Posts by jh
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Key on a roll. Speaking to John Campbell:
What do you want to be remembered for?”
“Going back to that main point I think it was Muldoon who famously said “I want to leave the country in no worse condition than I found it”.
“Isn’t that a low ambition?”
“Yes I want to leave the country in better condition than I found it and if theres something (I genuinely beleive) It would be lifting our confidence to a certain degree about how we see our selves in the world and what we think we are capable of achieving. Now I think individually there is masses of ambition that sits out there there but can we actually take that and convert that to take the opportunity .
And I always thought what was happening in the opposition of politics (of course they would oppose National, that’s their job actually apart from everything else) but it was a bit negative about out place in the world. So we played a bit about whether people coming here was a good or bad thing whether people should invest here was a good or bad thing, or whether we have a trade agreement with parts of Asia was a good or bad thing, but actually in my mind, the reason that I want to say yes to those things is because they are the opportunities that reflect our opportunities to both get wealthier (which is all about what you can do with that money) and then ultimately the oppurtunities for Kiwis. I’d like New Zealanders to feel (after my time as Prime Minister) they have become more confident outward looking nation more multicultural.http://www.tv3.co.nz/CAMPBELL-LIVE-Monday-September-22-2014/tabid/3692/articleID/103019/MCat/2908/Default.aspx
Throw the country to the lions for property investors and developers. Key takes a pass from Conell Townsend runs down the left side where the defence is off having a change of bra. -
Tony Alexander's view on house prices
In BNZ Chief Economist Tony Alexander's weekly overview, Auckland house prices are set to move upwards nicely. Here are his 19 reasons why:
1. Auckland did not enter the 2008 recession then late-2008 into 2009 global financial crisis with an over-supply of property. Shortages of personnel constrained house construction from 2004 through 2008.
2. The shortage has become worse in the past four years and last year annual consent numbers were at a four decade low.
4. The government is explicitly aiming to grow Auckland’s population as a means of achieving “agglomeration” benefits for economic growth which accrue from high interaction amongst economic players.
9. A big fall in apprentice numbers in the past five years coupled with the loss of skilled people to Australia and older tradespeople leaving the sector rather than get licensed means labour-related construction costs will rise and labour will not be available to build houses even were more land available.
13. The migration cycle appears to be on the cusp of turning and if the housing market has performed so well with net outflows over 3,000 in the past year the implications of positive gains are clear.
14. The nature of net inward migration is changing toward greater numbers of people coming from Asia and with Asia’s middle class booming in size potential inflows of wealthier people are large.
17. The government has announced its efforts to improve housing affordability (lower prices) and they are minor and unlikely to have a noticeable impact if any for many years.
18. Any credibility people may have assigned to those who have been predicting big price declines simply because prices have risen a long way and now fallen sharply in some other countries has gone out the window. Few people will now listen to their price decline views.
19. Members of the Opposition believe monetary fairies can make the exchange rate settle permanently lower by forcing interest rate cuts and printing money while letting inflation therefore go up. Given the non-zero possibility that such economically ignorant policies get introduced it is worth getting inflation protection by investing more in property – not less.http://www.davidwhitburn.com/blogs/auckland-house-prices-to-rise-over-10-in-2013/
and the response from the opposition was.....?
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2.3 Changing policy expectations
While useful, models do not capture all the effects policymakers expect from immigration.
When New Zealand moved to increase the numbers and skills of immigrants in the 1980s and 1990s, policymakers appear to have considered that these changes had the potential to have major beneficial impacts on the New Zealand economy, reinforcing the gains from
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the other liberalising and deregulating economic reforms undertaken during that period.
At that time, it was considered that skills-focused inward migration could: improve growth by bringing in better quality human capital and addressing skills shortages; improve international connections and boost trade; help mitigate the effects of population ageing; and have beneficial effects on fiscal balance. As well as “replacing” departing New Zealanders and providing particular help with staffing public services (for example, medical professionals), it was believed that migration flows could be managed so as to
avoid possible detrimental effects (such as congestion or poorer economic prospects) for existing New Zealanders.Since then, New Zealand has had substantial gross and net immigration, which has been relatively skill-focused by international standards. However, New Zealand’s economic performance has not been transformed. Growth in GDP per capita has been relatively lacklustre, with no progress in closing income gaps with the rest of the advanced world, and productivity performance has been poor. It may be that initial expectations about the potential positive net benefits of immigration were too high.
Based on a large body of new research evidence and practical experience, the consensus among policymakers now is that other factors are more important for per capita growth
http://www.treasury.govt.nz/publications/research-policy/wp/2014/14-10
The Savings Working Group are blunter“The big adverse gap in productivity between New Zealand and other countries opened up from the 1970s to the early 1990s. The policy choice that increased immigration – given the number of employers increasingly unable to pay First-World wages to the existing population and all the capital requirements that increasing populations involve – looks likely to have worked almost directly against the adjustment New Zealand needed to make and it might have been better off with a lower rate of net immigration. This adjustment would have involved a lower real interest rate (and cost of capital) and a lower real exchange rate, meaning a more favourable environment for raising the low level of productive capital per worker and labour productivity. The low level of capital per worker is a striking symptom of New Zealand’s economic challenge.
