Posts by Keith Ng
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Maori Seats:
Please - read the stuff I wrote in 2005. Here and here.
Not all overhangs are equal, nor all tactical voting. Yes - it's very smart for Maori Party supporters on the Maori roll to tactical vote and gain 7 seats *and* pump another 3% of party vote to Labour, but it's an abysmal failure for the electoral system (with the Maori seats) to let this happen.
The Maori seats were conceived to give Maori representation in Parliament at a time when there was no way they could get there, because we were a FPP system, Maori were few and dispersed, and the general electorate would never vote for a Maori MP. With MMP, none of those arguments stand.
And would the Maori Party fall under the threshold if there were no Maori seats? I doubt it, as a huge number of tactical voters double-dipping with a Maori Party-Labour split vote would give their party vote to the MP to keep it alive. But if not, then you've got to ask - can a party that's unable to get 1/3 of Maori votes really claim to represent Maori?
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(Note to self: Don't put *two* contentious threads in the same post.)
AIA:
1) Local investors, especially large, local, listed investors, are more easy to persuade, cajole or coerce, simply because they have many other business interests here. Political and public pressure would actually have some influence.
2) The benefit that the Herald was alluding to, I think, was what Hickey was talking about. Not so much that there's additional benefit to be gained from foreign investment, but that we're already its bitch, with our spending habits requiring constant flow of foreign investment to feed it.
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e.g. Rather than build a terminal extension to increase capacity, they might choose to increase fees to price out less profitable flights to, I dunno, Chile or something. It doesn't have to be dramatic or malicious to have a big flow-on impact for the rest of the country.
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Damian, I was pleased when our mutual Doctor friend finally conceded that Obama was, in fact, our Lord and Saviour.
I'm with Russell and Don. His oratory isn't an appeal to base instincts, but to - as another fancypants, wishy-washy orator put it - the better angels of our nature.
Obama totally touched me in my special place. Politics that engage on a moral, rather than pocketbook, level; an America that gives a shit. Even if Clin-ton can manage the economy better, can create more jobs and provide better healthcare, is that really more valuable than someone who can restore a sense of dignity and direction to the nation?
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Oh Che, all that disposable income and soon-to-be-debt-free lifestyle is bound to make you soft! Soft, I tell you!
(Hey, I've got to justify being poor somehow, and I think virtue ethics is the easier way to go here.)
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And salaries are for pussies.
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Being freelance –as far as parents are concerned at least– is clearly synonymous with "job seeker".
Welcome to the club, Damian. It took three years of not starving to demonstrate to my parents that I am, in fact, not unemployed. However, they probably just assume that I'm dealing drugs now, because surely, nobody can make a living with just journalism...
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That Wrightspeed X1 is awesome. Could be awesomely dangerous too! A car that can get to 100kmh in 30m making about as much noise as an air conditioning unit would catch a lot of people by surprise.
You mean, like this (NSFW)?
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Yikes - hefty contribution there, Christopher. You make excellent points.
About the surpluses, yes, they are partly a result of Treasury's underestimation of revenue, but the government was budgeting for a surplus anyway - the accident of history just added to the scope.
And yes, they're partly a result of decreasing costs in social spending, too, but I don't think that the action of automatic stabilisers detract from Cullen's cred as a Keynesian economist.
And I didn't suggest that he needs to run a constant surplus. The whole point of running a surplus is so that you can spend it at some point down the line. I think you mistook me on this point.
But the point we're trying to address here is whether Cullen ran a surplus with the specific intention of saving up for a fiscal stimulus package at some point down the line, right? That this point wasn't at 2006 or 2007 and that revenues remained strong doesn't detract from that.
The point I'm trying to make is that there was money that could have been spent that wasn't - that Cullen's political efforts ensured that the surplus was higher than it would otherwise have been under a National or even another Labour Finance Minister, and that this effort was part of his active interventionist outlook. I can't read his mind, of course, so it could well be political expediency rather than doctrinal adherence that's driving him, but my point is that this was a long time coming.
In support of your argument, I've just reread this interview I did with him in 2005, where he says:
I believe that one of the secrets of fiscal management is to allow the automatic stabilisers to work as best as you can, rather than actually acting consciously pro-cyclically or counter-cyclically, which assumes you can pick when the turning points are.
It's bad enough the Reserve Bank having to make those decisions, it's terrible if you've got someone else in the economy trying to make them as well - and probably making different ones.
The thing that went wrong with Keynesian fiscal management in the post-War era - and you can see it in this election campaign - it very easily degenerates into one-sided Keynesianism, where you spend at the top of the cycle, because you can afford to do so, and you borrow at the bottom of the cycle, because you need to to stimulate the economy - and so you're *always* turning towards a deficit! [laughs] And so you're always building up debt, and never paying it off! [laughs]
Will have more of think about this.
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Phil - I appreciate the trade-off that you're talking about, but we don't trade freedom for other freedoms, we trade freedom for our safety, for security, for prosperity, for rights.
Freedom is the lack of restriction on our actions. Being better informed is something that's good, and it contributes to our capacity to participate in a democracy, but it's not freedom.
(Sometimes, however, we do trade freedoms for other freedoms. e.g. We can't coerce, blackmail or enslave other people.)