Posts by Ian Pattison
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Interesting how nobody's talking about the Mt Roskill by-election; which I presume is where the first round of this MOU is going to play out. Are Labour and the Greens going to coordinate and only going to put forward one left candidate?
Had everybody forgotten about that?
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Hard News: This. Is. Crazy., in reply to Brent Jackson,
Surely the Meth test is not a binary Yes/No ? Trace amounts should be ignored. It should be blatantly obvious if it was used as a lab.
You'd think so but this isn't about protecting kids from meth-contaminated houses. As Russell said in the post, it's about targeting lifestyle and masking it as an environmental health and safety issue.
What I'd like to know is: how many of the private testing contractors also provide clean-up services?
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Hard News: This. Is. Crazy., in reply to linger,
Don't want to go too far down the rabbit hole here because it is off-topic but
The table shows GDP fell in absolute terms (while the population increased, so per capita GDP fell even faster). The fall in productivity is largely because the proportion of unemployed went up. Furthermore...
The table shows GDP increased in absolute terms. The first period covers nine years while the second covers six. Per annum increase in the first period was 8,487 while the pa increase in the second is 8,549.
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Hard News: This. Is. Crazy., in reply to Bart Janssen,
We got the tax cuts and everybody was all smiles.
We didn't actually get tax cuts, we got tax increases. The proportion of growth in GDP that went to tax, under Labour, was 12%; while the proportion of growth in GDP that went to tax, under National, has been 18%.
Interestingly, the compensation of employees dropped from 51% to 37% while business' operating surplus went up from 38% to 45%.
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Trump, as president, will be much more benign than is being made out. His policies are nothing more than click-bait and will be abandoned once he is in place. Think about it, deporting Muslims would start a civil war. How would you do that? Where do they go? Put them all on a boat and push them out to sea? Requiring Mexico to build a wall could ruin NAFTA. Nobody will listen to him and I don't think he has the political nous to extend the office any further than the experts who went before him. I suspect he will end up simply rubber-stamp Republican congress initiatives in return for baubles and the odd legislative gimme.
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Polity: Is being a tax haven worth it?, in reply to izogi,
Deleted.
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How did LTCs become law? Literally in the middle of the night, under urgency, as a 71-page SOP that was dropped-in to the Taxation (GST and Remedial Matters) Bill in December 2010. The SOP was bigger than the bill, received no select committee scrutiny, and was handed to members two days before being read.
No wonder it ended up such a defective piece of kit.
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Polity: A short history of half-baked…, in reply to andrew001,
The average house price went up $200,00 in Labour’s entire 9-year term. Under National, it went up 24% in one year (2015) which eclipses all increases that occurred under Labour.
National have done almost nothing to stop it. The SHAs have been a farce, the $50 million to secure land has disappeared with an admission they have nothing to show for it, and the suggestion that Councils re-zone land has been scotched by National’s constituency and erstwhile housing market parasites Auckland 2040. They didn't do the one thing that would actually help with this mess: rein-in housing market speculation with either a tax big enough to dissuade speculators, or simply banning people from owning more houses than they really need. Self-interest and greed. Your parents would be ashamed of you and so are your kids.
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Hard News: How the years flew by ..., in reply to llew40,
counted as inflation, that woul
Either we blame the people who did the thing, or blame the system (or part of the system) they operate in. If you don't want to blame the people, the system needs fixing.
To my mind, this is just another example of how deregulation and neo-liberal economics have ruined the west.
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People boating and fishing from the old Mangere Bridge:
