Posts by Sacha
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Steve Barnes,
Gordon Campbell accuses Bill English of Playing Politics with the tragedy in Christchurch.
Campbell makes some clear points, as usual.
Every candidate for spending restraint and revenue relief that has surfaced in the past 48 hours (Working for Families criteria, interest free student loans, postponing or scrapping the CBD rail loop in Auckland, the partial privatisation of state energy companies etc) was on the government’s political wish list well before the earthquake.
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Government spending is, after all, only one half of the revenue equation. If English wants this to be a genuine process, all forms and all rates of revenue gathering should also be back on the table, including (a) the possibility of a special national tax levy for Christchurch and (b) a review of the government’s highly skewed tax cuts programme.
The principle behind reviewing the criteria for Working for Families is supposedly that certain upper middle class families have little need for the WFF subsidy. Well, if means testing is to become the new norm, the same principle should be applied to the tax cuts programme – given that its benefits were showered disproportionately on the least needy income earners in New Zealand.
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Why should WFF middle income earners, students and Aucklanders be selected out to shoulder the main burden of the quake, and of the government’s related borrowing programme? Last year, no such restraint was in evidence when nearly $2 billion was magically found to bail out the investors in Alan Hubbard’s business empire.
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Steve Barnes,
I have been told several times to "STFU" and that "Now is not the time or place" to mention such things.
That's what this thread is for, now. Not last week.
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OnPoint: On Price Gouging, in reply to BenWilson,
Legions of arbitragers
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Lew has a post at Kiwipolitico about Peter Hyde's report.
A crew toured Aranui yesterday, talking with the residents and broadcasting their concerns — lack of facilities, lack of attention, breakdown of the rule of law. Breakdown of the rule of law. People fleeing their homes because, at twilight, groups of people roam around casing houses for burglary.
The media must report this, and in some cases it has: but ultimately it is for the government to undertake a response which mitigates against this inequitably-distributed misery. And a government who is reportedly considering policy changes which will weigh heavily upon lower-income New Zealanders would be well-advised to look after those citizens’ response.
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Cracker: It's a Wonderful Thing, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Implementing the 2001 cross-government NZ Disability Strategy with no funding is a classic example. It meant having to persuade departments to shift already-committed funding to something they traditionally haven't supported (with no funding for the persuasion effort or even a broader campaign to underpin it), or beg for each extra initiative slowly and torturously against all the usual resistance to change. It's a wonder progress was made at all, really.
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Philip Matthews on the quake and the history of another Christchurch suburb.
For a long time, more than a century, Waltham was a suburb in the shadow of the gasworks. In fact, Waltham Road -- pictured above -- was once known as Gasworks Road; it appears in Christchurch newspapers under that name as early as the 1870s. The gasworks and the railways were big employers here; the streets were lined with modest, wooden workers' cottages. Even after the earthquakes, many of those cottages are still standing.
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
I’m still too raw to get fully into the spirit of this kind of thought experiment
Hence the other thread whose purity you and I pushed for. :)
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to giovanni tiso,
What has changed that makes borrowing suddenly okay?
The credit agencies were always OK with our public debt levels, just not when you add in the private sector. And this government conflated that distinction before the quake to try to justify its ideological preferences. Now showing through a bit. That's all that's 'changed'.
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And Danyl focuses briefly on the politics around the politics.
DPF is wroth with the media for tastelessly pestering the Finance Minister about his plans to finance the re-building of Christchurch. Apparently when English publicly muses about financing the cost of the quake and then calls a press conference to discuss the issue it’s ‘ghastly opportunism’ on the part of the media to question him on it and report his answers, especially if they’re politically unpopular ideas like scaling back Working For Families.
Most of the suggestions I’ve seen from various politicians and pundits on how to deal with the aftermath of the earthquake are things that those individuals desperately wanted to see happen before the quake.
And in the comments, our friend Matthew Littlewood notes:
I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but three or four years ago, all of the surrounding territorial authorities (and ECan) put out the urban development strategy, which was a response to exactly this concern. It received more than 20,000 submissions and public consultation on it was huge, as were the necessary logistics to impliment its “findings” so I imagine something in that order wouldn’t go amiss again.
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Tim Watkins discusses the politics of paying for reconstruction.
When it comes to vast sums like this, political economics becomes very simple. You need more money and it has to come from somewhere - you either have to cut or borrow.
Naturally, a right-wing government will favour the former, because it wants to do that anyway. And this will become one of the big questions in the next few months. What's going to have to be sacrificed to pay for Christchurch?
It's the perfect cover for those who prefer small government anyway, except that sacking more public servants and cutting more night classes aren't going to come close to picking up the tab. So you look to the big ticket items? Will National choose to go farther than intended on welfare cuts? Will defence upgrades be postponed? Will some of the highways of national significance be seen as less significant? Maybe we could skip a prison or two?
What about the budgets for the Rugby World Cup? Whanau Ora? Broadcasting? Youth Affairs? The Families Commission? And on and on...
On the other side of the coin, he notes that ratings agencies seem relaxed about upping this country's public debt.
Now, more borrowing is essential, and suddenly it's also no big deal. Moody's sees no reason to alter our credit rating, despite anticipating extra offshore borrowing as a result of this second quake. Our debt ratios would remain in line with our Aaa-rated peers, it says.
The government, if not sanguine, now accepts that borrowing more is possible.
Which prompts the question, how come borrowing that would have utterly buggered our economy a week ago, is now perfectly acceptable? How can both be true and responsible?