Posts by linger
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Hard News: The Day After Tomorrow, in reply to Trevor Nicholls,
The Greens have more policy than NZF, so more to push, perhaps?
But yes, if the question is phrased as "who wants to form a Government?" then any media pressure for action should be directed first at National. The Greens care about getting their policy actioned, but rather less about getting ministerial titles if that isn't necessary to achieve the former aim. -
Hard News: The Day After Tomorrow, in reply to Katharine Moody,
I do have to wonder who they are sampling when I read statements like
the correlation between being aged 5-14 and voting Green increased sharply, from -0.42 in 2014 to -0.08 in 2017.
How can they have meaningful data on this at all?
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"Rotten to the core" springs to mind; the surface colour may change rapidly, but it's more important to be aware of the contents.
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(Translation: if there were more civics education, there’d be less of a market for uninformed political punditry.)
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Hard News: The Day After Tomorrow, in reply to Trevor Nicholls,
Yes. I’m now hearing a meme from several National supporters that “if the Greens don’t get into government this time they’re finished”. Which is idiocy: the Greens continued to increase their support during the past 9 years outside government, and their current low polling is rather more likely a temporary result of having had three sitting members (two of them with high media profiles) perform very badly timed and highly public career suicides. They’ve got rebuilding work ahead of them, but associating themselves with National doesn’t seem the way forward.
(Meanwhile, National emerged entirely unscathed from Barclay’s rather more problematic route to career suicide, despite links to English and others. Go figure.)
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Speaker: The Government lost the election, in reply to izogi,
anything returned-to-sender would cause someone to be removed from the roll.
Yes, that’s exactly the problem: and the main reason that action is taken seems to be to prevent the EasyVote card being sent to the wrong address and subsequently being used for invalid voting. Which makes the EasyVote card the problem. Granted it shouldn’t be sent out in such cases; but equally, it’s not essential for voting, so the disenrolment step (under conditions where by definition the voter will be unaware that that has happened) seems excessive.
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Hard News: Media Take: The selling of…, in reply to Katharine Moody,
I've long argued that "putting bracket creep right" should be accomplished by actually moving the bracket boundaries (say, on five-yearly review, and quantized to nearest $10,000 increment), not by lowering the associated tax rates to make the system less progressive and/or out of ideological belief that government should do less.
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The ACT belief that tax on unrealised income somehow counts as a real loss was also displayed by Muriel Newman a few years after all the NZ finance company collapses. In a DomPost letter to the editor, she argued that, because she had received no final income from her investments, the withholding tax paid on her compounded interest over the investment term should be refunded to her. Nice try — but choosing compounded over paid interest is a trade-off: more nett income if all goes well, more risk if it doesn’t. On paper the value of the investment goes up each year because interest income is added to it, and income tax is paid on that gross income. But the nett income is then subject to the same risk, and the same fate, as your principal.
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Hard News: Media Take: The selling of…, in reply to linger,
Re-checked. I'm actually wrong, and GJ is essentially correct on that point, though not in the consequent insistence that the commercial wasn't deliberately misleading. The "income tax" claim is misleading for a different (though similar negative counterfactual) reason — that the tax cut law has not yet come into effect, and therefore removing it does not impose any new tax.
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Hard News: Media Take: The selling of…, in reply to Katharine Moody,
To be fair, I was assuming Steven Price had that correct. GJ seems to think either that the ad referred to some other act, or that the act should be interpreted differently than by that lawyer. This would be the easiest thing for GJ to provide evidence on, by linking directly to the publicly-available text of the relevant act, if it supports GJ's interpretation.