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6:00 am, October 4th, 2025 - 71 comments
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Today's Posts (updated through the day):
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Voices for Freedom’s local government campaign
New Announcement Post up:
The Standard hosting is moving
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Voices for Freedom’s local government campaign
https://www.interest.co.nz/public-policy/135502/energy-companies-don%E2%80%99t-see-sufficient-profit-preparing-dry-year-risks-and-are
Free market fails ,surprise surprise, maybe the private shareholders should be forced to match the government $ for $ to fund more resilience, psst build onslow ffs!!
In fairness my Meridian and Mercury shares are whats balancing out my Ryman shares 🙂
Buy into a retirement home because Boomers are retiring they said…not retiring quickly enough it seems 🙁
Shares !! I just escaped the farm for a few days , it's got expensive out there , if only farm owners where having a great multi year run of profits maybe they could pay me better, !
Sounds like rough going
1977 was my year off after 7th form. I called it my year of finding out what I did or didn't want to do. A working holiday.
I spent a 3 months doing shift work in a factory. 4 months on a town supply dairy farm outside of Auckland. 4 months on a sheep station at Taupo, and 3 months in army doing territorial training.
Those 14 months were probably the most formative months that I ever did.
I found I wasn't suited for repetitive work because I liked innovating. I couldn't stop trying to improve the work processes.
I'd planned to go farming because I was and still am fascinated with it. And I'd done a lot of it while I was at high school.
But time doing farming just showed me that it was negative sum experience if the lifestyle didn't interest you as much as process improvement. Farming is where you worked your butt off to make banks profitable. That was when land was way way cheaper and there was some hope of paying off the property and plant before you collapsed into retirement with a bad bad and haemorrhoids. Something that doesn’t look feasible these days.
Also that there was limited room for innovation in farming because between mortgages and commodity pricing there was limited capital or time available to make a difference without taking on excessive debt.
Farmers are conservative peons for the usual reasons that debt peons are conservatives. Too busy scrabbling to look up. Which is why, b, I think that you're unlikely to get wage increases from farmers. They always going to pay down debt whenever the margins temporarily rise.
The army was the highlight of that time. I found that I made a terrible soldier because of an obsessive need to ability to handle "hurry up and wait". I always wanted to figure out how to improve processes, but the army is (rightly) conservative in making sure that everything that they already do is really well honed.
So I did the default and reluctantly went to university to do a BSc in earth sciences and a minor in management, worked as a barman, did more army time, and did a hell of lot of times on field trips exploring ancient volcanic ash showers.
Eventually I wound up as a computer programmer…
Boomers can't sell their houses to buy their retirement home.
Might come as a surprise but they weren't all wealthy and sorted
Puckish-so you are happy to profit from a fucked-up oligopolistic market while the poor of this country freeze to death because they can't afford the power prices this fucked-up system creates.
Nice.
Bring on the Wealth Tax.
It's worse than that, he's also benefitting from Granny farming.
Bwaghorns the farmer not me, sounds like too much hard
Work
When you put it like that, yes but I feel bad about it
Nice – we can now rename you Puckish Rentier.
Because that was the entire reason for Key's part-privatisation of the gentailers – to allow wealthier people who could afford shares to extract monopoly rents from poorer people who couldn't afford shares, but had no real option to stop buying electricity. Effectively, that's been a tax on the poor by the rich – such an asprayshunnal way of running an economy that only 'Saint' John could have thought of it
You don't have to convince me I already bought them
PR they're just jealous.
😀
At least you bought local company shares and didn't throw it all into houses.
Gonna be honest, the amount I own is, in the scheme of things, not far off 2/5s of FA
80% of New Zealanders who own anything of note have the majority of their savings in houses.
20% of households held the largest share of their wealth in financial assets such as pension funds, shares and investment funds, and I bet not too many of those are regular Standard readers.
And for those who think shifting that weighting from houses to shares is easy, well some of us are old enough to have gone through the 1987 crash, 1997 crash, 2008 crash, and 2022 crash.
I would not say bought, they were giving away a few thousand shares to those who had any savings.
The dividends at those prices would be way higher than anything on long-term deposits.
So of course there has been a CG as well.
Graph below shows the dividend pay out levels.
https://www.thepost.co.nz/nz-news/360843270/ideas-electricity-market-government-didnt-come
Just got the second dividend for the year but I just buy more shares with it so its not bad
Ryman on the other hand…
I stick it into savings and then bundle it off into term deposits.
