Posts by Kyle Matthews

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  • Hard News: Park Life,

    At the very least it would be nice to have a golf course where golfers are not completely segregated from the plebs.

    I think for some golfers, that's half the point.

    Since Nov 2006 • 6243 posts Report Reply

  • Legal Beagle: A rather incomplete…,

    GROUP HUG! Seriously, I was stewing a bit doing the vacuuming just now and I appreciate this.

    Fucking vacuuming. I hate it too.

    Since Nov 2006 • 6243 posts Report Reply

  • Hard News: Incomplete, inaccurate and misleading,

    Basically, yeah

    All good then? Sweet...

    Since Nov 2006 • 6243 posts Report Reply

  • Hard News: Team Little: pretty good,

    I'm quite surprised that Finance has gone to Robertson. He's a clever bloke and should handle it competently, but I think his heart is more in the social issues / policy area, not bean-counting.

    I think it will be good for him personally. If he does it well it will line him up well for a future run at party leader/PM, as it fills in a big part of his CV.

    I was disappointed not to see Adern not get a major portfolio. If she's a future leader she has to be able to front it against a senior minister.

    Since Nov 2006 • 6243 posts Report Reply

  • Hard News: News from home ...,

    Oh, please. See above for remarks on the Labour Party constitution and its links to unions. If you don’t like how the Labour Party does it, then vote elsewhere or work to change the constitution.

    Well I've never party voted Labour, and I can't see myself doing so in the near future, and the only thing that would have ever made me likely to hold my nose and become a member was to vote for Grant, and I didn't do that either.

    But the fact remains that Labour will be the major party in the next left wing government, and because they interact at the edge in the center of the bell curve, the one that we most rely on to take votes from the right side of the equation. So I'm as interested in how they choose my future PM, as any other party that I'm also not a member of.

    Since Nov 2006 • 6243 posts Report Reply

  • Hard News: Dirty Politics,

    Key sends Slater a written apology for releasing the email which sunk Judith Collins. No lessons learned there then.

    I'm not sure I have a problem with this. Slater has a right to privacy too, which the PM presumably breached, and a public apology is part of the settlement arranged with the Privacy Commissioner.

    Even scumbags etc...

    Since Nov 2006 • 6243 posts Report Reply

  • Hard News: News from home ...,

    I don’t need one and I’m not Maori but I certainly feel comfortable having Unions represent the people.

    There's no problems with them representing their members - that's what I expect my union to do.

    Why some of them get to be the deciding vote in choosing a future Prime Minister however I have no idea.

    Since Nov 2006 • 6243 posts Report Reply

  • Hard News: Housing, hope and ideology,

    How much demand is that? How many people rent a house a the lower end of the market? How many people are you talking about? How much will it keep prices lower by? How much are they going up by anyway? How much will they cost? How many are being built anyway? How will it affect the quantity of the ones that are being built? How many people will the population be by the time they’re finished being built? How much effect does building of new houses actually have on population?

    I’ll get my research team right on that.

    Since Nov 2006 • 6243 posts Report Reply

  • Hard News: Housing, hope and ideology,

    That’s not a fact, it’s a theory with a whole lot of caveats and disclaimers about the conditions under which it holds.

    It's a very well held theory with lots of real world evidence. It's as fact as you can get in large complex macroeconomic systems. It's not straight maths that you can predict, but demand for housing is moderately predictable at the lower end. It tends not to be the thing that people on lower incomes skip paying - they'll skip paying food and electricity, health care costs etc first, as the above shows. At the lower end of the private market, people won't tend to downgrade into damp, cold houses if they can afford something better, just because it's cheaper.

    I’m lost. You want to talk only about the effect of building state housing on the price of the 750,000 houses that are valued below the median?

    No, I said lower end of the market. State housing competes with the bottom 10-20% of income levels - single income minimum wage earners, underemployed people, beneficiaries. It doesn't compete with the median income which isn't the bottom end of the market.

    But anyway clearly no agreement here.

    Since Nov 2006 • 6243 posts Report Reply

  • Hard News: Housing, hope and ideology,

    Tonight I was directed to an interesting publication by Auckland City Mission describing people's experiences and difficulties living in poverty.

    Since Nov 2006 • 6243 posts Report Reply

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