The Herald reports:

After a grim Newshub-Reid Research Poll for Labour saw the party trailing National by 8.4 per cent, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern told interviewers on her weekly morning media round that Labour’s internal polling had the two parties effectively neck and neck – and appeared to goad supporters into making those tightly-held polls public.

“Now in our polling, which is regular, National and Labour are neck and neck. And so that feels like a fairly accurate representation right now,” Ardern told TVNZ’s Breakfast programme, noting that media companies tend to poll less frequently than political parties.

Ardern made similar remarks on RNZ’s Morning Report and expressed some surprise that the figures had not entered the public domain, presumably by being leaked.

“I’m surprised they haven’t come out because they are often party of corporate briefings by the company that does ours [polls]. I’m sure they’ll find a way out,” Ardern said.

The Herald later obtained the most recent figures from Labour’s internal pollster, Talbot Mills. They are from the organisation’s October poll.

The poll had Labour and National on 35 per cent each, with Act on 11 per cent and the Greens on 9 per cent. NZ First were on 4 per cent while Te Pati Maori were on 2.2 per cent.

This is almost hilarious. Because the Newshub Reid Research poll conducted in late October and early November was bad for Labour, she demanded someone leak the Talbot Mills corporate poll to refute it. The only problem is that poll was done almost a month earlier, in late September and early October.

I did wonder why the PM didn’t simply release her own internal polling, which is done daily?

Bernard Hickey writes:

In an unprecedented move in the modern history of our political economy, finance minister Grant Robertson yesterday defied the publicly stated objections of the opposition and reappointed Adrian Orr as Reserve Bank governor for a full second five-year term, effectively destroying what remains of the bank’s record since 1989 of it being seen to be politically independent and above the partisan politics of the day.

That 33-year-long era of neither major political party either publicly attacking the bank or expressing a lack of confidence in its governor is now over, leaving financial markets to hope that if National-Act is elected next November that Orr either stands down immediately, or is dismissed and replaced without too much fuss before he has to make any big decisions that clash with the new government’s views.

National tried to avoid this scenario by proposing a one year extension to allow the next Government to consider the issue. But Robertson has appointed Orr through to March 2028 – past the 2023 and 2026 elections.

The Reserve Bank’s decisions essentially added $1 trillion to the wealth of home-owning households and it was clear in public to everyone except the Reserve Bank, Treasury and the finance minister’s office.

The repeated denials that anything much had changed or was wrong became laughable. A range of Treasury and Reserve Bank papers even went so far as to say it was not clear that quantitative easing had widened inequality, even though both Robertson and Orr were advised in those frantic days at the beginning of covid that QE would make the wealthy much wealthier.

The refusal of both Adrian Orr and Grant Robertson to acknowledge any mistakes or publicly have any regrets has been the final straw.

They’re still trying to blame everything on others.

The moment it broke in public was earlier this year when inflation refused to cooperate with the plan and blew out to 7.2%. It is not expected to get back down into the legislated and agreed target range of 1-3% for another couple of years.

The Reserve Bank’s recent annual report and statement of intent don’t even mention the failure to hit the bank’s inflation target. It’s as if it never happened. It also wasn’t mentioned in Robertson’s reappointment letter.

Incredible – not even a mention of their biggest failure!

A good profile of James Meager at Stuff.

His first memory is of police coaxing him out from under a bed. Now James Meager, who grew up in a Timaru state house, wants to be Rangitata’s next MP. …

He grew up in south Timaru, with the Road Knights around the corner and cousins in the Mongrel Mob.

“I think about that sometimes, whether there is a thing in my life that made me go down one pathway and not the other,” he says.

“My first living memory is being sort of coaxed out from underneath the bed by a police officer.”

His parents separated when he was 4, and his mother left to raise three kids, of which he was the eldest.

50 years ago National MPs came from relatively privileged backgrounds and Labour MPs did not. Now it seems to have reversed with many National (and ACT) MPs coming from very challenging backgrounds, while more and more Labour MPs are from the comfortable middle class.

He is upfront about the time he woke up to find a letter delivered to his room at Selwyn College, in Dunedin, while he was a second year student.

The letter requested he leave the college that day, following an incident the previous night when he threw a drink over a student, frying their laptop.

