Posts by Matthew Poole
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OnPoint: Election 2011: GO!, in reply to Dismal Soyanz,
What I am saying is that over time there may be benefits to the current account through reduced interest payments to foreign lenders.
Yes, probably. But the deficit is, largely, a private sector problem. Reducing government debt-related outflows doesn't deal to the 80-something percent of our foreign debt that is related to private borrowing for homes, cars, and big-screen TVs. Flogging off state assets to reduce state borrowing doesn't change that calculation, which is at least some of Keith's point.
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OnPoint: Election 2011: GO!, in reply to nzlemming,
New Zealand’s approach to security clearances is not like the US. When you get a clearance here, it is at the request of the CE of the agency for the duration of the job, i.e. if you shift agency, the clearance officially lapses and you have to get a new one (unless they’ve changed it in the last 5 years). Of course, the SIS may recycle the ground work, but they usually touch base personally with the referees again. In the US (as I understand it) they go over you with a microscope once and you hold that clearance for life, unless someone raises a flag on you
A clearance here lasts five years, after which you must be vetted again. If you change agencies and it's less than 12 months since your last vetting, and the duties are broadly comparable, the new CE has the option to grant you clearance without a new vetting. The new clearance should be granted only for as long as the old clearance would've been valid. This is based on Security in the Government Sector from NZSIS, which is NZ's security clearance bible.
In the US it's 10 years, I believe. It's very definitely not life-long, and as with NZ they're granted on a per-agency basis. A DOD clearance is not automatically transferable to DOE, or DHS, but a sufficiently recent vetting can be used to support granting clearance.
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OnPoint: Election 2011: GO!, in reply to Ross Mason,
if I am not mistaken, it appears they did not interview him
I think that oversight would've been mentioned very prominently indeed had it occurred. An interview with the subject isn't exactly a "check", which may be why it's not listed.
Going to the trouble of interviewing two (or more) referees and not interviewing the subject? Whatever their other failings, I can't see that one happening. -
OnPoint: Election 2011: GO!, in reply to Paul Williams,
it is possible to design markets that deliver long term public good thus alleviating the need for governments to necessarily own or directly provide.
Oh, it absolutely is. The problem is that NZ has no history of such things that inspires any sort of confidence. Our single biggest contribution to the entire field of neo-lib economics is as an example of how it can go horribly, horribly wrong when "the market will sort it out" is coupled blindly with "the market is never wrong" and the above-mentioned attitude toward regulation.
NZ also has a population the size of Australia's largest city, making for rather different market dynamics. It makes for some serious challenges in trying to establish a competitive market for things like electrons with which there is no scope for product differentiation and it's prohibitively expensive to create divergent delivery streams.
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I know where the government can save $10b of capital spending over the next couple of decades: the Roads of Significance to National.
Any takers? -
OnPoint: Election 2011: GO!, in reply to Paul Williams,
ownership isn't the only way in which you can achieve public policy goals, regulation and incentives are others. Ownership is just more direct.
And in a country where unbridled capitalism is still the flavour du jour in many levels of bureaucracy and government, regulation is a word that engenders responses similar to those one gets from bringing angels on horseback to a kosher dinner party.
Sadly, those same types also believe that ownership by the state is bad, but at least they accept that it's legitimate for owners to exercise control even if they disagree with the ownership holding itself.
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OnPoint: Election 2011: GO!, in reply to Richard Llewellyn,
That said a well-run company is a well-run company, regardless of whether it is state owned, publicly listed, or privately owned.
As has been said many times, it wasn't the wholesale flogging-off that improved Telecom's performance, it was turning it into an SOE.
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OnPoint: Election 2011: GO!, in reply to Sacha,
the rich pay more tax than the rest of us
No, they don’t. I’ll leave that one up to Keith or others. Been tackled here many times in the past, but the amount of dodging is striking.
And even if they don't dodge, is paying more tax inherently bad? If I get paid six figures a year, I have more flexibility to structure my expenses than someone who gets paid, say, $50k. Or $40k. Or those poor bastards who're trying to raise a family on the back of two, or three, minimum-wage jobs.
Saying "but the rich pay more tax" carries the implied message that paying more tax is a bad thing. Given that income disparity has bad outcomes for everyone, not just the poor, surely it's in the interests of the rich to pay more tax to allow for quality services to the less well-off and help redress some of the imbalances?
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OnPoint: Election 2011: GO!, in reply to Keith Ng,
QV – authoritative services seems like a kind of natural monopoly too, but I haven’t given it too much thought.
Given the subtle corruption of the ratings agencies leading up to the GFC, I would call valuation of property a service too essential to be trusted to the private sector. Introduce competition, and suddenly there's scope for ratings to be unreasonably favourable just to avoid having the client take their business elsewhere.
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Hard News: Only what we would expect a…, in reply to Sacha,
They could start by restoring the R&D credits that they cut within months of taking the reins in order to fatten the lolly scramble they had planned. But that would require vision, and a real (as opposed to claimed) commitment to sustainable, high-value industry developing in NZ.