Posts by Moz
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Hard News: Media Take: the poor health…, in reply to Hilary Stace,
For those clinicians and others unfamiliar with
... traditional masculinity, expression of the permitted emotion (anger) can look very much like a psychotic episode.
Where does the act draw the line between "minority" and the rest, and what exactly defines "mental disorder"?
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Hard News: Behind those Herald…, in reply to Alfie,
Didn't Jesus
You forget, today is Good Friday when we celebrate murdering that trouble-making son of a god. In other news, some prophet gets a weekend holiday in heaven before being sent back down "but daaaad!!" "get back down there and clean that mess up" "it's not faaaiiiiirrr! You never let me do what I want".
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Hard News: Behind those Herald…, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Islam's issue is charging interest, not banking itself. A point which seems to pass by many of SWB's detractors.
It's almost the same prohibition on usury that Christians have. Not that you'd know that from watching the Christians. There's an interesting summary of the subject here. I looked at using an Islamic bank when buying our house, but they weren't entirely sure they wanted to deal with non-Muslims. I suspect some of their security is of the form "you wouldn't want to turn up to the mosque and face us if you defaulted".
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Hard News: Behind those Herald…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
a 15 year old buying a house
I'm amazed that he could persuade the court that he should be allowed to do that. Normal children can't sign contracts until they're 18, even if they have guarantors. The common practice is for the parents to pretend that they're carrying out the transactions or to form a trust, but that article suggests neither trick was used. The risk for the child is that parents may not want to recognise their ownership once they turn 18...
I'm surprised the media aren't bringing up the equally useless idea of buying houses that are worth nearly nothing due to being in areas of negative demand. The under $25,000 end of the market has quite a few properties available.
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Hard News: Behind those Herald…, in reply to Matthew Poole,
massively reduce the number of people moving to Auckland. ... How, exactly, would you do that
I'd say via most immigrants live in Auckland, we want fewer immigrants in Auckland, we don't have the means to stop them moving where they like once they're here... ergo, we need to permit fewer immigrants.
I don't think that would make anywhere near as much difference as the next suggestion: stop non-citizens or non-residents buying real estate. I'm not sure that that would be easy, and it might crash the market (especially if existing non-resident owners were required to divest)
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Hard News: Behind those Herald…, in reply to Glenn Pearce,
Nah, that's because the curve has changed as much as anything else. The extreme ends used to be much closer to the centre before, now the richest are pushing the average up more because they have 100x the average wealth rather than 10x.
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Hard News: Behind those Herald…, in reply to Kumara Republic,
How does it compare to the Sutherland Shire, where the Cronulla riots happened a bit over a decade ago?
People fighting over surf breaks and arguing about $50,000+ cars are not really the criminal elements most people fear. In that area you're far more likely to get run off the road by a new-ish Range Rover occupied by someone checking Facebook than beaten up by a drug dealer. It's gone from "the bogan beach" to "OMG, a beach in the city!!!" in the last 20 years. Apartments within driving distance of the beach start about $1M but a house near the beach is 3M+.
The Cronulla riots were a locals vs outsiders problem, which you get at beachside suburbs. There was a huge element of using talkback radio to arrange a fight and it's a bit hard to untangle the politics as a result (radio host Alan Jones is explicitly not part of any of the groups in the riot except perhaps the police command group).
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Hard News: Behind those Herald…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
"for a decent quality home"... let us hope that that is what Ngai Tahu Incorporated is being forced to build, because we desperately need to see that become the new normal. I don't have any confidence that they would choose to do so.
But that is a whole other topic: what does a decent home cost, and why don't companies build them and people buy them?
I just built a wildly over-expensive 2.4x3.6m sleepout in our backyard ($6000!! - yes, I counted) but it is insulated and very comfortable. To the point where it has changed how I feel about the whole house, it's become "my lovely bedshed with that pile of brickwork shielding it from the road".
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Hard News: Behind those Herald…, in reply to Joe Wylie,
The Tintin cover is brilliant!
first inner-city Sydney job the company smartarse
Ah yes, the Lesser Australian Dickhead, a promiscuous species seen in a wide variety of habitats throughout the country. An introduced species, commonly regarded as a pest if not a plague, very resilient in the face of attempts to control its behaviour or limit the population.
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Hard News: Behind those Herald…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
firstly, property inflation gains are undertaxed
I think it would be more accurate to say that capital gains after inflation are undertaxed. Australia used to do this explicitly, taxing everything after inflation when you sold the property. It was quite straightforward and seemed fair to most people.
But Howard "simplified" that with a 50% discount instead of indexing, which encouraged people to trade properties more often when there was higher inflation. The win for Howard was that more trading = more stamp duty, and stamp duty goes to the state governments so he could cut their funding and they wouldn't whine. But the day the house trading encouragement goes away is the day state revenue collapses.
I think we should go (back) to indexing asset values and taxing the gains.
One thing NSW at least does is a land tax based on total value of all the land you own. House you live in is exempt, as is social housing, but it's a progressive tax - this is why you don't see giant megacorps owning billions of dollars of property. They would be paying 1% of land value every year, instead of the 0.1% that a single sub-%500k investment property costs you. Again, I think that this is a good idea but the exemption for your house should be 50% ort less, rather than 100%. Instead of stamp duty, preferably.