Meager is upfront about his time at university, describing himself as loud-mouthed, obnoxious and opinionated.

Some of that behaviour came after drinking alcohol – which incidentally he hasn’t touched for two years – and included sleeping in people’s gardens rather than walking home after a night of binge-drinking in his high school days.

And I once vomited in a church (during a service) because I had drunk three bottles of Baileys the night before, when I was at Otago. Many students had experiences at university that do not define them.

One News reports:

An Auckland homeowner who says she was advised to sell up and move out to get away from unruly Kāinga Ora neighbours has taken a complaint to the Ombudsman.

After enduring five years of illegal drag racing, loud parties and street fighting, the woman said she was horrified when a Kāinga Ora representative suggested she move because there was little the housing agency could do to help her.

They are the worst landlords in New Zealand – terrible for tenants and terrible for neighbours.

She estimated she and her husband had called noise control more than 50 times and contacted police about 30 times since 2017.

Earlier this year, police told her they were Kāinga Ora properties and to seek help from the agency.

The woman said an agency representative told her it was difficult to move the tenants.

Don’t move them. Evict them. It’s what happened before Labour took office. Bad behaviour should have consequences.

“She said ‘we can’t move them. It’s really hard – where are we going to move them? It’s just moving the problem somewhere else.

“‘And, you know, it’s just kinda how it is. We don’t have a lot of places to put these people and we’ll just try and get them to sort it out.

“‘It’s the government policy which makes it just about impossible for us to move difficult tenants’.”

The woman said a Kāinga Ora staff member rubbed salt in the wound – suggesting she move out.

“She kinda said to me ‘why don’t you move?’, and I said ‘because I own my bloody house that’s why and why the bleeding heck would I move, I’m not the one causing trouble’.”

The sad thing is this damages the reputation of all state house tenants – the vast majority of whom are great law abiding tenants.

Ten years ago I’d happily live in an area with state houses, as the then Housing NZ would require good behaviour from tenants. Now is it any surprise there is huge hostility to new developments when existing home owners realise that Kainga Ora will do nothing.

This post is by PaulL, a regular commentor and occasional contributor. It is the sixteenth post in a series on the financial incentives to work and the impacts of our tax and transfer system on household formation, and the ninth post on the “what could we do” subsection. The index to all posts in the series can be found here.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time (some would say an interminable time) articulating what I see as the current disincentives in our tax and transfer system, and some options for what we’d do about them.

To my mind the current system has too many people on a benefit at a time when work is plentiful, and we’re getting worse not better. This is saving up trouble for the future – we need everyone to have a productive life, and contributing to society is part of that. We also cannot be serious about people having equal opportunity if some people fundamentally cannot even get on the first rung of their working life.

If National in particular are serious about a social investment approach, then surely this area is one of the best social investments we can make? If we can get people off a benefit and into work then we change their lives.

This post covers to what I’d do to make progress on this problem if I was leader of a major political party. 

Morgan Godfery writes:

Last week ANZ, New Zealand’s largest bank, posted a $2.3 billion profit. For that kind of cash the Government could double operating funding for the education system, it could hire the 4000 nurses the health system desperately needs and then some, and it could settle historic Treaty of Waitangi breaches all over again.

The “good” news is that ANZ pays tax on its before tax profit.. Sadly it probably won’t see 1,000 more nurses or a 25% increase in education funding – but that is because of Government priorities.

I’m surprised Morgan seems unaware of corporate tax.

Or maybe he is aware and is advocating that the tax rate on companies should be 100% – as trialed so successfully in the USSR and North Korea.

Yet that $2.3b – made from the mortgage interest, credit card fees and other bank charges that ordinary people pay – will accrue to the world’s very wealthiest few. In a country where inflation is running at 7.2%, and the cost of living continues to increase, multibillion-dollar profit-making is obscene.

Actually that profit will go to anyone who has a KiwiSaver account or retirement fund that has shares in ANZ. ANZ is not owned by a few billionaires. All of the top 10 shareholders are fund managers who represent tens of millions of investors.

And profit alone is almost meaningless without context such as the size of the company, and what the return on capital is. A $2 billion profit on $4 billion equity is a huge profit, but a $2 billion profit on a $15 billion equity is not as large.

