Posts by Paul Campbell
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crap, looking at that graph I must have started this, I came back from my OE in 2004 and bought my house for cash, no mortgage …..
seriously though people moving to NZ with money is one cause of this, all in all that’s probably a good thing for the larger economy (wealth transfer inwards) though not so good for the Auckland housing market.
Just like looking at surnames it doesn’t prove directly that “people overseas are buying up our houses” more like that people with alternative sources of financing are buying our houses.
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Having lived in/with both systems I'd like to descibe the experience I had getting my gall bladder out in the US .... I had really good minsurance ... took me close to 6 months to get a referal and then an an appointment with a specialist, 3-4 more months of intense pain futzing around doing diagnostics and trying meds that didn't cost anything, then a sonogram, a diagnosis and an operation within a week.
My wife had the same thing in NZ a decade later, here it was the opposite ... a specialist and a diagnosis within 3 weeks .... then on a (long) waiting list for an operation (after the pain I'd been through we paid the full cost of a private operation pourselves, probably 1/10th what we'd have paid in the US).
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What I'm not hearing from Labour is whether or not they will withdraw from the treaty if it is signed by National and they subsequently regain power.
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Today's Tremain
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I also doubt charter schools could claim their education is OK because of the placebo effect, so homeopathy has one up on them there
Really though one needs to take Slater's site's pronouncements with a large grain of salt (rock sized) one thing "Dirty Politics" showed us his voice and his web site is available for hire, likely we're simply seeing the words of the highest bidder.
Now I'm off to get the fire hose and make some nice strong homeopathic beer
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Polity: House-buying patterns in Auckland, in reply to Katharine Moody,
And at the same time, wages were still inflating and Cullen didn’t move the tax brackets (he took advantage of ‘bracket creep’).
so did Muldoon during 70s hyper-inflation – in fact I suspect just about every finance minister does this, it’s a situation where you actively have to do something that makes your life worse, inaction is probably easy.
Ideally we should have brackets (and benefits, and the minimum wage, and ….) tied to an inflation index
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Polity: House-buying patterns in Auckland, in reply to Sacha,
Sacha doesn't Australia have a law that prohibits foreign house purchasers from buying existing dwellings? .... the only way they CAN buy one is by building a new one.
Mind you they also charge foreign real estate investors 30-45% capital gains tax
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There's an easy way to test all this - the NZ dollar just got worth a whole lot less (hooray!, I'm an exporter I ....) if Auckland house prices follow the RMB (or the US$) - jump up by ~20% again then yes, Auckland real estate is being bought up by off-shore investors, if they follow the NZ$ and don;t suddenly jump they're probably not so much.
Of course if you are worried about the effect of immigrants on Auckland house prices simply do what we've done in the past and require new immigrants to settle somewhere else ... of course National would have to reopen all the Dept of Immigration offices they've closed around the country over the past few years
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Polity: Gay marriage, weed, and death…, in reply to TracyMac,
in the US, you get tax breaks just for being married
Well only sort of, mostly all you get to do the equivalent of income averaging - you file jointly and the progressive tax steps are adjusted accordingly.
Mind you I guess in the US filing jointly is a big tax break simply because you only have to file one return, you get to save 100 pages of paper
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I hear complaints here in Dunedin that there wasn't a similar line queueing around the Octagon ... not because the fans aren't just as 'real, but because the tickets weren't being sold here
