I’d trade off having a $20 cap instead of free if they spent the extra $120m on increasing off peak & out of hours services. IMO there’s a big gap for shift workers or people going out at night and having to drive because there’s no other way to get there & home.
It seems more that he was overruled by Luxon, Seymour & Brown. But in a way the Epsom voters have won the battle only to lose the war.
There was never going to be 2 million new apartments all of a sudden, and so long as the provisions allowing the Auckland council to prioritise building in areas where there’s infrastructure remains (which it does) - then Epsom has train stations and that’s where they’ll get built.
Setting aside any possible privatisation moves, anybody doing business with Serco given their record is suspect.
Most of NZ’s power is renewable (majority hydro, quite a lot of wind, and increasing amounts of solar) but in the 90s the neo-libs in the tory party did a market restructure that results in the spot price for all electricity being set by the most expensive power currently being generated.
In times of low generation from any of the renewables (droughts, weather, shenanigans) that has meant gas/coal plants temporarily spin up and then all of the generators get paid the big bucks because that power is pricey.
Over time we’ve struggled to keep up with electrical demand, lots of reasons. Governments not investing in domestic solar enough doesn’t help, challenges finding places to build more dams (none built in years now) which has meant most new generation up until recent solar developments has been wind only.
This is coupled with a foreign aluminium smelter holding an entire hydro dam to ransom for incredibly cheap power sucking up a chunk of generating capacity that might be better utilised elsewhere as no major party wants to be the one responsible for that smelter pulling out of a small region costing it quite a few jobs.
Now because we aren’t getting as much snow on the Southern Alps as we used to we are having more times where the hydro generation down there isn’t going full noise, and more times where the temporary plants are spun up which puts our spot prices up quite high - this has seen some timber mills completely shut down as their electricity costs are so high and data centres are under the same pressures.
(that’s my potted history / economics explainer)
$7.5B is a myth; and it was already announced a couple of years ago.
You could build an entire cellular network (maybe minus physical towers) for that much.
Labour borrowed to get through Covid & for infrastructure, Willis borrowed to give landlords a tax break.
They’re good* for certain parts of the economy that have a huge amount of money to throw at political campaigns I guess. Real Estate, Fisheries, Oil & Gas all got what they paid for.
*in the short term.
I think we are in Stagflation territory in New Zealand, thanks to a moronic insistence on austerity to resolve a mostly external inflation problem.
Are you trying to suggest that a few thousand landlords getting a tax break doesn’t equal the same spending power as 10000 public servants?!
Hopefully us kiwis learn that austerity is BS and doesn’t work faster than the UK did before turfing their tories out.
One thing about the claim that its needed to attract talent is that from what I can see as an outsider looking in, getting onto boards is all about networking and who you know. The “skills” you bring are usually post-factum justifications for their appointment. And alot of the time boil down to, well this person’s been on a lot of boards before, so they must be good.
Also notice, people tend to fail upwards into board positions? They’re former (often failed) CEOs etc.
This!
The payouts for directors in the private sector is already BS, why would we want to match it with public sector.
The misinformation was in a segment on RNZ I think, not an official proceeding.
He’s got a very high pitched whistle, and he’s been subtly blowing it throughout his leadership of National.
Setting aside all the other stuff.
Are claiming that Russia was not the aggressor in this current war? If so, what’s your argument, that it was a response to provocation? If so, what was such a provocation that justified invading another sovereign nation (again)?
I was trying to figure out the same thing, Ford Utes? But they might actually be made somewhere in SEA for all I know given they’re right-hand drive models. Teslas will be coming from there and it would be a good energy move to put tarrifs on electric vehicles imported from USA just to spite space karen. I’m sure there’s plenty of other mundane stuff we just don’t think about.
I don’t think its just bigotry, there’s a load of tradition and history that ties particularly Pakeha New Zealand to the west. And without devolving into bothsidesism (although, obviously it is) some people do have questions about aligning with regimes accused of human rights abuses and what not.
I think NZ does need to start having the discussion though; the old assumptions and alliances are bending and its foolish not to ask where our future alignment is best placed.
I don’t think it’ll be clear for a while yet, especially now they’re being explicit that they will go with either National or Labour.
If this ends up being a change campaign you could see a bunch of voters moving away from Opp if its close in order to ensure an actual change happens rather than more of the same only hopefully slightly less bad.
Its not clear to me that we are in a change cycle though; NZ Fist going up so high at the expense of Act & Nat is interesting but isn’t massively moving the dial back towards the left.