ANZ operates in a tiny market of a mere 5 million people, but its profits would make financiers in London and New York blush.

Not really. Banks in Australia have had profits of $6 billion, in the UK around $20 billion and US around $66 billion.

But 2022 is different. The Reserve Bank is increasing interest rates sharply, meaning rents and mortgages are becoming more and more expensive. The cost of borrowing for business increases too. The cost of servicing business debts rises while cashflow falls as struggling households slash their spending on consumption. Jobs could soon be lost.

As the OCR rises, it is true mortgage rates increase and bank revenue, but so does the cost of their borrowing. Also defaults sadly probably increase.

The answer to that issue though isn’t Marxism, but maybe looking at the policy advocated by Trevor Mallard where the Reserve Bank can change KiwiSaver contribution rates as an additional tool, rather than only have the OCR as a lever.

Steve Todd kindly sent me details of the STV count in Wellington. Thought people would be interested in some of the details.

1. 1st preferences – Whanau 43%, Eagle 17%, Foster 16%, Chung 14%
2. McDonald preferences went 32% Whanau, 16% Chung, 13% Foster, 12% Eagle
3. Blake preferences went 42% Whanau, 12% Eagle, 11% Foster, 9% Chung
4. McKenzie preferences went 42% Chung, 14% Whanau, 11% Eagle and Foster
5. Hastie preferences went 37% Whanau, 20% Foster, 16% Eagle and Chung
6. Dudfield preferences went 58% Chung, 18% Foster, 12% Whanau, 11% Eagle
7. Chung preferences went 49% Foster, 28% Whanau, 23% Eagle

Whanau was in 1st place at every preference.

Eagle was in 2nd place on the first five counts and slipped to 3rd place on the 6th and 7th count.

Foster was in 3rd place on the first five counts and then 2nd for the last two counts.

Auckland University released:

However, the academics’ research within four New Zealand-based organisations, which involved worker observation, in-depth interviews, document collection, and ad hoc discussions with participants, uncovered a culture around humour within one business that wasn’t entirely funny.

“I didn’t want to get into what I call the dark side of humour, but I found it, and our paper investigates the relationship between humour and bullying and suggests that this type of bullying can be even more insidious and difficult to address because the use of humour creates a smokescreen, which to some extent protects the perpetrator,” says Dr Plester.

In the (now defunct) business, which had less than 30 employees, the researchers observed sexualised, dominating, and hierarchical humour. However, all of the employees said they didn’t consider it to be bullying.

If none of the 30 employees thought it was bullying, then maybe it wasn’t?

I recall working in my 20s at an advertising agency where the Friday night drinks conversation was reasonably sexualised, but mainly by the women. One staffer asked all the guys if we were circumcised or not. Other times they would talk about how size does matter.

A notable feature of the company in which humour appeared to cross a line, says Plester was the ‘culture of fun’ that prevailed, and that was explicitly recognised by all staff. Jokes, pranks, physical horseplay, banter, and many so-called fun and humorous interactions were constantly enacted and displayed as part of the workplace culture, according to the study.

On the surface, life in the organisation seemed to be a whirlwind of fun and laughter. However, in confidential interviews, Plester heard some staff admit that some of the humour went too far, had the potential to cause harm, and in some instances, employees said that humour and fun had resulted in physical and psychological harm.

“There were people that got picked on more than others, they didn’t say they were being bullied, but there are reasons why you would do that. Belonging was more important than calling out humour that they found confronting or distasteful.

“Although the interactions we looked at were unanimously identified as humour by all staff members, our interpretation and construction suggest that these joking social behaviours can be perceived as bullying.”

It is hard to judge this workplace without details, but fun should never cause harm. But what is harm? At Parliament one of my colleagues (who may or may not have gone on to be a National Party Deputy Leader) was terrified of spiders. I changed her screen saver to a full size photo of a scary tarantula and she ran out of her office screaming and wouldn’t go back in until I removed it. Did that cause harm? Probably less harm that when I persuaded her to attend a fundraising premiere of LOTR: Return of the King with me!

The 2022 mid terms were basically terrible for the Republicans. They have gone backwards in the Senate, backwards with Governorships and they look like they will only pick up half a dozen seats net in the House.

