Posts by Russell Brown
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I was 17 in 1981, and if I'd had the vote I'd have voted for Muldoon. (Mainly to piss off school politial advocate John Campbell)
I can't believe I've admitted that so publicly.
S'alright. I walked into exams the year before that wearing a vote National button, partly to wind up my liberal teachers. I'd also given the young Labour reps a grilling when they came to pitch to us.
(Which brings back memories of the Social Credit team that came to talk to us and confirmed a great many unflattering stereotypes, satorial and otherwise, about Social Credit people ...)
But the next year, I voted for Ann Hercus and marched against the Tour.
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Brilliant write up Russell. I was at the schools stage challenge in Wellington last night. Talk about creativity. I think the future of NZ is in good hands, even if they can't vote yet
I was talking to some advertising industry people last night: they have a big problem with creativity, or the lack of it, with local staff. They sometimes get bright kids, who have to go off for their compulsory national service (two years in either the military or the police, and two weeks a year thereafter) -- and come back as drones.
The official recognition of the problem -- the new official "Creative City" policy, under which the government decrees creativity - is somewhat ironic.
That's not to say there isn't a creative community - Mr Brown and his buddies Imaginary Friends (comic artists for Marvel and DC, concept art for games) are examples - but it seems very marginalised.
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I don't dispute that Landlords benefited with the introduction of the Accommodation Supplement, because it obviously added to the number of people who could afford private rental housing. But don't blame the landlords who are filling the void left by 'limited' State Housing stock.
The problem (well, one of them) with market rents was that quite a few Housing NZ properties were going unlet, because people couldn't or would pay the higher rents. So there was excess capacity and rents still spiked. Go figure.
Rents are determined by supply and demand. They go down when everyone can afford to buy their own home, and up when they can't. They could also drop if the number of houses were increased to the point that demand is satiated. At that point premium stock would be in demand and grotty old mouldy dungheaps wouldn't.
I think it's more complex than that. I think one possible pitfall of Cullen ending the tax-loss gravy train on investment properties is that the number of people prepared to make properties available for rent will fall, and so will the supply of rental stock. In that case, rents for those who can't or don't want to rent could go up.
OTOH, in Auckland you might just see more families able to buy and live in the burbs while the kids rent city apartments, of which there is a considerable supply.
Re: turnover. In our street, the Housing NZ properties that turn over are those let to more or less marginal types, who move on or are turfed out. The lasting tenancies are indeed 2 brm houses let to old people. But that's good if you live in our street.
But, really, there's no need to theorise. We did that thing, and all the research on market rents was negative. They triggered hardship and public health problems, and probably fuelled rental inflation that ran ahead of house prices. I could hardly believe it when National proposed a revival in 2005.
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Not true Steven. The Accommodation Supplement gets paid to the Beneficiary not the Landlord. Landlords are lobbying to have the supplement paid directly to them because <wait for it> some beneficiaries don't pay their rent but claim the supplement anyway.
The impact has been curbed with a return to a sensible state housing rental policy, but when National switched to market rents in the 90s and tried to load the entire social housing obligation onto the accomodation benefit, the effect was that of a subsidy to landlords.
It probably drove rental inflation and it definitely sharply increased the proportion of their income poorer households spent on rent. So they might have been paid the accomodation benefit, but they didn't benefit from it: landlords did. The research is quite clear on that.
It's basically a really ineffective and counter-productive approach to public housing policy, and the fact that National wanted to bring back market rents at the last election denies logic.
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Well, fair enough - just as there are (I would respectfully suggest) people who don't place much store in the probity of tens of thousands of beneficiaries who've clearly received money they're not entitled to, and WINZ has exercised their discretion and declined to prosecute for welfare fraud. Now, if some excitable MP stood up and said this was proof of widespread corruption in WINZ and political cronyism on the part of the Labour Party, I think someone would be told to calm down a little bit.
Sorry, you've lost me there. I can't divine a comparison and I'm really not sure what you're saying.
