Posts by George Darroch
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I feel like I'm in a city that faces the Pacific. I know where to go to get great beef noodles for 10 bucks, or to get a really classy meal for a bit more. I'm five minutes from the city and I have a beach around the corner where I can swim in summer. There's a farmer's market at the weekend, and places to go at night. And the wine is exceedingly good value.
Yeah, I dig what you're saying.
Last week was Samoan Language Week. It was the kind celebration we need more of. Not in a 'StuffWhitePeopleLike' kind of way, but in recognition of the fact that people don't shed culture and language easily, and our differences are to be valued. I think we're getting there in parts, despite the efforts of some.
I agree that there are few things less becoming than a kind of reverse cultural cringe. It's easy to do, as others here have noted. Engagement with the world that means rootlessness or denying indigeneity and 'home' is equally undesirable.
Talking with the world should not, and need not, come at the expense of celebrating and being who we are.
But there are interesting and important things happening elsewhere, and it seems that as the UK diminishes in importance in the collective consciousness, none have yet replaced it as sources of ideas and interest. Perhaps we need to be sure enough of who we are first? Do we need a new flag and a republic? I'm at least half serious.
I also suppose that having grown up palagi in a very diverse neighbourhood in 1980s and 1990s in Auckland, it's hard to imagine why there isn't more difference represented at the national level.
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I'd like to think how New Zealand could be positively cosmopolitan. With slightly less than a quarter of the population foreign born, and another million or so overseas, you'd think that New Zealand would be significantly more international in tone and demeanour.
We would be able to leverage that into creating connections; in business, society, science, technology, and other areas. While retaining an identity, we could be a lot closer to the Pacific, Asia, Australia, and Europe.
But it seems to stubbornly resist that in favour of provincialism. Such connections are performed quietly and individualised. And I can't explain why. It isn't 1850 any more.
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Home refs? In a Super 14 final? You can't say it influenced the outcome, but that seems like pretty poor form all the same.
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Bear in mind though that a large percentage of the Nats probably support many of ACT's policies but stick with the Nats for other reasons
This may be true. But by the same token, a large percentage of National voters were won over from Labour at the last election, and probably still support many of Labour's policies but were won over for other reasons.
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What's eventualism?
I have no idea. You better ask Labour.
Every time I ask their MPs and activists when they're going to get around to (insert reasonable idea here) they tell me they can't do everything at once, and they'd like to do it eventually some time in the distant future.
I've heard that if we keep Labour in power for 25 years we'll get back overtime.
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NoRightTurn has published something similar to what I've been thinking today.
We have MMP to thank for this, I think. under FPP, an election like 2008 would have produced an enormous majority, with all the arrogance that entails. But by ensuring the distribution of seats in the House reflects the actual votes cast, MMP has ensured that parties are acutely aware that it takes a shift of only a few percent to cause a change in government. Which means they have to keep their promises. National promised centrism, and so it has to deliver on that
That there are very few things in the budget that can be labelled 'radical' is testament to the political environment. I don't think anyone in National wants to restart the revolution, although they do seek the kinds of changes they think will turn us in to Ireland/Singapore, a 'tiger' of the South Pacific, where low taxes and private enterprise drive wealth. They know however that their program will have avoid causing significant pain at any stage.
It's also testament to how Labour's pragmatic eventualism (re)established gradual change as the accepted model.
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Those of us who are working toward the academic life, on the other hand, might not have much of a choice.
I know that academics are already up and leaving. I'm not sure this will slow things.
They always have, of course, for bigger, better, and different things. But New Zealand can and should be a place where people can live a lifestyle, participate in a strong intellectual environment, and earn a decent income for their work.
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Come on George - don't you remember the near hysterical pitch the calls for tax cuts got to just last year?
I wasn't in the country last year. I can only imagine that it was horrible to experience.
Politics is about the possible you know.
Well we will never know if it was possible in 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, or 2005. Because he never tried, and never even put the option forward.
After that point I'll give you that it would have been a large electoral liability.
By 2008 it was well and truly too late. The time to put a capital gains tax is not at the tail end of a property boom but at the start. Doing so then would indeed have caused a terrible reaction, and would have been blamed for the inevitable collapse of the market.
But having high interest rates and a stagnating non-productive bubble economy at risk of imminent subsidance is hardly a recipe for good times either. Having houses further out of the reach of the ordinary worker doesn't make for happy voters, who feel that they're being cheated out of ownership and happiness.
So yes, argue that it didn't happen because it was electorally too costly. That's an honest argument. But don't say that it was even put on the table, because it wasn't.
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He did try, but even the mention of it got shouted down by all in sundry.
He did not try.
In 2005 he described a capital gains tax on non-family homes as a "potty" idea. He was strongly opposed, and shot it down every time the Greens discussed it with him. He refused to let the Reserve Bank and Treasury even investigate a capital gains tax in their consideration of instruments to damp the housing market.
In any case, those shouters were exactly the ones who needed their arses kicked.
Their desire for a housing and sharemarket bubble-economy meant that the Reserve Bank kept interest rates high to dampen inflation - and as a result we had a high dollar that hurt exporters, and interest rates that hurt capital investment.
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I hope everyone pauses and has a little grateful prayer of thanks to Michael Cullen, whose refusal to feed the bubble with tax cuts is the only thing between us and Iceland.
I won't.
After nine years of consistently refusing to implement any kind of capital gains tax. Which would have damped house prices, meaning more money spent in other areas, and encouraged money to flow into the productive sectors of the economy.
He also did nothing or dampen private sector borrowing on housing and imported consumer items (funded largely by paper gains in the housing market), fueling one of the largest current account deficits in the world. Of course, while the people were spending, the people were happy, so it wasn't something he wanted to interfere with.
Things could be a lot worse, but they could be a lot better.