This is atypical. On average the party not holding the Presidency gains 28 House seats and five Senate seats. Add into the mix that there was a cost of living crisis and a President with very low approval rating and you would normally expect them to have gained 35+ House seats.

The Dobbs decision on abortion was no doubt a factor, but it is clear from the results that candidate quality was also a large factor. There was a huge amount of ticket splitting where people voted differently for Governor and Senate.

In Georgia Brian Kemp was re-elected with a 7% margin while Walker trails by 1% in the Senate. No coincidence that Trump campaigned against Kemp and endorsed Walker.

The problem for the GOP is that Trump has a binary test for endorsements – do you support my fantasy that I actually won the last election. So you have candidates for Governor and Senate who lost what should have been easy races to win. Even worse is that Trump spent large on the primaries but spent almost nothing on the actual general election.

And this week he is going to announce his candidacy for 2024. Six months ago I thought he would win the nomination and win the general election in 2024. Now I think the Republicans will lose if he is the candidate. Yes Biden may be dementing slightly, but we saw in Pennsylvania voters will select an impaired Democrat over a bad Republican candidate.

Trump is obsessed with his loss in 2020, In 2024 he will campaign on just one issue – that he never really lost. This is not how you will win the electoral college.

And he will spend half the campaign attacking anyone in his own party who does not swear fealty to him. A few days before the election he starts attacking Ron DeSantis and since the election Glenn Youngkin.

And now there is a clear alternative in Ron DeSantis. His 20 point victory in Florida was mammoth. He won the Latino vote. Put a 46 year old DeSantis up against 81 year old Joe Biden, and he would crush him.

DeSantis, like Trump, is exceptionally good at fighting the culture war, but unlike Trump he can also govern competently.

The problem for DeSantis is that even if he beats Trump in the primary (if he stands), Trump will either set up a third party and split the vote or attack DeSantis from the sidelines non-stop. So by Trump standing, he possibly guarantees Biden being re-elected.

The best outcome for the Republicans would be Trump gets indicted and convicted for breaching national security laws and DeSantis becomes the candidate.

This post is by PaulL, a regular commentor and occasional contributor. It is tangentially related to the series on effective marginal tax rates and incentives to work. The index to all posts in the series can be found here.

I’ve had some question from commenters on how big the problem is. This post summarises how many people we’ve had on benefits over time in NZ.

MSD have good publications on this, and the material in this post is drawn from their latest fact sheet.

We can see a steady upward trend from the start of this Labour government, then a jump with COVID. Since COVID there has been a steady decrease, but we’re nowhere near the levels prevalent pre-COVID.

The Facts analysed:

• Based on probability, candidates in the first three positions should have won 30% of the elections.
• However, they won 57% – almost twice as many.
• In other words, those 105 candidates in the top three positions won 20 out of 35 elections (a 1 in 5 chance) vs the other 323 candidates who only won 15 of the elections (a 1 in 22 chance).

This is why candidate order should be random, not alphabetical. The surname advantage is quite huge in elections where candidates are not well known.

Kenneth Marcus writes:

Nine different law student groups at the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Law, my own alma mater, have begun this new academic year by amending bylaws to ensure that they will never invite any speakers that support Israel or Zionism. And these are not groups that represent only a small percentage of the student population. They include Women of Berkeley Law, Asian Pacific American Law Students Association, Middle Eastern and North African Law Students Association, Law Students of African Descent and the Queer Caucus. Berkeley Law’s Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, a progressive Zionist, has observed that he himself would be banned under this standard, as would 90% of his Jewish students.

It is worth noting that there are around 100 groups at the School of Law, so those banning are a minority.

A Zionist is simply someone that believes Israel should exist as a Jewish state. It doesn’t mean you support any particular Government of Israel or their policies. It doesn’t mean you support settlements on disputed territory or any particular borders. It just means that you support Israel existing.

Anti-Zionism is flatly antisemitic. Using “Zionist” as a euphemism for Jew is nothing more than a confidence trick. Like other forms of Judeophobia, it is an ideology of hate, treating Israel as the “collective Jew” and smearing the Jewish state with defamations similar to those used for centuries to vilify individual Jews.

Exactly.

