = NZ$320 @ Pack&Save
Came home and needed to do another shop. Full trolley = A$205 @ ALDI’s
Similar items although obviously not identical. Allow for currency conversion at 1.1 and GST @ 1.15 the NZ equivalent price of the ALDI’s trolley would be about NZ$260
Given the minimum wage here is around A$23 per hour – well you can see where I’m coming from.
Its not cows being farmed over on this side, its Kiwis
Cost of living for food and clothing in NZ is insane compared to America.
Flash ‘designer’ $100+ jeans here are $20 over there.
Considering Australian and New Zealand have similar rates of poverty it seems unusual your visitors will have seen levels majorly different from what they experience in Australia (unless they don’t visit where the poorer people live in Oz)
Anyone who has walked down George Street in Sydney will be able to atest to the numbers of people sleeping rough. I am surprised that an Australian would just straight up comment on poverty in NZ. Even smaller area’s like Townsville, Cairns, Darwin and Rockingham have very visable signs of poverty.
Of course it may be that out side of Sydney most of those effected are of Aboriginal decent and so probably aren’t taken into consideration by the average Australian.
Exactly
You got it in one Gosman. Many of the rural communities where there is poverty, are way off the grid. Having visited a few in my time – via a long plane flight. There is a bit in urban landscape too – but those areas were generally unheard of/not spoken about – if you had not lived there for a while. Not like, say Auckland and our huge, city wide homeless problem.
That said, my time in Aussie was in the West, Victoria and South Australia.
Oh right that explains (certainly no excuse) for the Winz managements behavior in Taupo. Got their bonus payments for rejecting welfare claims to make Tolley’s books look brighter. Too much champagne on the taxpayer by the looks. Let’s hope they get turfed to the other side of the Winz counter…and rejected.
Who’s in Auckland and today can help to hold a banner /placard?
Whistleblower/ Media Alert!
Please do not censor or underplay the importance of this arguably corrupt ‘conflict of interest’ – regarding NZ Prime Minister John Key, in his advocacy for the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA)!
Follow-up TPPA – WALK AWAY protest today outside Auckland Uni – exposing PM John Key’s shareholding in the Bank of America!
WHEN: TUESDAY 21 July
TIME: 1 -5 PM
WHERE: Symonds St / Grafton Rd intersection – directly outside Auckland Uni.
WHY? Because Auckland students are back and there are THOUSANDS of them – who yesterday read the message on our banners and placards!
LET YOUR BANNERS /PLACARDS DO THE TALKING!
The FOCUS – again – is that NZ PM John Key is a shareholder in the Bank of America!
(These Bank of America shares are NOT in a ‘blind trust’!)
Whose ‘national interest’ is PM John Key serving?
Is John Key working for US or the U$??
READ IT FOR YOURSELF:
http://www.parliament.nz/en-nz/mpp/mps/fin-interests/00CLOOCMPPFinInterests20151/register-of-pecuniary-and-other-specified-interests-of
“Register of Pecuniary and Other Specified Interests of Members of Parliament:
Summary of annual returns as at 31 January 2015
(Page 29)
Rt Hon John Key (National, Helensville)
2 Other companies and business entities
Little Nell – property investment (Aspen, Colorado)
Bank of America – banking ..”
A LOT of people don’t know this, and it is, in my view, as an anti-corruption ‘Public Watchdog’ an arguably significant corrupt ‘conflict of interest’.
_________________________________________________________
(In this You Tube clip – John Key admits that he’s a shareholder in the Bank of America, in front of a Grey Power Public Meeting, 3 February 2011.)
http://www.radiolive.co.nz/Is-Prime-Minister-John-Key-profiting-from-New-Zealands-foreign-debt/tabid/454/articleID/19525/Default.aspx
______________________________________________________
……..
Penny Bright
These guys look like they might be able to help:
http://beaut.ie/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/father-ted-careful-now.jpg
Why doesn’t the Opposition focus in on this at Question time if it is such an open and shut case of conflict of interest ?
