Posts by Sacha
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Hard News: Last Words, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
The Greens got my party vote.
onya
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Hard News: Last Words, in reply to Russell Brown,
I'd really like to vote for Jacinda Ardern
so it was *you* who amended that billboard?
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Hard News: Last Words, in reply to Russell Brown,
National’s even going to give “good” schools more money.
which was the whole plan all along - ideologically consistent rewarding of the already "successful"
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Hard News: Last Words, in reply to Ian MacKay,
interesting stats on landline ownership
Interesting, thanks. Wonder why higher income earners would have lower rates?
NO LANDLINE TELEPHONE
Horizon Research earlier this year found 6.4% of New Zealanders 18+ do not have a landline telephone at home. This rises to 19.6% among 18 to 24 year-olds; 18.8% for those earning $100,000 to $200,000 a year and 12.5% for those earning less than $20,000 a year.
12.9% of business managers and executives no longer have a landline at home, along with 17.2% of students and 14.6% of labourers, agricultural or domestic workers. 13% of those flatting and boarding and 11.6% of one parent families have no landline at home.
HorizonPoll research finds 95.5% of its panellists have access to the internet at home, 39.3% at work, 19.1% by mobile, 7.3% at an internet café and 8.4% at a wireless hot spot.
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Hard News: Last Words, in reply to Craig Young,
I believe the word is hypocritical rather than ironic. :)
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Hard News: Last Words, in reply to Tom Semmens,
What's your take on the role of the political opposition parties and movements in driving and shaping media coverage, Tom?
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The Herald's John Armstrong notes Key's stuff-ups during the campaign making little impact on polls.
The paradox is that Goff - unlike Key - would seem to have got more right than he has got wrong during the four weeks on the hustings. Yet, this does not seem to have made a blind bit of difference. If anything, Labour's support has ebbed even further.
Labour's "shock-and-awe" campaign was always high risk. It had to be. But the lesson is simple. You cannot shift three years of negative sentiment in less than three months - the short timeframe Labour gave voters to absorb its capital gains tax and other policy lurches.
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Hard News: Last Words, in reply to Matthew Poole,
that support for National is so high while support for asset sales is so low
A 'key' feature of this time around.
I'm also far more engaged than most voters
That probably applies to most of us here. Makes it harder to understand how others are making decisions in the context of busy everyday lives.
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Capture: Don’t Point Me Out In A Crowd, in reply to JacksonP,
I am resigned to gig envy, but memories are good too. Thanks Jonathan for stimulating some of those (and I may even recall one or two being taken).
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Hard News: A week being a long time in politics, in reply to BenWilson,
Once they are built, and have a proven revenue stream, like our current ones, of course plenty of people are happy to privatize those profits.
Gordon Campbell's latest article says the energy SOEs just had a big surge in capital investment - the profits of which will now be privatised after the costs were socialised. Textbook.
Too bad the taxpayer will now be losing out once those assets are sold down, because they’ve just paid for the capital investment that will be driving those even higher returns – and which the private investors will begin to reap.
The evidence is clear on this point. The $1.7 billion return over the last three years from the four energy companies would have been even higher, as Greens Co-Leader Russel Norman pointed out yesterday, if the SOEs in question hadn’t chosen to double their investment in new plant and machinery, in order to deliver even higher returns in future. As Norman says:
Now that the earning potential of our SOEs has been enhanced through this capital investment, the Crown can expect to see considerable growth in dividend streams from this point on. Treasury makes this point explicit in their last 2010 Annual Portfolio Report. They say the Crown should now expect to receive higher returns.
We have seen this before. Like our energy SOEs, Telecom had invested significant amounts of capital in building a modern telecommunications network in the years before privatisation. In the years following Telecom’s privatisation, dividend streams for its new private owners doubled, then tripled within six years. History now seems to be repeating itself with our energy SOEs. National has allowed the taxpayer to build up the asset, only to then on-sell it to the benefit of others.
More than anything, those current 17.5% returns on average over the past five years are an astonishing testament to the efficiency of the SOEs. Despite the election campaign propaganda that asset sales will bring private sector disciplines to bear on the SOEs, the reality is the exact opposite. The SOEs are at serious risk of being reduced to the same general levels of incompetence as the private sector.