Posts by Russell Brown
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Polity: House-buying patterns in Auckland, in reply to Sacha,
Given that we tend to only let in migrants with money nowadays, I expect long-time locals to have lower wealth than recent arrivals. Be interesting to see a breakdown by length of residence.
That's an interesting point.
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OnPoint: My last name sounds Chinese, in reply to llew40,
Sorry but hard to see this as anything other than ham-fisted politics. Phil has turned a legitimate economic issue related to the impact of foreign speculators on Auckland housing affordability to a singling out of Chinese investors based on ropy stats. So the political opposition gets to frame labour as dog whistling, labour get to spend days explaining what they *really* meant. And media get plenty to feed off.
That’s fair.
I don’t think the analysis is completely bonkers. It’s the kind of thing you might do internally, to get an idea of what’s going on in the absence of better data. You’d be entitled to find it interesting if you found some evidence that the number of Chinese traders in the property market was way out of proportion to the number of resident Chinese.
But it’s simply not strong enough to to go public with like this, especially when you can’t control the way the Herald’s going to frame it.
Focusing on non-resident Chinese investors isn’t necessarily racist either. There actually aren’t any other countries with trillions of dollars of capital looking for places to go, and the Chinese credit and investment environment is very weird, as evidenced by the recent drama on the Chinese stock markets. It is entirely possible that Chinese capital (and credit) is distorting our badly-regulated residential property market.
But this just isn’t good enough data to go out and say so with, especially when you’ve dragged residents into it.
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Polity: House-buying patterns in Auckland, in reply to Jim Cathcart,
Not that the NZ public has taken much notice, speculation on Chinese equities has taken a hit this week. There is much fear and deep uncertainty (outside NZ anyway) about the wider implications of all this
It's actually been fairly widely reported here – with the emphasis, of course, on "what this means for New Zealand".
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Polity: House-buying patterns in Auckland, in reply to Sacha,
A more basic question – why did Labour choose to focus on this partcular angle right now? Who signed off on it as a strategy?
Twyford has actually been hammering the speculative foreign investment issue (if, indeed, there is an issue) for quite a long time.
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Turns out that the quantative analysis behind the story was done by another sometime PA blogger, Rob Salmond.
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Just heard of the passing of Frank Stenjees, formerly of The Androidss. Lovely man, sad to see him go.
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Hard News: Friday Music: A night out dancing, in reply to davesparks,
All due deference to your headlining DJ skills, : ), the CTRL + ALT + DANCE line up is pretty stonking. Harry the Bastard has some nostalgia appeal for the old folks!
Oh, of course!
Edit: Just had to check some details and have now updated the post. Harry and I will be holding down an old-school house music room at Whammy, under the Housequake! banner. Should be good fun.
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Speaker: Honest Bastards & Dishonest Cowards, in reply to Kumara Republic,
They need to focus on identifying ways to depict the Key government as dirty, crony-capitalists. It really isn’t that hard since that’s what they are.
Here’s a possible start: “For the price of a shipload of sheep to Saudi Arabia, you could instead get x number of doctors.”
That's not "dirty crony capitalists" so much as simple competence, which I suspect will be more fruitful. I think it's pretty clear after Dirty Politics that the public will overlook the most dreadful shit in favour of who it thinks can run the country.
The trick is to convince people that Govt spending in itself isn’t bad, but rather where their tax dollars go to. The term “fiscal chickenhawk” comes to mind.
Yep. Bad spending is bad.
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Speaker: Honest Bastards & Dishonest Cowards, in reply to llew40,
n the same way that Republicans are painting themselves into a demographic and constituency corner, my concern is simply that Labour are appealing to less and less people, in the name of principles that sadly no longer seem to be relevant to many NZers, and that gaining broader appeal needs to be the highest priority.
I think one relevant thing to consider here is the way that National was obliged to take on board a raft of Labour initiatives – Working for Families, paid parental leave, the Super Fund (for a while), interest-free student loans – in order to render itself electable in 2008. Curia had presumably done the research to identify the Labour policies the electorate didn’t want to do without.
Has Labour done similar research to work out which dead rats it will need to swallow? Not some general sense of needing to be “National-lite”, but the battles it’s probably not going to win. I’m not even sure what those things are myself.
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Hard News: Apple Music: Taking a dump on…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
I’m just going under the deck to detach the sub-woofers,
I may be some time…Hahahaha ...
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