+100….GO Penny…it is what is hidden that will be of most interest
Taken from the NZHerald, reprinted from an Australian commentator, and pretty apposite to New Zealand:
“The problem is that Australia, after decades of effort to diversify, is looking ever more like a petrodollar economy of the Middle East, but without the vast horde of foreign currency reserves to fall back on when commodity prices fall.
Instead, Australians must borrow to maintain the standards of living that the country has become accustomed to, which even some Greeks will admit is unsustainable.”
Taken from UK daily Telegraph, a right wing cheerleader that hates seeing countries like Australia and France defy the orthodoxy and periodically prints Cassandra like stories on the fate of both.
How is Australia defying orthodox anything?
This comment at the end of David Parker’s opinion piece in the Herald is one which is of relevance to TPPA decisions.
“National may wish its dynasty to last forever, but democracy requires that future governments not be shackled by National’s ideology.”
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=11484069
IF Tim Groser and the National Party cabinet commit NZ to the TPPA, then this will surely shackle future governments.
Labour, let’s hear it from you, “STOP THE TPPA”
David Parker does not consider himself an opponent of the TPPA, nor a supporter of opponents of the TPPA.
You are aware you can leave international agreements aren’t you? If NZ decided to leave the UN for example there is little the UN could do for example.
How do you know that the TPPA has an Agreement exit process?
You are aware that there is no legal exit process out of, for example, the EU and the Eurozone, right?
Seriously what the F is going on here, I’ve hit peak Max Key for sure. 5 major NZ news outlets posted some or all of Max’s holiday video yesterday, but wait there’s still more! Media going to great lengths to write anything on the beloved PM’s son.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/opinion/70402896/opinion-new-rules-for-john-keys-selfiegeneration-kids
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/70412689/max-keys-life-on-instagram
someone’s seriously plugging the boy’s image. It’s been going on for days.
It might be going from dirty politics to distraction politics, but I think it’s equally likely that some publicist is trying to prepare the ground for him as a broadcaster, building “celebrity”. Throw money at a few photo spreads, next thing you know he’ll be on dancing with the stars or some bullshit like that, then get a few part time but 5 or 6 figure microphone jobs.
Meh. More vacuities on the airwaves.
Talking about airwaves. Media guy Paul? said on 9toNoon this morning that Radionz is sacking 20 with 6 new jobs opening up net 14. All seasoned workers no doubt, like gold. No rise in funding from gummint for 8 years.
Strumming my pain with his fingers
Singing my life with his words
Killing me softly with his song.’
Yes, yek killing me softly?
Do we have the next Pebbles Hooper?
Seriously though, in any normal world once Key is not Prime Minister his son should pretty much cease to exist in the eyes of media.
I suspect Roughan.
Perhaps the MSM is getting us used to him so that when JK hands over the countries reigns to him we won’t be too bothered by the disappearance of democracy and the open implementation of our new aristocracy.
“And the next leader of the National Party is Max…”
Noooooooo!!!
Like I said yesterday, it was all a PR ploy, and everyone fell for it. PR 101.
Max is getting built up.
……..and yet we are supposed to leave the children alone, so stop thrusting them down our throats please.
Little squares off with Gower
http://www.3news.co.nz/nznews/video-andrew-little-snaps-over-chinese-buyer-data-questions-2015072112#axzz3gUEtp8Ha
Everyone I know think Gower is a completely tool, with opinions ranging from he is a bit of of a wierdo to he is compensating for being so ugly.
So, my view: Little punches Gower, Labour soars in polls.
Or it proves Littles buckling under the pressure and can’t handle the awful truth
So really it won’t change peoples minds all that much
Labour’s talking past you to the real people bro, you know – the people who can’t afford to buy a house in Auckland. Just ask around your office, Labour is getting huge kudos at the water cooler.
