Posts by George Darroch
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I actually like the Asteron Building. There's nothing uniquely NZ or Wellington about it, but it has a lightness of form that deserves to be commended. I like Te Papa, at least on its south approach, for opposite reasons. It imposes and announces its presence. Its spaces work reasonably well (at least when I compare it to every other museum and gallery I've been to on either side of the Tasman). It is starting to date, but that happens. It could be the Auckland Museum...
Auckland has a number of monstrous acts in play - the Newmarket railway square being one, the uncertain futures of the St James and Mercury theatres being another.
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Look at the infamous quote from a 60s-era CEO of IBM, who said that he didn’t think there’d be a need for more than maybe five or six computers in the whole world.
He was right.
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Word.
Briefly: super untouched, RoNS roll on, military unmolested.
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My point is that New Zealand's boom was fuelled not only by speculative investment from abroad (as Alistair noted upthread or elsewhere), but the Yen carry trade and inflationary bank lending. It couldn't last, but both Labour and National were happy to see it continue.
I'm not as harsh on National in a comparative sense as some others, because I believe that their opposition took what they thought was the easy way of reforming the economy, rather than the hard business of structural change. (not that there would have been many cheerleaders for this, when they could point to Ireland and say we should have been copying them).
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Interestingly, among advanced economies*, only the PIIGS, Norway and the UK had higher growth rates 1990 - 2007 (pretty chart and graph). Nothing was sustainable.
We know what happened to Ireland et al. The UK had a boom in the city that is now slowly exhausting (and wreaking much pain on the rest), and Norway prudentially managed vast oil reserves.
*(I exclude former Soviet bloc industrialised economies from the advanced economies category on the basis of where they were in 1990)
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On transport, it is so weird that Joyce’s roads of national stupidity aren’t being used to ridicule the govt at every opportunity.
Every time the govt says it’s being prudent, where is the ridicule of the holiday highway or transmission gully: both of which have business cases that amount to flushing a billion bucks down the toilet.
Or the govt’s next great transport priority: a motorway from Cambridge to Taupo. No I am not joking.
Policy capture. Federated Farmers, the Road Transport Forum, and the small number of people that those in the National Party come from and associate with (East Coast Bays types).* They want a country with good roads that take them from one place to another - this is what is important to them. It is a disguised value judgement. There's nothing, absolutely nothing wrong with value judgments - we spend considerable sums on national parks that only indirectly add to gdp (through tourism) because we consider them important. But this one just slips right under the radar. I suspect it is because they are the same values that are held by those in the media.**
A democracy, at least as it functions in New Zealand, is not a mirror, rather an interpretive guide.
*I'm not saying that other parties are necessarily more widely composed, but Labour is rightly ridiculed when it pretends to have a wide spectrum, similarly the Greens. National is composed almost entirely of lawyers and farmers, and nobody blinks, let alone raises it as an issue.
**Similarly, morally conservative viewpoints are not generally celebrated, despite being held by a wide section of society. -
it made me finally realize that said friend and I had divergent moral values and it was perhaps time I moved on. I believe he now manages a multi-billion-dollar investment fund at a major insurance company in the City of London …
Watch out. He'll be a cabinet minister in a dozen or so years.
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Bit of rugby in the meantime.
The one thing I don't blame the voters for.
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No no no. It is nominal - but inflation stays really low. For some reason. Also unemployment plunges for some reason. And productivity grows steadily, somehow.
The pull of gravity also weakens as celestial beings enter your body.
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Fascinating. Can anyone explain how NZ spent $23 billion on transport in 2009?