Posts by Russell Brown
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Speaker: Identification strategy: Now…, in reply to nzlemming,
Dear Russell, when the hell are we going to get an NZ English spell checker on PAS??? I’m tired of the squiggly red lines every time I time I type “Labour”
I'm fairly sure that's not our spellchecker. I think it'll be your American-made web browser.
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Speaker: Identification strategy: Now…, in reply to BenWilson,
If they did this on purpose for well-calculated reasons – and it works – we Chinese-sounding named people are in way more trouble in New Zealand than we ever thought we would be again.
The most chilling part is that it might work
The distant panicky noises I hear suggest to me they're not as well prepared as they would be if they'd planned it this way.
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Speaker: Identification strategy: Now…, in reply to Tze Ming Mok,
Oh yeah, and here’s the last chunk of my submitted post that Russell probably cut for brevity,
Argh! I thought I’d selected all the text except for the footnote, which wouldn’t select, so I just pasted in what selected + footnote.
I’ll fix that now. Sorry!
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OnPoint: My last name sounds Chinese, in reply to blue_pen,
Keith Ng stop your moaning we’re trying to solve a problem not stitch up the local Chinese.
On what I had expected to be a quiet weekend, we're doing a pretty good job of arguing about a very sensitive topic without it turning into a shitfight.
This is particularly welcome given that people on either side of the argument blog on this site. But you telling a longtime blogger here to "stop your moaning" doesn't help. Show some respect, please.
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Speaker: Identification strategy: Now…, in reply to Heather W.,
James Cameron was buying what was deemed as sensitive land (farmland over 5ha or over 3ha near waterways) so needed OIO approval. If he was buying townhouses in Auckland may not have needed to follow the same processes.
Yes, exactly.
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Thomas Lumley of StatsChat weighs in:
Personally, I’d guess that all these explanations are true: that Chinese New Zealanders (on average) buy both homes and investment properties more than other New Zealanders, and that there are foreign property investors of Chinese ethnicity. But that’s a guess: these data don’t tell us — as the Herald explicitly points out.
One of the repeated points I make on StatsChat is that you need to distinguish between what you measured and what you wanted to measure. Using ‘Chinese’ as a surrogate for ‘foreign’ will capture many New Zealanders and miss out on many foreigners.
The misclassifications aren’t just unavoidable bad luck, either. If you have a measure of ‘foreign real estate ownership’ that includes my next-door neighbours and excludes James Cameron, you’re doing it wrong, and in a way that has a long and reprehensible political history.
But on top of that, if there is substantial foreign investment and if it is driving up prices, that’s only because of the artificial restrictions on the supply of Auckland houses. If Auckland could get its consent and zoning right, so that more money meant more homes, foreign investment wouldn’t be a problem for people trying to find somewhere to live. That’s a real problem, and it’s one that lies within the power of governments to solve.
I suppose the difference is that we already know what and where James Cameron is buying because the Overseas Investment Office is obliged to record and approve it and publish the details.
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Just to note: I don't think Labour can blame the Herald for the framing of the story. I gather the angle was pretty much how they wanted it, despite the concerns of some wiser heads on the editorial staff.
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I don’t have any problem with the suggestion that foreign PRC-based investors are buying loads of houses in New Zealand (as are foreign white people but no-one cares about them, because the narrative is about predation from China, not our own stupid lack of regulation).
It would be surprising if no there was no one trying to speculate in our housing market given given the terrible regulation and until recently trivially-avoided capital gains tax.
On the other hand, there literally aren’t any other countries where the conditions are like those in China. The government’s determination to hold down interest rates has made bank deposits and bonds relatively unattractive and credit so cheap that huge numbers of retail traders borrow money to buy shares in the two stock markets (and, incredibly, the government responded to to the recent slump by pumping in money to make it easier for them to borrow). There are trillions of dollars in capital and credit looking for places to go.
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Just to kick things off, here's a more detailed explanation from Rob Salmond of his methodology.
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Polity: House-buying patterns in Auckland, in reply to SHG,
How the fuck do you tell someone’s ethnicity from their surname?
Quite reliably, actually. As Tze Ming notes in the other thread, the top names are all Mainland Chinese names using PRC-standardised spellings.
The problem is whether the analysis can say anything strong enough about residential status, which is the actual issue.
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