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That great Gaynor piece seems to have permanently disappeared from the Herald site, but here's an excerpt from a 1999 Hard News about it:
Most of us probably also missed an amazing piece of analysis by Brian Gaynor in the Business Herald last Saturday. The picture he drew, from information on the public record, had a lot more to say about what's been wrong in this country than any argument on Winebox points of law.
His column was about Michael Fay and David Richwhite and a series of transactions in which their merchant bank was involved between 1986 and 1993 - involving their companies European Pacific, Capital Markets and Fay, Richwhite and the Bank of New Zealand, Tranz Rail and Telecom.
In the course of five major transactions, Fay and Richwhite personally pocketed over half a billion dollars - at the same time as their minority shareholders lost $277 million. Someone of less moderate inclination than Gaynor might say that they basically raped their shareholders.
And the worst of it is, the government helped them do it, handing them sweetheart deals like the Telecom share option arrangement in September 1993, which allowed Fay and Richwhite to pocket $274 million from Telecom share sales without having to put up a penny in advance. While they wallowed around in cash, their shareholders made precisely nothing.
I apparently offended one Fay, Richwhite employee so much last week that he signed off the Hard News mailing list. In which case, let me say that again: anybody who believes those two ratbags to be any kind of heroes, any sort of role models, is utterly deluded. Disgust seems too weak a word for how I feel about those people.
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BTW, Russell if you find it so objectionable that "Fay and Richwhite buying their way out of an insider trading investigation", then I assume you now support law changes that would require (say) the IRD or WINZ to automatically prosecute in all cases of alleged wrong-doing? What I don't want to see changed is the tiresome notion that even people I don't much like are entitled to the tiresome presumption of innocence thing, even if Winston Peters doesn't agree.
Que? The pair have just made the largest settlement of its kind ever in Australasia in order to have the insider trading case halted. For reasons of cost to the Crown and simply having the matter done with, I can see why the SFO would agree to the deal. But I'm hardly going to place a lot of stock in the fact that as part of the settlement they don't have to admit liability. The uncontested facts of the TranzRail story are damning enough.
Thing is, is not even any criminal behaviour that makes me despise those people. It's their behaviour full stop, as detailed so comprehensively by Brian Gaynor. As Shane Jones put it yesterday:
"Why do so many Kiwis have doubts about our capital markets? Why does the current CEO of the sharemarket still struggle to build people's confidence? Because people have not forgotten how these two individuals gorged for their own personal growth.
"They squeaked out of the Winebox but the cork, having been pulled off this bottle, shows the sludge of their wrongdoing hasn't been forgotten by us. Not at all."
Amen.They hurt this country. And the fact that Fay in particular tried to harness a misguided nationalism to further his personal cause sickens me just that little bit more.
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Never been there (thank goodness!) but on our stopover last year we stayed at the Carlton on Bras Basah - not far away - and thought it was excellent. I think it was NZ$160/170 a night but our rooms were big, clean and well equipped, and the service was great.
The Ritz Carlton? Stayed there years ago on Nokia's dollar and it was brilliant. Huge rooms - with a harbour view from the bath! Best breakfast buffet I've ever encountered too. But with rates pushed up by the multi-ring circus of CommunicAsia, just a bit beyond my budget ...
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Oh, I look at the De-Press and despair a lot - though admittedly it doesn't take much. :) I think Mediawatch has been on a bit of a roll lately, doing some measured and thoughtful pieces on this, the 'Murder Energy'/Muliaga media circus and the flat out bizarre love-in of David Bain. This might sound like a back-handed compliment, but the world would be a much better (and better informed) place if the Mediawatch crew decided it was time to close up shop.
Heh. You have a better backhand than Roger Federer.
But yes, I reckon Colin Peacock is owning lately.
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Thompson was fine - I think both he and Colin mistook my use of "punitive" to mean "vindictive" ...
See!? It's the gathering tide of Asian ... literacy.
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