Posts by Matthew Poole
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Hard News: A plea for sanity on the…, in reply to Penny Bright,
Requesting that Parliament declines to proceed with the Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill until the lawfulness of the reliance of Auckland Council on the New Zealand Department of Statistics"high"population growth projections, instead of their “medium” population growth projections for the Auckland Spatial Plan
So we'll hold the whole thing up while we quibble over whether we should be catering for 700k more people or 1m more people? For fuck's sake!
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Speaker: Generation Zero: Let's Grow Up, in reply to Jim Welch,
The way I understand what is proposed
What's proposed is sane. What many opponents are calling for, though, is actual decentralisation; many business centres spread across the city, spread out the employment, etc. The town centres will have small clusters of employment, frequently dedicated to servicing the locality. The opponents want region-focussed businesses to be spread around the region so that the CBD doesn't continue to dominate. "Share the wealth" is how one proponent phrased it.
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Speaker: Generation Zero: Let's Grow Up, in reply to Jim Welch,
It’s what a place is like to live for the average person which is a real test of its ‘livability’.
Auckland is getting there in some ways, but some of the proposed "solutions" will destroy much of the headway that's been made in recent years. The calls to decentralise and stop focussing on the CBD, for example, would deprive an area that's reviving of the people on which said revival relies.
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Speaker: Generation Zero: Let's Grow Up, in reply to Russell Brown,
the amount of deadweight time involved in getting to and from work drove me nuts.
These days that's no longer the case for people who use public transport, what with smart-this and mobile-that. Drivers, however, are stuck with the grind, though I do at least use my commute to listen to RNZ podcasts.
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Speaker: Generation Zero: Let's Grow Up, in reply to Nathaniel Wilson,
20 minutes from the CBD a generation ago was a long way out though.
20 minutes at peak was still not terribly far. Onehunga or Avondale, maybe.
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Speaker: Generation Zero: Let's Grow Up, in reply to Nathaniel Wilson,
As a general rule, med school loans only get massive (i.e., 6 figures) when the students get suckered into other loans
Six-year degree before specialisation. At this year's rates that's $6,344 (average of the range) for the first year of BHS plus a further five years at $13,274 (total $66,370), coming to $72,714. They're also ineligible for a student allowance for at least years five and six (fuck you very much, Steven Joyce!), meaning living costs that will probably add on another $12k for those two years. Add in course-related costs at a maximum of $1k/year for things like text books and you're already at $90k. They don't need to get "suckered into other loans" to end up with massive figures hanging over them.
You're showing how long ago it was if it only came to $50k for you to get that much education. A bog-standard Bachelor of Arts from U.Auckland runs to over $15k these days, and that's just for tuition.
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On the topic of the age gap, one of the things that really makes me furious is that those of us in our 20s and 30s who're trying to get onto the property ladder are being told to moderate our aims by those already on it. Those people saying that are, largely, middle-aged, and got on the ladder when it was completely affordable to buy a first home within a 20-minute peak-hour drive of the CBD. Now affordable means looking an hour out, or leaving home at sparrow's fart to avoid the ever-earlier-starting peak hour crawl. Or it means buying a home so scungy that no self-respecting squatter would touch it when faced with freezing to death.
We don't even get the option of affordable new homes, because those on the ladder want McMansions whose mortgages they're servicing with the rental income from their five investment properties; so the developers are building McMansions, because that's where the real money is. -
Speaker: Generation Zero: Let's Grow Up, in reply to Jim Welch,
I appreciate that it is harder to get into the Auckland property market than it was a generation ago, but somehow I think young doctors will be fine.
Young doctors have six figures of student loan hanging over them, with mandatory repayments consuming 12 cents in every dollar they earn above about $20k. Servicing an inner-Auckland-sized mortgage as they try to think about starting a family while also paying off their education? Yeah, nah.
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Legal Beagle: Kim Dotcom and the GCSB, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
I think the activity that various people upthread 8 months ago considered unthinkable *was* actually happening.
Under non-existent legislation, however. GCSB didn't have any particular legal mandate (or constraint) at the time this testing apparently happened. The case for needing real oversight just keeps on getting stronger and stronger.
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OnPoint: What Andrew Geddis Said, But…, in reply to Hilary Stace,
More power-grabbing by National. This time they're taking away Auckland Council's power to set regional transport policy, instead requiring Auckland Transport to be "consistent with" the Government Policy Statement on Land Transport. Following any of the Council's plans is subordinated to the GPSoLT.
Needless to say the current GPSoLT (the GPS concept was Labour's creation, but each government produces its own) is heavy on the Roads of Dubious Significance and very light on anything else; including maintenance of local roads, never mind that dirty public transport thing.