My office is in Christchurch, which offers a better lifestyle and way more affordable housing
I’ve tried engaging the people I work with and it doesn’t matter if I mention Key or Little their eyes tend to glaze over so I don’t bother
That what happens when everyone is married to their sister, I guess.
Hmm lets see
A. Live in a city where you can’t afford to buy a home, very expensive just to live, spending hours commuting, your mayor is Len Brown
B. Live in a city where you can afford to buy/build, not expensive to live, commuting in under an hour, has plenty of work available and your mayor isn’t Len Brown
Tell me again why living in Christchurch is such a joke
Hard to argue with that reasoning PR.
Does Christchurch still exist? I though we got that earthquake to take care of it.
PR is patting himself on the back for being a wealthy Merivale or Fendalton resident whose leafy suburb was untouched.
That is being sexist!
“real people” could not afford to buy a house in Auckland by 2004/2005. Now, they are talking to “real people” who are tired of being outbid on $800K villas.
You keep muttering your same mantra. 2004? Where were you? Did you raise the issue like you are doing now? Was the government then selling off state houses? Was the foreign money from China coming in at such huge amounts as now? Is there a huge crisis now or not? Should the government do something about it now or simply reminiscence about 2004 and some other year like 1904?
No, it definitely proved that Gower was attacking Labour and Little rather than trying to be a journalist.
Gower proved that a long long time ago, and didn’t need any help from us, let alone the leader of the NZLP.
Gower’s ego compels him to dominate the ‘news’ with his pissing contests, rather than do any real reporting
A jack up to help Key out of the data jam. Notice Key using Gowers stupid line of questioning in the House today. Most Kiwi’s will be thinking Key’s antics are not funny in the least, actually I think they would rather he cut the crap and ban non resident foreigners buying our property.
Why wouldn’t Key take advantage of Littles endorsement of race-baiting?
OK well according to Hooton on Nine to Noon yesterday National failed to take the bait and bite. Looks like he was wrong as the head clown of the National Party circus couldn’t help himself ( just like ponytail pulling) so people will still be angry with him till he plucks false data out of his arse.
Yeah, and he didn’t punch him though, did he.
Next time, I suggest Little simply looks at the camera and says “pfft”, or “do you have a question?”
Thats actually quite good advice so of course it won’t be listened to
Just another illustration of the media either playing the Patsy questions game or getting dealt to by member or cronies of this corrupt regime in power.
Speaking of which, (you heard it here first) expect Radio New Zealand will have little choice but to issue an apology to Mr Tung…..you know Judith Collins husband. After bully boy Tung continues to throw his weight around threatening legal action against any media who dare question his involvement in the dodgy swamp Kauri trade.
http://m.nzherald.co.nz/politics/news/article.cfm?c_id=280&objectid=11483596
Yeah, he’s only a director of one of the companies involved (“Oravida Bleach Inc.”, or something). It would be far more damaging to his reputation to point out that he’s married to that vindictive trash Judith Collins.
Unlike those media outlets who have been threatened and muzzled, unfortunately for Tung, if he doesn’t settle down and crawl back under his rock he and Judith share ‘he and the kauri company he works for’ will get so much bad press their operation in Ruakaka will be driven out of Northland with their tales between their legs.
At any stage we choose a very public (widely covered by all media) protest and hard line picket can be arranged where nothing gets in or out of their depot.
So go ahead punk make our day and press the button!
+1
“he is compensating for being so ugly”
So now its acceptable to question peoples professional capability because of their physical appearance?
The language Gower used falls into the catagory of defamation imo. Labour should announce they are seeking to take legal action against Patrick Gower and TV3.
My computer doesn’t like the clip for some reason, what was it that Gower said ?
He was rude and bullying and wouldn’t let Little answer anything properly. He accused Andrew Little of “cooking up statistics because he knew it was going to hurt people”. That is shameful and Little should demand an apology. He went on to say “He (Little) only did it for the headline.
