Category: Guest Posts
It was a good day for New Zealand. Justice Hansen sentencing the Urewera four was having none of what he called their “utterly implausible” excuses. Well done, police and prosecutors. So called “peace activists” will not rest easier. Their cover ispermanently blown by the terrorism evidence even though it could not be used. They know the police know who they are and what they mean by “peace”.
Over the days since the Minister of Finance presented his fourth Budget, there has been extensive debate about the details of the Budget’s growth projections (will New Zealand achieve growth of 3.4% in the year to March 2014?), about whether the government’s accounts will be in surplus of 0.1% of GDP by 2014/15, and about whether more should have been done to help low-income people.
You’ve got to hand it to the jocks in the financial markets. My German co-author, who knows a bit about such things, tells me there’s already a spread trade going in credit default swaps (CDS). I won’t bore you with the details, but the trade amounts to an indirect bet, based on French sovereign debt, that Francois Hollande will be gone in 5 years time. Either that, or he’ll retreat into the safety of the pack.
The NZ Herald recently ran a poll asking whether National was right to use its veto to override Labour MP Sue Moroney's private member's bill to extend Paid Parental Leave (PPL) from 14 weeks to 6 months. After 16,000 votes were submitted, sixty percent of respondents had answered yes.
One unchanging political reality is that review panels are set up to get the outcomes of the interested party. I suggest that the current constitutional advisory panel has been carefully set up with focussed terms of reference, and carefully vetted panel members, to achieve the Maori Party goal of ensuring that the review gives effect to the treaty, and entrenching separate Maori seats.
During the last hundred years central government taxes per capita rose 20 times faster than consumer prices (from around $660 in 1910 to $13,198 in 2010 in year ended March 2011 dollars, as in the chart below). Meanwhile real GDP per capita only rose roughly 4-fold. The fact that taxes rose roughly 5 times faster than incomes as measured by GDP is reflected in the rise in taxes as a percentage of GDP from 6.3 percent of GDP in 1910 to around 30.8 percent in 2010.
It’s an honour to share some thoughts with you, report on the NZ, Australian and US relationship and put it in a historic, then global and regional context. I do this with some trepidation. I spent the first forty years of my life trying to get into the media and have tried ever since I was appointed trying to keep out of the media.
Deception has always been at the heart of the Emissions Trading Scheme legislation. When it was enacted in great haste by a Labour Government in 2008, the public were told it was intended to stave off global warming. In fact, its purpose was to settle a major law suit brought against the Government by the forestry industry.
If the current (New Zealand) owners cannot sell the Crafar Farms to the highest valuing individual, regardless of nationality, then the consequences for the New Zealand economy in the long run could be substantial. The necessarily lower market values eventuating for the relevant "sensitive assets‟ such as farm land will flow through to lower capital valuations.
I have been thinking about ‘culture’, my friends, and am trying to get a handle on this most important matter. Culture is jolly important. We hear a lot about Maori culture, and hear all the time that we are a ‘bicultural nation’, although this is of course disputed by those who insist that we are actually multicultural.
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