A guest post by Owen Jennings:

The Reserve Bank has three roles:

• operating monetary policy, eg by setting the Official Cash Rate (OCR) to keep prices stable
• helping to keep the banking, finance company and insurance sectors running smoothly
• supplying NZ’s money, eg notes and coins

We all know that the Bank has increased staff numbers 78% since Orr was appointed including an extra 15 in his office.  Pray, tell me, what do they do?

Maybe this is the answer below.  They write material totally irrelevant to the Bank’s core business, outside its mandate.  Meanwhile what they have been legislated to do – price stability – they have failed miserably. Accountability, anyone??

Here is an excerpt from the Reserve Bank’s latest Annual Report. 

Te ao Māori.  In our role as kaitiaki of the financial system, we seek to support a thriving Māori economy. We continue to work with a range of stakeholders to progress work on:

• understanding the Māori economy and the challenges around Māori access to capital;

• the Future of Money – Te Moni Anamata;

• better reflecting te ao Māori in the banking sector through our involvement with Tāwhia – Māori Bankers Rōpū; and

• collaborating with our central bank partners as a member of the Central Bank Network for Indigenous Inclusion.

Following the release of the Te Ōhanga Māori – The Māori Economy 2018 report , we are now well underway with our Māori Access to Capital work programme. This work focuses on quantitative and qualitative data to better understand Māori access to capital in the Aotearoa New Zealand economy. Te Waka Hourua – our Te Ao Māori strategy continues to evolve and we are focused, now more than ever, on supporting our people to be more confident in and capable of engaging in te ao Māori. An internal work programme has been launched that will look to support growing capability across Te Pūtea Matua, promote greater representation of Māori and inspire leaders to better understand and reflect our commitment to Te Tiriti o Waitangi in the work we do.

Te Ōhanga Māori – The Māori Economy 2018 – Reserve Bank of New Zealand – Te Pūtea Matua (rbnz.govt.nz) Our Future of Money – Te Moni Anamata work programme considers the barriers that may emerge from a changing cash system. We are partnering with Māori experts to explore how access to physical currency supports financial inclusion and Māori economies to thrive independently on ancestral lands, which may be far from our main population centres and have more limited access to digital payments. We continue to be an active and committed member of the Central Bank Network for Indigenous Inclusion, which aims to share knowledge and practices, promote deeper engagement with Indigenous Peoples and foster a greater understanding of and education in indigenous economic issues and histories.

Throughout the year we hosted virtual discussions focused on the Māori economy, and we co-chaired the inaugural Indigenous Network Symposium. We have since passed on the responsibility for chairing the network to the Bank of Canada. We are a committed member of Tāwhia – Māori Bankers Rōpū, collaborating across the sector in unlocking the potential of Māori land and housing and growing Māori financial literacy and Māori representation in the banking world. Alongside these projects, we are consciously building relationships with iwi, Māori businesses and Māori organisations to engage a broader and more representative cross-section of society in all that we do.

This post is by PaulL, a regular commentor and occasional contributor. It is the fifteenth post in a series on the financial incentives to work and the impacts of our tax and transfer system on household formation, and the eighth post on the “what could we do” subsection. The index to all posts in the series can be found here.

We’ve established that the gap between welfare and work is relatively small in financial terms. We’re asking people to go out to work instead of staying at home, and the increase in household income associated with that is low. 

We’ve also established that it can be expensive to change the financial arrangements to address the effective marginal tax rates.

In the eighth post I canvassed our options, and noted that there are a set of non-financial changes that we can make to encourage people into work.  This post will cover those in more detail.

A guest post by a reader:

A major obstacle for getting back to work. We have a pretty high bar – carer/child ratios, teacher (carer) qualifications, floor area/child, outdoor area/child and a raft of others. High quality stuff, expensive but subsidised and over-subscribed. Waiting lists and all that. Even the creche at a gym has to meet all the ECE standards including qualified “teachers” and all that.

On the other hand, you could get lucky and have a parent or auntie or other family member or friend where you can park the little treasure. No requirements about qualifications, space or anything like that. Just acceptance of the arrangement by the parent and caregiver. No money changes hands.

