Posts by Lucy Telfar Barnard
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Another thing that I think is not often mentioned in this debate:
Although people recognise that life-expectancy is increasing, it's usually in the context of "superannuation will cost us more money", rather than looking at what we think superannuation is for.
In 1938, when the pension age was 60, those 60-year olds could expect to live about another 17 years after they qualified.
In 2001, when the pension age reached 65, the additional life expectancy of a 65-year old was 17 (male) or 20 (female) years.
Life expectancy has increased further since then. A 65-year old in 2013 could expect to live another 19 (male) to 21 (female) years, and four years later I would expect that to be higher again.
If we think that "about 17 years" seems a fair expectation for the length of retirement, then we should be raising the age now, not dithering about it for another 20 years.Perhaps if we increased the age now, we could also look at raising benefit rates for those under 65 years. For many 64-year olds, turning 65 means suddenly they can afford to live with something approaching dignity. I really don't see how a 65-year old in good health has greater need for a livable income than a 64-year old on a sickness benefit.
MInd you, I'd personally prefer to see some sort of actuarial approach. If life insurance companies can make an educated guess at how much longer someone is going to live, why can't the state? For me, with my parents still alive and my grandparents mostly having lived a long time, I probably wouldn't get to draw on the state until I was 73, while my husband would probably become eligible at 61 - but how is that unreasonable?
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The retraction is nobly done. It is also noble of you to take the blame on yourself ("I am sorry that you have been misled by something I have written"), but I don't personally feel that it was what you wrote that misled me. I think it was reasonable for you to expect that the information the MInistry of Justice supplied was the information you asked for.
If you ask someone for a carton of chicken eggs, telling them you want to see if chicken eggs make as good a sponge as goose eggs, and they hand you an egg carton, it's not unreasonable to assume the carton has chicken eggs in it. When someone else goes back to them, and they say "oh, actually they were duck eggs"... is it really your fault you said a chicken egg sponge was almost as good as a goose egg sponge?
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I thought Public Address had a policy of never direct linking to Mr Slater's site? Or maybe that was just wishful thinking on my part.
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The alternative view is that National sees this as a possible outcome, and also sees it as a win, their view being that since private school children all pay separately for the "extras", why should public school children get a free ride for things that aren't core curriculum?
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Hard News: Obscuring the News, in reply to Stephen Judd,
there just isn't enough news generated locally to meet the need
By "news generated", do you mean "newsworthy things happening", or "newsworthy things written up into stories"?
If you mean the latter, then yes, definitely. If you mean the former, I suspect that it's more that our too few paid journalists are expected to produce too many items per day to have time to look for things that are actually newsworthy, or investigate them properly when they find them. -
Hard News: "Meth contamination": the…, in reply to Stephen Judd,
Someone might like to enquire how much Housing NZ money has been wasted on unnecessary refits/cleanup operations. I suspect it is many millions. Obviously the human cost of turfing people on the street is pretty terrible, but there is also the cost of houses not built or repaired because money was wasted on the meth scare.
To cut HNZ a little slack, the debate about the relative dangers of smoking vs baking, and in particular whether the 0.5ug level is appropriate for the former as well as the latter, is a pretty new one. If I were an HNZ tenant, and my child had developed respiratory illness after I’d moved in, as, alas, so many HNZ children do (though less than those who don’t get to move into HNZ houses), and the neighbours said the previous tenants of my home had been drug users, and HNZ said “oh yes, we tested and it was above the Ministry of Health guideline, but that’s just for labs, you’ll be fine…”, well, I don’t think I’d find that very reassuring.
In short: I blame the MoH health guidelines for not being more specific and thus allowing the whole issue to arise, more than I blame HNZ for following the only guidance they had in the matter on whether properties needed cleaning or not.
N.B. I allow that slack in regard to decisions about cleanup, not putting people out of their homes.Also, people do still bake in NZ (albeit less than in the past), and HNZ has a lot of tenants, so they will require a meth cleanup budget even if they’re only cleaning up after labs.
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This is a lovely description of what looks like a lovely documentary.
Just one thing. When you write "a large Lake Taupo photograph worked on by four girls in 1963" it jars. I can cope with 'girls' in inverted commas, or maybe even "four of the girls", since they apparently called themselves the 'colouring girls'. But in that sentence, with that photograph... well, they look like women to me.
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Speaker: Sprawled out, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Re: the NZ home, I had a sulk when they were talking about 1870s houses and showing houses from the 1900s. And later they described the villa as having come from the UK, when I think there's better evidence it was based on a style developed in Virginia. So the architectural history seems either to be getting lost in translation, or only done once over lightly in the first place.
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Polity: Post "post-truth" post, in reply to ,
would it not be better if journalism maintained a healthy neutrality?
Sure, if that were possible. Since it's not, it would be better if all journalists were honest about their biases.
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Speaker: A Disorderly Brexit, in reply to John Palethorpe,
Thanks John for sharing your parents’ “leave” vote reasoning. I can’t believe that all 52% of leave voters were stupid and/or racist (and awful to see the racist element emboldened by the result), so helpful to get a sense of what was going through the heads of those for whom the vote to leave was an educated, rational position.
In relation to those emboldened – living in the UK in 2012 I couldn’t understand the segment of the British population who complained so loudly about foreigners and migration, because the UK seemed so "white" to me. Only 13% of the UK population is overseas-born (in 2014), compared to 25% in NZ. “Visible” ethnic differences are similarly different – 13% “White” on the UK 2011 census, compared to 25% non-“European” in NZ.
But maybe that’s the problem. Maybe the UK would be less racist if it were more ethnically diverse?Otherwise, oye. I’ve never felt so ashamed of my UK passport.