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John Mclenan
"I find your society genuinely admirable in many ways. For example, I met Helen Clark while I was in Wellington. I was invited to her official residence, and waved in by a lone policeman who didn't even check who I was, then I had a barbecue with her. I congratulated her on the public's enlightened attitudes towards racial issues, but she disagreed. She said to me that New Zealand was really a very racist country, and she was determined to do everything she could as prime minister to change that. I thought that was a very bold, honest statement to make to a foreigner, and I really respected her for that."
http://www.stuff.co.nz/sunday-star-times/features/3751531/Acting-giant-reflects-on-NZ-society
New Zealand has never been adverse to remaking itself in various ways during its relatively short life as a modern state. Whether it was the 1890s, the 1930s or the 1980s, far-reaching reforms have dramatically altered the institutions and policies of this society. The 1980s marked a range of changes – economic, social, cultural – as the country sought to re-align its geo-political connections and the domestic and international competitiveness of its economy. For most of the 1980s, the dominant cultural debates centred around national identity, and what might be labelled “post-colonialism”, or in During's (1985) terms, coming to know New Zealand in our terms, not those which originated with a colonial power. At the core of this re-assessment was an emergent biculturalism which involved placing indigeneity and the effects of colonialism on the tangata whenua as a key consideration of political and policy development from the 1970s, and more particularly from 1985. Whether it was the delivery of Maori-sensitive
welfare and economic policy, increasing the awareness of the impact of colonialism both in an historical as well as a contemporary sense, or Treaty settlements, there was a significant re-orientation of public perception and practice. It also involved inviting others, notably Pakeha, to explore their own post-colonial identity (Spoonley, 1995). But almost simultaneously, decisions were being made about New Zealand's immigration policies that were to have far reaching consequences for the cultural politics of New Zealand, although it was to be almost a decade before there was an awareness of what exactly this meant. Those decisions about immigration that saw policy altered from 1986
onwards have remade the cultural mix of New Zealand and have added a new layer to the evolving imagery and policy concerns of this country.Actually NZr's an no more or no less racist that the other human animals.
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Speaker: An Open Letter To David Cunliffe, in reply to Stephen Judd,
I do think that NZers will reevaluate their feelings about the economy when the housing bubble deflates and dairy prices regress to the mean.
Except that we have strong migration pushing up demand (according to Treasury, Reserve Bank, Savings Working Group, Gareth Morgan) and I think that is what the public believe.
Reid Research ran a poll that said 62% wanted greater restrictions on immigration (68% of Labour voters and 58% of Green voters). This election labour talked about restricting immigration but were equivocal. Someone on The Standard said it was a "beat up" and everyone was relieved.The first thing National wants to do is gut the RMA; the RMA isn't just about National Parks and dairy farms, it affects every urban area in New Zealand. Developers are salivating in anticipation. You can't argue quality of life or house prices while giving immigration a free pass it just makes Labour sound impotent.
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James could have come and said something at the rezoning meeting in Ilam a few months back. He might have added his voice to the Councils man who said "well, we have immigration and you have to have population increase (to increase the wealth). So it suppose it is one of the imperatives of government".
He could have chipped in with the benefits of multiculturalism. -
I'd say Helen Clark lost more people than Roger Douglas. Clark attacked the national identity (if anyone objected they were branded racist).
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Speaker: An Open Letter To David Cunliffe, in reply to Russell Brown,
John Tamihere - Former Labour Cabinet minister
What went wrong?
The dreadful result last Saturday was not the result of one thing but the culmination of many. The party over the last 30 years underwent a huge churn of ideas, policy and people.
The response to Rogernomics following David Lange shifted the party off the contest of ideas in regard to economics and the concentration on the Kiwi family and the Kiwi battler to a new debate.
Under Helen Clark the party was captured by academics and tertiary-educated leaders of a union movement that never worked a shop floor. They concentrated on identity politics and controlled the party not on the great economic issues, but on whether you were gay, Maori, feminist, bisexual, etc.
The party machinery then populated the Parliament with a narrow compass of appeal.
They lost because they no longer reflect their voter demographic either in values or in priorities. They have driven people like myself out of the conversation and out of contributing to the party. They have lost connection with middle New Zealand and, particularly, men.
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No?
Josie Pagani
Labour focused on leading a left bloc instead of maximising its own support, and believed it could mobilise 800,000 people who didn't vote in 2011.
It didn't try hard enough to appeal to National Party supporters, while people grew wary that it would rely on parties they really didn't like.
It seemed at times out of touch with the hopes and lives of working people, distracted by issues like gender-quotas, fast trucks and dead trees, which reflected a lack of confidence that its core values are popular enough to win.
Voters began to think Labour was trying to make you a better person rather than better off."
No again? -
Speaker: An Open Letter To David Cunliffe, in reply to James Dunne,
Yes, clearly Labour’s problem is that it isn’t racist enough.
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It could start by looking after it's own people. -
What makes you think someone from a group "Multicultural Aotearoa" would connect with the Labour voter?
Haven't you heard of the Putnam study which shows diversity is the inverse of civic engagement?
Don't you know that humans evolved in small groups of people like themselves and developed bonding mechanisms so they could trust, sacrifice and thereby survive?
Didn't you hear of the (government appointed) Savings Working Group and their verdict on immigration policy and the well-being of New Zealanders?