Posts by Kyle Matthews
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Universal suffrage. That’s what I want.
Which is fine. But the military exemption is there for a reason. It wouldn't be necessary if everyone who ever lived in NZ as a citizen or PR could vote forever, but that's not the current law so that's why there's a military exemption - soldiers get sent by the government overseas for war and don't get to come back like other people do.
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I don’t see why soldiers should be a special case. Why is killing in the name of so much better than making peace in the name of that the killers get to vote but the peacemakers don’t?
Soldiers could be deployed to a war zone for long periods of time. They're duty could prevent them returning to NZ in the time frame. Some soldiers during WW 2 didn't see NZ for five years.
That's not the case with a person who has a job for the UN. They have leave and options to return home that soldiers might not have.
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And we’re really going to bring Dirty Politics into it? If you want to go there, Kyle, I’ll ask whether that label is better applied to people who only respect the rules when they find it politically convenient to do so.
I'm not aware of anyone not following the Labour party rules.
But I think everyone could do a lot better than look at the rulebook, and then be snide about fellow caucus members, which it seems is going on a lot. That's not going to inspire anyone.
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Now, could you please answer the question: Has Cunliffe behaved in a manner that’s contrary to the Labour Party’s own rules? Not “has he behaved in the manner you think he should” or “is this leadership contest happening at a time of your liking”.
That's setting a pretty low standard for leadership of a party, and a person who wants to be prime minister Craig.
I mean there are many things in "Dirty Politics" which if true, would not be against the law nor against various political party or cabinet rules. They'd still be terribly unbecoming of a minister of the government, leader of a political party, or prime minister. That seems like a pretty good tax gain for the government which will largely fall on rich people.
That’s right Kyle, I just didn’t think, and what I didn’t think was that an added 15% on John Keys’ current 2.8% still only equals 17.8% tax i.e. about half of the top tax rate.
So you're unhappy with the Labour party policy because it would increase the tax take from John Key from under two hundred thousand, to almost a million dollars per year.
I didn’t think that you and others who aren’t the brains behind it and can’t verify myriad as yet unspecified details to be refined by the Expert Panel
You want people to verify rules that haven't been written yet? Tricky.
Despite peoples’ best efforts my mind hasn’t been changed on this, I’m still over it. and so in the interests of keeping this thread on track and not dirtying up the site anymore. It may be best to just let your desire to be the brains behind the CGT go.
You started a few days not understanding that it was a tax on capital GAINS. You basically understood nothing about what it was and were slagging it off. Now that people have answered pretty much everything that you've raised, you're still slagging it off.
Anyway...
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I don’t know why I’m saying this, but Cunliffe isn’t “forcing” anything but acting entirely within the rules. Those rules might be inconvenient – or downright embarrassing – but it’s hardly dirty politics, and nobody outside Labour itself is in any way responsible.
No, but I do think it's not good for the party.
If you want to do a review of the election and where your party needs to go, and then choose a leader that best fits that, then you need to complete the review first (assuming that an election can achieve this goal).
But for political reasons Cunliffe has resigned now to force the vote and give his opponent less time to gear up. Would it have hurt if the MPs had come together and said "We will hold a review, after which Cunliffe will resign and he and other candidates will stand in February/March to be leader"? How come that shit couldn't be sorted in a 7 hour meeting?
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The soldier is clearly a special case, and the fact we have an exemption for them isn't an argument for another sort of person. UN workers don't get deployed for five years without being able to return home (neither do soldiers these days, but hypothetically they could).
Personally I'd find "anyone who comes from NZ can vote regardless of how many decades they were last here" a little bizarre, but each to their own.
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Again you’re saying “that’s hard” as a reason for not doing it. I’m pointing at a disparity and asking why it exists. If it helps, imagine you have a kiwi soldier in Syria working with a kiwi UN employee. They work side by side, and both have been there for four years. The soldier can vote, the UN worker can’t. Why?
Because the soldier is working for the NZ government, and it's possible that they've been deployed and not able to return to NZ (in a time of war for example).
Maybe that means the UN worker should be able to vote, but until that time, the military exemption makes sense.
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Speaker: An Open Letter To David Cunliffe, in reply to Tinakori,
Those deficits required very large borrowing, hence the increase in our debt. My point was that, Labour wanted to spend more than National and the Greens even more than Labour. To do so they would have had to borrow far more, even if they had raised taxes (counterproductive in a downturn anyway).
It's like having a discussion with a National Party election pamphlet.
You mean raise taxes, like raising GST from 12.5 to 15% right? Because that would be counterproductive in a downturn.
National decreased income taxes, which overwhelmingly assisted people who earnt more, and then increased GST which hits poorer people harder as its a flat tax.
And claims that they massively increased expenditure is just nonsense. Austerity cuts you mean, in real terms.
Come on Joe, arguing that someone could at least deign to join the conversation beneath the blog posts they’ve contributed at Publicaddress isn’t a cheap shot. it’s pretty much exactly what happens all the time.
It's not beyond possibility that James has been told to pull his head in and not contribute further by a bunch of people.
I don’t know, does anyone? New Zealand isn’t a fair and equal society, the Prime Minister “earns $428,000 from his PM’s salary along with this year’s $5,000,000 increase in his wealth (according to NBR’s rich list) which gives him a total income of $5,428,000. On this total income he pays just $132,160 in income tax and approximately $21,400 in GST giving a total tax of $153,560 or 2.8% of income”
I simply asked Deborah what, if any, change in reasoning/ philosophy has occurred within Labour to introduce a flat tax that has any possibility at all of taking yet more money from the lowest possible denominator? As opposed to them introducing a more refined policy that would under no circumstances take money from the lowest possible denominator. When you have years and years to refine these types of policies to your hearts’ content, why not safeguard the poor?
You didn't think before posting this, that it's possible that part of that 5 million dollars might be capital gains, and which might be taxed under the Labour CGT? Given that there's very few poor people who are going to be picking up an extra $5 million in wealth each year, this flat tax would in effect be progressive in nature.
I understand the purpose of the tax, it’s the leeway for collateral damage that eludes. It’s the emphasis on revenue collection at the possible expense of anyone at all, even just a single individual, for whom that money might make a big difference, that has me lost. When did that person stop mattering?
You could say this about several taxes. GST isn't affected by your income. You could complicate our tax system by including it in a personal tax return that everyone has to complete so you know what their total income is, or you can simplify it and lose the ability to charge poorer people less.
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That’s probably because Labour wanted a lot more government spending that even with higher tax rates would have required more borrowing , a higher deficit and more public debt. It was not a profitable angle from which Labour could attack National.
Only if you can't read and follow through on a budget.
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No, it’s not but there’s also a good number of people, I suggest, for whom it’s not going badly enough to overcome a small-c conservative aversion to radical change. (And before anyone bursts a blood vessel, I’m not using “radical” as a pejorative.) It wasn’t exactly days of wine and roses for the Fifth Labour Government, but “don’t put it all at risk” messaging seemed to hit the target.
I think the two differences between the 5th Labour govt and the current National govt in this area is:
1. Labour got the government books on track by both reducing debt and started saving for the future with the Super Fund. National may have done as well on the economy (depending how you measure it), but the government books have been dragged well into the crap.
2. When this is brought up National can just point at the GFC (rightly or wrongly) rather than at their tax cuts which has overwhelmingly benefited the rich over the less well off. Labour hasn't found a good way to tag them with this and make it stick - it's largely taken the economy and the government books off the table as an effective campaign strategy for them. That's somewhat nuts given that they've taken us from low government debt to reasonably high government debt, and they're running on their management of the economy and the government accounts.