1. It wasn’t Andrew Little who released the information, it was Phil Twyford.
2. I have never seen any reporter act in such a rude and jeering way to any interviewee. And that’s saying something where Gower is concerned.
3. No other member of the media pack was able to ask a question.
…and in doing so, he quite obviously got right under Andrew Little’s skin. Little’s response was ill-advised.
Also true.
Typical, too many reporters try to create a story and make it all about them, rather than just asking the question and letting the respondent reply. Gower,s ego gets in the way of his interviewing far too often
AND Little didn’t Snap. He answered forcefully!!!
Quite!
+100 Anne…and another take on Nactional Party framing used by TV3, their bestest friend
‘Patrick Gower tries to call Andrew Little a liar and then sulks when Little puts him in his place’
http://thedailyblog.co.nz/2015/07/21/patrick-gower-tries-to-call-andrew-little-a-liar-and-then-sulks-when-little-puts-him-in-his-place/
“So far all the ugliest elements put on display since Labour raised the issue of China’s speculation in our residential housing market have been displayed by those screaming racist …
As a National voter I absolutely agree with this
I would say the same if I saw a National Party senior politician treated in the same way.
+1
err… I might make and exception for John Key. 😉
Please, someone tell Andrew Little that everyone already knows why you don’t wrestle with a pig and he doesn’t need to demonstrate.
Patrick Gower talks trash, and in doing so, speaks only of himself.
Exactly, if the people of NZ see the real Little Andy the next election will be just like his performance in New Plymouth so he needs to keep his cool
🙄
Thanks for your concern.
Always glad to lend a hand but seriously if Angry Andy wants to be PM the worst thing he could is be himself
Polly wanna cracker?
I wouldn’t worry too much, TV3s ratings are abysmal anyway, or Gower, “Pfft!” indeed! (& personally I think Gower is crap anyway so watching Little take no shit from him was awesome to see, but yeah just a look of disdain next time would suffice.)
MOST WATCHED
One News: 853,290 (TV ONE, 6:00pm – 7:00pm)
Border Security: 660,260 (TV ONE, 7:30pm – 8:05pm)
Seven Sharp: 641,720 (TV ONE, 7:00pm – 7:30pm)
The Force: 632,890 (TV ONE, 8:05pm – 8:35pm)
Shortland Street: 457,770 (TV2, 7:00pm – 8:00pm)
MOST WATCHED EVENING (7.30pm – 11pm)
Border Security: 660,260 (TV ONE, 7:30pm – 8:05pm)
The Force: 632,890 (TV ONE, 8:05pm – 8:35pm)
My Kitchen Rules: 343,220 (TV2, 8:00pm – 9:20pm)
Criminal Minds: 314,190 (TV ONE, 8:35pm – 9:30pm)
Married At First Sight: 240,410 (TV3, 8:30pm – 9:35pm)
MOST WATCHED ON TV3
3 News: 246,630 (6:00pm – 7:00pm)
Married At First Sight: 240,410 (8:30pm – 9:35pm)
Come Dine With Me NZ: 148,840 (7:00pm – 7:30pm)
Reality Trip: 133,640 (9:35pm – 10:35pm)
Inside Story: 129,870 (8:00pm – 8:30pm)
see – you’re just fucking game-playing while the country circles down the drain under this government.
I hope that in real live you (even inadvertantly) do something that actually helps people in a real way, rather than just facilitating speculators or other parasites. It would be a shame if you were a net-loss from the well-being of the rest of the human species.
I see PR you like to call Andrew Little Little Andy. Excellent as I have no problems with people trying to belittle the opposition politicians or politicians they don’t like by calling them derogatory names, that’s why I love to refer to Key as a lying perverted money trading fucking spiv.