Once upon a time, in-house baby sitting (as it was called) was unremarkable.  The kids were fed, watered, changed and entertained – probably in front of a TV for some of the time. If your kid was not happy or you were not happy you found someplace else to take him/her. Willing buyer/willing seller and all that. Noone called it “early childhood education”

Such an arrangement is obviously not as good as the full-service bells-and-whistles stuff found in an ECE establishment. On the other hand it might be a bit more econmically feasible and be the difference between Mum/Dad staying home or getting back to work. I guess there would have to be some minimal standards about space etc and probably some finagling of the subsidy arrangements. Details. What’s not to like?

These days ECE is big business and popping up all aver the place. Sort of recognised as part of the education system except for the 100% private (ie for profit) ownership with significant government subsidy bit. Just an observation. We don’t run the primary, intermediate or high school system like that ….

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Bono in the NY Times:

I ended up as an activist in a very different place from where I started. I thought that if we just redistributed resources, then we could solve every problem. I now know that’s not true. There’s a funny moment when you realize that as an activist: The off-ramp out of extreme poverty is, ugh, commerce, it’s entrepreneurial capitalism. I spend a lot of time in countries all over Africa, and they’re like, Eh, we wouldn’t mind a little more globalization actually.

Great musician and economist!

Capitalism is a wild beast. We need to tame it. But globalization has brought more people out of poverty than any other -ism. If somebody comes to me with a better idea, I’ll sign up. I didn’t grow up to like the idea that we’ve made heroes out of businesspeople, but if you’re bringing jobs to a community and treating people well, then you are a hero.

Bono for PM!

A guest post by Clive Bibby:

A recent announcement that Stuff journalists are investigating the background of some of this year’s local body candidates as purveyors of disinformation and as such, a threat to democracy, rings hollow against their refusal to scrutinise the government’s own revisionist campaign.

You don’t have to be an Oxford scholar to recognise the duplicity of their actions which lays them open for criticism as being an extension of the Labour Party propaganda machine.

It is somewhat surprising that this group of journalists is being led by one of Stuff’s senior scribes – none other than Andrea Vance who has an earned reputation for accuracy which ironically is a diminishing quality amongst members of the Parliament Press Gallery.

Things must be becoming desperate when the big guns allow their names to be associated with such dubious digging to find dirt on individuals of no consequence.

Meanwhile in the corridors of power where things are happening that will have lasting effects on the nations understanding of our true history, revisionist narratives are being peddled unchallenged as the gospel truth about the nation’s birthing pangs.

In reality, our history is going through a makeover that bears little resemblance to what actually happened all those years ago and nobody seems to care.

One would think that at least the opposition parties would see this development as the real threat to democracy and be promising to add the eradication of these false doctrines to the list of those “must do” jobs when it takes over the treasury benches.

Yet we see only a relatively small handful of priorities from those who must make it happen. Apparently, the insistence of truth telling isn’t amongst them.

And what of the disinformation that is being promoted as the truth?

You need go no further than the popular narrative promoted by academics and wannabe leaders that Maoridom continues to suffer as a result of colonialism and consequently requires compensation on a never ending scale in order to regain its original status as proud tangata whenua.

The truth is that during the musket wars, pre the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, the Maori race suffered more than anything else from self inflicted wounds. It is a sad fact that the Iwi population dropped by approximately 40,000 (mainly innocent bystanders) from an estimated high of 100,000 able bodied men and women.

The ravages of tribal conflicts in the years pre 1840, in an environment where the winner takes all, had the single most damaging effect on the population of our earliest settlers. The wilful slaughter was only brought to a halt with the arrival of the first colonial missionaries who promoted a message of peace that changed the lives of warrior chiefs like Tamati Waka Nene and Hone Heke for ever.

The negative effects of colonialism, the part that the academics selectively identify as the root cause of Maoridom’s struggles in modern society, were not a factor until much later when assurances given in the Treaty were either ignored or only partially honoured. It is fair to say and should not be forgotten, that the mistreatment of Maori by some of the colonial settlers did immeasurable harm to a race of people trying to adapt to the new authority, much of which was foreign to a lifestyle based on survival of the fittest.

However, the facts are that this nation has evolved in spite of those setbacks, building into a multi cultural society that is the envy of the world. We have achieved this status by learning from and acknowledging our true history. We now enjoy a system that accommodates retrospective claims of misdeeds by the Crown and allows for compensation that can help to re-establish tribal authority and future prosperity.

The real danger to our democracy is the deliberate distortion of these historical facts that would, if allowed to take root, set our development back for no good reason.

