Posts by Matthew Poole
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Speaker: The Voyage: Dutch Disease –…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
This was only a few weeks ago, so I doubt they've yet had time to get it going properly.
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Speaker: The Voyage: Dutch Disease –…, in reply to Angus Robertson,
But in New Zealand you think property can only go up.
In the absence of a fundamental change in how we address property sale transactions, yes. You point to Crafar, and it’s those kinds of transactions that drive up the prices for everyone else. The other bidders were looking to pay a fair value for the properties, not to win the bidding at any cost, but now that someone’s set a new benchmark (no matter how ludicrous) it feeds through to the rest of the market.
For starters, banks are still much more willing to lend on property than on anything else. Want to start a business? GLWT. I’ve got friends who had to go begging on fucking Facebook to get a few grand (literally. All they wanted was $5k) in lending because their bank didn’t want to know. Want to buy property? Hey, how much can we lend you? And farms generate revenue, they’re not just somewhere to live.
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Speaker: The Voyage: Dutch Disease –…, in reply to Angus Robertson,
How do farmers farm for capital gain and make a "tax-free" profit when farm capital values decline by 20%?
For the saps who bought right before the drop, they suffer. For most of the rest, they hang in there for a couple more years and wait for the market to resume its climb. You're talking as though there hadn't been huge gains in value over the preceding years, gains that are only blunted by a 20% drop in value.
Your logic is up there with saying that the plateau in residential property prices in much of the country has ceased to make owning rental properties primarily for capital gain an attractive proposition.
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Legal Beagle: Shirking their responsibilities?, in reply to Tom Semmens,
So we'd quite likely end up with a situation where nobody could stand list candidates. How would that benefit the country?
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Legal Beagle: Shirking their responsibilities?, in reply to Tom Semmens,
At 30,000 members I would strongly doubt Labour and National would currently qualify either!
Labour's reportedly got over 56,000 members. Cannot find figures for National, but you may be right that they won't qualify.
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Legal Beagle: Shirking their responsibilities?, in reply to Tom Semmens,
requirement for a mass membership.
Given that only two of our parties would qualify, you're basically saying that only National and Labour should be allowed to offer MPs for list seats. IOW, we effectively would get SM by stealth but with the added insult that the likes of the Greens would only get to compete by standing MPs for electorates they would have little chance of winning. Fuck that for a game of cards.
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Legal Beagle: Shirking their responsibilities?, in reply to Martin Lindberg,
Why would the Air Bus not be allowed?
It’s not contracted to Auckland Transport. If we’re making him take public transport it needs to actually be public transport.
ETA: Basically, make him feel the full pain of Auckland's public transport "system", complete with zig-zag routes, un-integrated transfers, and non-existent rapid transport networks in the south-west.
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Legal Beagle: Shirking their responsibilities?, in reply to Islander,
An upper house is an abomination for the ANZ parliamentary system- we select candidates from just which group?
Bunch of ways of doing it, though all of them would need to have terms of six or nine years - two or three parliamentary cycles, depending how many seats were renewed each cycle. Direct election using STV. Election based on party vote. Appointment voted up or down by the parties (one party, one vote) in Parliament, and with each party being allowed to nominate one or two candidates to avoid any party having excessive power over the composition.
One way I have thought of having it done is to have half (or a third) elected by the public using whatever method is decided, with the remaining seats filled using Parliamentary appointment until the next election cycle (or two, depending), at which time the appointments would expire and the appropriate remaining seats would become elected. That would take care of how to populate staggered electoral cycles in a single hit without putting it in the hands of the majority party in Parliament. A 12-seat (which I think is really much too small) upper house could be filled in thirds or halves over three (or two) electoral cycles based on six- or nine-year terms.
If you want an abomination, how about a party with only 35% support from votes cast pushing ahead with a policy that has less than 30% support from all voters and nobody being in a position to stop it happening? I would call that a much greater abomination than any suggestion of having another house that might be able to curb the fastest legislature in the west.
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Legal Beagle: Shirking their responsibilities?, in reply to Steve Barnes,
Spare a thought for those that have to.
I know the pain, don't worry. Which is why I'm firmly in favour of requiring the Minister to know precisely what it is that he's denying when he refuses money to make Auckland's public transport better.
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Legal Beagle: Shirking their responsibilities?, in reply to Tom Semmens,
insist that list candidates are selected by regulated, democratic means from within the ranks of mass membership parties
You mean do it roughly like the Greens do. Their entire party list is constructed by the membership, but with some weightings inserted to ensure that the co-leadership has a gender split.