The only difference between you calling Andrew Little Little Any and me calling Key a lying perverted money trading fucking spiv. is the fact that
Andrew Little is neither little in stature or height, whereas Key is a lying perverted money trading fucking spiv.
Paddy Gower is an arsehole that needs to be put in its right place where the Sun don’t shine. He isn’t a credible journalist. A loathsome right wing fart.
Growers doing a real job on little on the news at the moment.
What do you mean?
Cut and edited the story to make Little look as bad as possible then finishes with his own little one sided stand up. I could never be a politician I’d make the little twerp swallow his mike.
Meanwhile over on One News Little came across well. Paddy loves to mash up his footage to suit his own agenda.
paddy sure does. Didn’t catch one news but hoskings took English s vague comments about murmurs he heard in China and turned them into a international disaster . How does this country rid itself of these sycophantic loser s ??
Stranger to Clemgeopin.” I resent your calling Paddy Gower an arsehole”
Clemgeopin.’Sorry, are you a friend of his?”
Stranger.”No I’m an arsehole”
lol
Andrew Little has carefully cultivated the facial expressions of a small business owner that has just been told the employee he fired illegally is taking him to court. hahahhahaaha
John Key’s expressions are usually of a rich boy saying, nup. nup. nup. don’t care. nup. people will die but it won’t be me. nup. nup. you’re poor anyway. nup. nup.
What a bunch. How can we possibly choose?
Little reminds me of Hank Hill.
Not just Auckland.
http://www.smh.com.au/business/markets/currencies/we-aint-seen-nothing-yet-chinese-foreign-investment-in-australian-property-tipped-to-surge-20150721-gigfaz
+100 Prickles….yup …I know of Australians being pushed out of their own housing market
Handy graphic from the Greens showing just how many NZers who made submissions wanted tougher CC targets than what the govt ended up chosing.
h/t @danylmc
Beyond comment.
How Seinfeld became a bad joke:
The threat of a hyper-vigilant left-wing outrage machine has been greatly exaggerated
A millionaire tells a dumb joke and nobody laughs — and that’s proof we’re all oppressed by social activists?
by ARTHUR CHU, Salon, June 12, 2015
Jerry Seinfeld is the latest brave middle-aged white man to weigh in on the “creepy” ascendance of humorless p.c. SJW anti-free-speech scolds. We know the drill now–we’ve heard it from comedians like Seinfeld and Patton Oswalt and, to a lesser degree, Louis C.K. and Chris Rock. We’ve heard it packaged in a different format from Very Serious media commentators like Jonathan Chait, Laura Kipnis and, most recently, an anonymous white male adjunct professor whose left-wing students “terrify” him.
It’s a familiar, tired drill. Point to instances of creeping overreaction by angry left-wing young people in the classroom, at protests and especially on Tumblr or Twitter. Portray these forces as a terrifying, swelling horde of enforcers with the power to totally destroy the lives of good old hardworking members of the chattering class like yourself. Talk about how this army of Social Justice Stormtroopers has successfully create a stifling Orwellian monoculture, especially on the Internet, where all of us live in constant fear of saying anything the least bit “offensive” lest our lives be ruined and as a result all online discourse has been stripped down to the level of catchphrase-spewing party apparatchiks seeking to avoid Stalinist purges.
This is clearly an extremely compelling narrative when it comes to a lot of people’s personal fears, because it’s a narrative they spin out of comparatively little evidence. It’s not that there’s no such thing as a left-wing witch hunt or that people haven’t been harmed by them — it’s that, for something that’s so scary that it warrants trend piece after trend piece on a biweekly basis, it seems pretty hard for these pundits to come up with actual examples of harm to themselves.
Daniel Tosh, whose nasty rape joke at an audience member spurred the comedy world to rally around him waving flags with apocryphal Voltaire quotes – yeah, he got a lot of mean tweets, and got analyzed in a bunch of think pieces, and got a really unkind (but hilarious) Onion article written about him.
And … that was it. His stand-up career is still going fine. He’s still on Twitter. He still has a damn top-rated show on Comedy Central, which makes him better off than 99.9 percent of all stand-up comedians in the country. (A show, by the way, which derives a lot of its humor from mocking people who are already being mercilessly made fun of or criticized on the Internet, which adds a little bit of irony to this whole “lynch mob” thing.)
Jonathan Chait combs through years of outraged viral right-wing posts on Facebook about left-wing atrocities but only comes up with one story of significant material harm, a kid being fired from a college newspaper, after Chait himself has gotten embroiled in controversy for trying to get journalists fired from newspapers for doing their job wrong. (As always, it’s actually about ethics in journalism.)
Laura Kipnis has a stronger argument for having been mistreated, even though the Title IX system she criticizes did, in fact, end up letting her completely off the hook — and even though the actual reason for the complaint against her wasn’t her “wrong opinion” but her spreading untruths about a student embroiled in a sexual harassment claim against a professor, which pretty much every “political correctness gone mad” pundit talking about the Kipnis case has ignored.
…….
Read more….
http://www.salon.com/2015/06/11/how_seinfeld_became_a_bad_joke_the_threat_of_a_hyper_vigilant_left_wing_outrage_machine_has_been_greatly_exaggerated/
Makes Sense…
“Labour believes if you have the right to live here you have the right to buy here, but not otherwise. That means all citizens and residents can. This will apply to all ethnicities.”
‘David Parker: Nats bet house on trade deals’
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/opinion/news/article.cfm?c_id=466&objectid=11484069
Not racism!…Go Labour for calling out the problem as it is…and the Chinese know it:
‘Wall of Chinese capital buying up Australian properties’
The “wall of Chinese capital” hitting property markets in Sydney and Melbourne will not ease up until the government introduces its anti-money laundering legislation, says an expert in ‘flight capital’.
James Tee, an ethnic Chinese property developer whose business specialises in “capital expatriation” – that is, getting money out of China and into his property developments in Malaysia – told Fairfax Media the exodus of capital from China was accelerating, thanks to the government’s anti-corruption drive.
“We have been tracking this for two years,” says Tee. Those outflows from China are compounded by the flight of capital out of Canada which is now “bursting” to find a home in Australia.
.
Due to the bubble in Canadian house prices and ensuing concerns over social dislocation, Canada’s government shut down its investor visa program last year. Some 40,000 Chinese visa applicants with a minimum loan to governments of $C800,000 were handed back their capital.
“That’s roughly $32 billion,” says Tee. “The Canadian government said: ‘We don’t want your money anymore’ and that capital is now hitting the Sydney market.”…
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/business/comment-and-analysis/wall-of-chinese-capital-buying-up-australian-properties-20150628-ghztdf.html#ixzz3gVPV2Oew
This shows that all the hand ringing that’s gone on here is just the overly PC getting them self into a lather about the wrong thing they need to wake up, its bad enough that labour have to fight the likes of Gower but being attacked buy so called progressive s on the far left is just pathetic.
+1
A dismal underperformance by Mr Little in his confrontation with Gower. Much to improve in the future.
Agreed, facetious. Little has already lifted Labour up in the polls to the point where he can be the next Prime Minister and I can only see improvement in the future. Good times!
I didn’t hear about Shane Te Pou, ‘a former Labour party official’ complaining, according to Radionz, that his Chinese wife ‘had her personal details released in Labour’s housing data leak’ This from 17/7/2015.
http://www.radionz.co.nz/audio/player/201762871.
1 No details of any kind were released as I understand it, except the bald percentages based on likely ethnic names.
2 Mr Te Pou has himself breached his wife’s privacy, not Labour.
3 He sounded confused and incomprehensible, and not a good advocate for any point he tried to make, or Labour.
If nothing else comes of this episode, at least it has got rid of a few pretentious low IQ PC dimwits out of Labour. All good, I say!