We must insist that the complete record (warts and all) is included in any state sanctioned revision of our history curriculum.

Failure to do so will result in a division from which we may never recover.

If it is not the full truth – it is a lie.

This post is by PaulL, a regular commentor and occasional contributor. It is the fourteenth post in a series on the financial incentives to work and the impacts of our tax and transfer system on household formation, and the seventh post on the “what could we do” subsection. The index to all posts in the series can be found here.

This post picks up a comment that many people have made. Reducing the benefit level would give the ability to reduce abatement rates without costing more or increasing the income levels at which people receive welfare.

If we reduce the benefit by 30% we can also reduce the abatement rate from 70% to 40% and still have the benefit cut out at about $40,000, about where it was before.  We can also reduce the family tax credits by 30%, and the abatement rate on those to 18% instead of 27%.

Jamie Mackay writes:

Would it be unkind to say you’ve got to go back to the days of David Lange and Rogernomics to find a government so reviled by the rural sector?

And it’s rather ironic that Labour finds itself in a unique electoral situation because of the support it garnered from the provinces in the 2020 election. A case of be careful what you vote for. A perfect storm of Covid, an empathetic PM, fear of the unknown, the fear of the Greens and a totally dysfunctional National Party, combined to produce the first majority government in MMP history.

The Government’s recent response to He Waka Eke Noa (HWEN) and the resultant modelling was an abrupt wake up call to rural New Zealand and those self-same provinces that swept Jacinda Ardern into power.  …

And we may never see the likes of 50,000 Kiwi farmers again if we lose 20 per cent of our sheep and beef production and six per cent of dairy. The numbers being modelled are frightening, even if they’re only half correct. …

So, apparently, we’re staring down the barrel of a 24 per cent drop in sheep and beef revenue. That’s nearly $3 billion a year. That pays for a heck of a lot of health and education. It will be the death knell for provincial NZ. We will become the pine plantation of the South Pacific. That’ll be good for tourism (and hay fever)! A dumping ground for wealthy offshore polluters who want to offset their emissions.

Take the President of Federated Farmers, Andrew Hoggard’s, recent comments on India’s dairy industry and the resultant ‘carbon leakage’ if we reduce production and less efficient nations take up the slack.

India’s currently at 23 per cent of world milk production, with ambitions to keep growing at six per cent per annum to be at 43 per cent in 20 to 30 years. They’ve got a carbon footprint per litre of milk that’s about 10 times ours. And when questioned on what sustainability meant to them, they said: “a full belly”.

Hoggard, quite rightly, questioned whether New Zealand’s place in the world is “cutting our own production, cutting our own throats, or is it about taking our know-how and can-do attitude to other agricultural systems in the world?”

The past two years have been the most divisive of my lifetime. We’re all rowing in separate directions. I think it’s called being up the creek without a paddle.

Mackay is right that there is huge anger in the provinces.

Worth reading ACT’s paper on the choice between democracy and co-government. An extract:

• Māori language and culture have been decimated, from being totally dominant in 1840 to nearly disappearing completely, before recovering gradually over the past few decades.
• Māori New Zealanders are statistically worse off in practically every measure from incomes to incarceration, including education, health, and home ownership.
• The Treaty of Waitangi, which was supposed to protect Māori property rights, was breached many times. These breaches can only ever be partly compensated, as much former Māori land that might be subject to a claim is now in private ownership and therefore unavailable for settlements.
• New Zealanders, being fair-minded, caring people, want the above three problems solved. They want to see the Māori language and culture preserved, every child have genuinely equal opportunity, and any wrongs of the past put right.
• Due to a combination of confusion and some deliberate deception, New Zealanders are being told that constitutional change is necessary to. solve these problems. This is not only untrue, it is a dangerous development.

I like this summary. You can care greatly about fostering Maori language and culture, supporting Maori property rights and reducing the inequities in key outcomes, while rejecting abandoning equal suffrage democracy as the solution.

Any constitutional system that gives different people different political rights is incompatible with universal human rights. ACT believes that universal human rights are essential for peace and prosperity.
Whenever people are given different legal rights, they inevitably fight to regain their rights and dignity.

Political rights must be based on citizenship, not ancestry or race.