Posts by Moz
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Legal Beagle: Fact-checking Parliament:…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
some places overseas was that you had a local education authority that was elected (often it was the local council)
I'm pretty comfortable at an NZ scale saying we do the same thing - about 5M people elect a government that runs the education system. Letting parents/guardians vote for who supervises their local school is pretty reasonable, but I'm not convinced that uninvolved adults would put the work in to cast an informed vote.
Unfortunately on some issues random people have strong opinions, and some of those opinions wrt education are terrible. I fear things like the religious wrong block voting anti-evolution, anti-sex members onto boards (Australia is suffering a bad case of incompetent loonies interfering right now - "Safe Schools" for example. Plus the whole funding disaster, but that's an unrelated topic).
So on balance, nope, average citizens should get to vote for the very top level (government), those directly involved can vote for what their kids deal with.
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Per Hilary, I suspect that people old enough to vote but still imprisoned as children can probably vote. Or do they automatically get transferred to adult prison when they reach voting age?
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Polity: Geography and housing options, in reply to Paul Campbell,
eruption to do something about the housing bubble
As long as it's not "Mount Taupo goes to London for OE" scale I'd be ok with that.
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Polity: Geography and housing options, in reply to Paul Campbell,
Auckland's only really using one of those harbours ....
You think that if used correctly fracking technology could encourage Rangitoto Island to fill in one of them, allowing it to be used for housing?
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DPF's point is, I think, very valid. We should find a big area of flat land and build a city in the centre to replace Auckland. That way the new city can expand out in all directions as required. For a city of 2M you probably want plains at least 100km across, which means building it.... in Australia :)
Or do what Australia, Japan and even Texas do, and put fast-ish trains in to link the outer "suburbs" to the CBD. If you could sit on the train from Hamilton for 30 minutes and be in Auckland it'd be quite reasonable to live there. As many Shinkasen commuters will testify, it's not the distance that matters, it's the travel time.
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Polity: Flaccid balloon, mite-ridden bees, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
a 100% tax on capital gains above a certain price/GV ratio
The old Australian system was actually good IMO. They taxed the after-inflation gain on all assets at your personal tax rate (with spreading over I think 3 years). So if you owned a house for 20 years then sold it, you only got taxed at the real gain, not the raw dollar figure (because over 20 years inflation alone is likely to double the dollar figure).
Then Howard decided to encourage churn in the housing market to help the states (who tax the churn rather than having a land tax). So now we pay tax on house price gains, but get a 50% discount on investment properties and 100% on the house we live in, if we meet some rules based on "people do X, which is bad, so X is banned"... after ten years it's 3 pages of weird questions. It means that if you own a house for 20 years you pay tax on much of the inflation, but if you only hold it for 3 years you only pay tax on half the profit. Oh, except for superannuation funds, including "self managed super funds", which pay tax at a rate of 15% regardless of your personal/marginal rate.
Australia is both a good example of how you can do this, and of how you can really screw things up.
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Polity: Flaccid balloon, mite-ridden bees, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Why does Auckland need a Government House?
It's less why the country needs it, and more what its value is. The current incumbent would no doubt be happy to knock it down and replace it with a modern collection of "first home buyer apartments starting from $1M" or somesuch, but unless the land is cleared first I expect no private enterprise will touch it. Getting permission to clear the site would be only the first problem.
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Hard News: Labour's medical cannabis…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
I can see why you'd leave out alcohol and tobacco
Plus it makes the graphs easier to draw, no need for a break in the axis or a log scale.
The whole "cause of death" thing is complex. Still, better here than in the US where "death associated with cannibis use" probably means "shot by a cop".
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Polity: A wilting rose, in reply to SHG,
Au contraire, Labour needs to keep Mallard, King, Goff, Cosgrove, and all the other troughers around so the voting public
The problem is that the people who most revile the troughers are giving up on voting. If those people were still voting, and voting vaguely green/left then Labour hanging on to its hacks would be a major win. But since those people are just not voting, Labour keeping the hacks means ceding government to the right.
I am not as optimistic as Rob about what's happening. Key is committing NZ to long term problems while spreading enough soft left nonsense around to keep the peasants from revolting. It doesn't matter how you dress it up, ever-increasing pollution, increasing poverty and falling living standards outside the 1% are not "wins for the left", but they are core business for the right.
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On a slightly related note, bigger councils might not be better - new research in Oz suggests that especially forced amalgamations can easily lead to diseconomies of scale: https://theconversation.com/do-mergers-make-for-better-councils-the-evidence-is-against-bigger-is-better-for-local-government-56813