Posts by Matthew Poole
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Oh, noes. I might get sued for libel by "the wealthy".
You'll also incur the ire of people such as myself who have some education in taxation. Evasion is a crime, avoidance is not. Some avoidance schemes cross the line (ask the banks) and become evasion, but the two are not the same thing.
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Self-employed taking cash, people working under the table, selling things as a job and not declaring it, work done under a barter system or trading work for work.
Also beneficiaries doing work not declaring their income are paying tax, but not telling MSD about their income etc. ACC recipients doing work that they're apparently not able to do while collecting ACC payments.
The idea that the rich are the only people who try and work the system to their best advantage is a little silly.
Nearly all of your examples are outright illegal, being tax evasion or fraud. Even barter is taxable, and work-for-work is arguably taxable.
There's a huge difference between using an accountant to structure your affairs such that they are making use of legal loopholes to minimise tax liability, and straight breaking the law. Using a trust/company to shelter income is legal, if dubious ethically. It's avoidance, not evasion. Not declaring income is evasion, which is a crime. Not telling WINZ about work you're getting paid for while collecting a benefit is fraud, as is getting paid for working while collecting ACC because you, supposedly, can't work.
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Cos they never crash eh?.
Very, very rarely, given how many flight hours are clocked up each year. If one is going to object to flights over residential areas based on the risk of a crash, better to object to single-engine light planes.
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they were flying without lights and in close formation... over peoples houses FFS in the dark. If this were just an exercise then I think it damned irresponsible and downright dangerous
The pilots are all wearing night-vision goggles, as are their co-pilots. It's not particularly more dangerous than any other flight activity that is carried out by the Air Force, hysterical knee-jerk reactions notwithstanding.
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It seems perfectly consistent with the overall belief that rich people deserve more money to reward them and to motivate them to be more successful and that this is the best way to make the nation "successful"
And at any level of income, a person who earns more takes home more (I'll ignore WFF abatement, because that's a whole other container of squirmy ground-dwellers). The suggestion that higher rates of tax on higher incomes are a disincentive to earn more is utter bullshit, unless one has been mislead into believing (as many people do) that a pay rise into a higher bracket means your whole income is taxed at the higher rate.
Fixing the WFF abatement rates and clearing up the loopholes that allow property-owning millionaires to get WFF would be a good start. Cutting taxes, not so much.As things stand, if I calculate the average between the Herald's estimate and Stuff's estimate, the tax cut balanced by the GST increase will see me better-off to the tune of a whopping 90 cents per week. As a friend put it, I'm in no danger of obesity setting in if I spend it all on lollies. Big. Fucking. Whoop.
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"Given what they doing and saying, I think the possibility existed that they could have hurt someone"
puts the burden of proof on the wrong party.
But I'm not arguing in court, or even venturing on the charges. My opinion is that there was legitimate concern about some people's actions.
And in any case, Russell is commenting on what we know of what the Police knew. If the Police were required to know to the standards of proof necessary to obtain conviction before they could act at all, then we would never have any trials based on search/interception warrants because the whole point of those warrants is to get the evidence.
It's quite a reasonable observation, IMO, based on what's been reported, that at least some of those arrested were acting in ways that could give rise to legitimate concerns about possible danger posed by them toward others. That's not pre-judgment of the trial, or the persons. Even if they are found not guilty it still doesn't change the validity of the observation, it merely says that their actions weren't of a criminal standard.
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I feel very uneasy about messing with the status of a national park.
By making it a national park under Tuhoe stewardship? Which, as I understand the proposal, was what it would've been.
If there's no change to access, why is this such a scary concept?As for the delay due to the size of the courtroom, although trials with multiple defendants are becoming more common with drug conspiracy charges they're still distinctly in a minority. Adding a new courtroom to the existing Auckland High Court would be quite a difficult task, given the building's design and construction. The need to provide secure access to the holding cells and the judges' chambers from the new room(s) without compromising the security of existing rooms would be tricky to achieve. All the more so that the existing courtrooms would have to remain usable throughout construction activity.
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Paul, I don't think that warning is sufficiently strident, but I also don't know how to make it more so. Maybe some mistakes just have to be made.
And, really, you haven't lived on the 'net (I was going to say tubes, but thought that might be a bit too rough) if you haven't seen it at least once. -
Thanks for this post, Graeme. It's nice to have something to throw back at all the people whinging about how Parliament did some terrible thing by voting down the Bill. Admittedly the vote wasn't framed in terms of a Bill that's so structurally flawed as to makes its very presentation a mockery of statutory drafting, but it did at least ensure that the public weren't faced with trying to comment on something so bizarre and unworkable as Locke's law.
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Am I the only one who finds Richard Dawkins and the other "atheism uber alles" usual suspects to be at least as objectionable as overtly in-your-face religious types? What's the difference between his "There is only one truth, and that's my truth" and that of organised religions?