Should have been gold coins, but whatever.
A time machine and remember to buy bitcoin would be nice
I use carefully selected managed funds.
I was looking at Vanguard S&P 500 but considering the damage they've done to movies I just couldn't do it
Yeah but it's failing nz having private share holders in key infrastructure, take it back , with or with put compensation is the question?
Keep it as is, PPEs ftw!
As a small shareholder, what would your view be if Meridian financed a major capital work via a capital call on shareholders? Would you participate?
I'd go online and work out what that means for me as I have no idea of what the ramificatins would be
Wrong – mine is a principled objection to who benefits and who loses from the privatisation of near-monopolies. It's nothing to do with my personal situation which is fine, and I don't blame PR for acting in an economically rational manner because we all have to do it or perish. (That incidentally is also part of the problem). However, I get irritated when people ostensibly on the left start parroting "the politics of envy" drivel.
Bit of a stretch calling ad a lefty, inmho, I'm no lefty either they're just the better option.
Luke Malpass, in ThePost, being as disingenuous as always. No mention of the billions borrowed and given away.
https://archive.li/l0JSx
“In short, the Government is spending beyond its means — borrowing to pay for ongoing spending such as medical procedures, schools, police salaries and welfare (as opposed to, say, new roads, bridges and hospitals). It has been since the last term of Ardern and Hipkins’ Labour.”
Malpass pretends to be, but never is, fair. He always sticks it to Labour.
He picks the CGT will just be a return to the bright-line test.
Treasury prefers a 20 year bright-line test.
If so, or 10 years – for mine they should start from the March 2018 date.
Isn't amazing that nz accepted a prime minister changing a law that he immediately benefitted from finically, !!
I'd love to see the howls of protest if they back dated it and made luxon coff up.
They can only apply it to sales after the 2026 election – Luxon got out early because he knew it might be a one term government (the economic policies would cause a recession).
He mentions the Greens and the environment.
Labour and Greens should do a joint statement on this – soon as. Concerns about what the government has done – and the response (what would done about it after 2026)
He also says TPM is not close to the median voter.
A Labour and TPM should make a joint statement. Concerns about what the government has done (what would be done about it).
Easy response
National accepts a partner (ACT) that wanted accelerated help to landlords while seeking massive cuts to government spending and pandered to it, because that is who they are.
Labour has partners that want more taxes on those on high incomes, those making CG and those who are wealthy. To provide better government to the many and help to those in need, Labour will agree.
Labour should make it clear it stands with the 1975-2023 evolution on Treaty of Waitangi/Waitangi Tribunal of past governments and call the 2023-2026 government an aberration. An extremist one that wants to place the interests of capital/rights of investors before the Treaty, due process and the environment.
True, but already too complicated. People find it too hard to think about impersonal systems, but they make judgments about individuals every day.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/politics/360843703/labours-secret-bold-plan-and-luxons-unpopularity-lefts-2026-gamble
Someone needs to publish a comic – economics for beginners
1.Keynes refers to an economist not a misspelling of canes (brought back for used in boot camps).
Trump says him not winning Nobel Peace Prize would be an "insult" to the United States, then he renames the Department of Defense as the Department of War.
You couldn't make this stuff up.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/09/30/trump-says-not-winning-nobel-would-be-insult-to-us_6745960_4.html
Obama got it just for being black – it's a bit degraded already.
Make the Nobel Peace Prize Great Again – no beards, blacks, or bitches \sarc
He all ready deserves it but if he can get this over the line pr even something close to it he'd be considered one of the greatest Presidents ever
http://www.bbc.com/news/live/cn0xvnxqj2xt
You need to put (sarc) after such comments Pukish, otherwise people think that you mean them.
But would you give it to Trump if he really does get a peace plan to stick between Hamas and Israel,
and then gets a truce between Ukraine and Russia?
Truman didn't get it and he got the Korean ceasefire.
He was the one who appointed Acheson (no mention of South Korea as a security interest) and MacArthur (went to the Yalu River).
I would have given it to Truman for carrying out the Marshall Plan, for the Berlin Airlift, defending Europe from Soviet aggression, and defending the New Deal as a plan to a peaceful and more equitable society.
For the first part sure, the second part was just good domestic policy.
He was also the person who "sacked" MacArthur!
For wanting to nuke China as his army fled south.
POTUS may have seen the action to provoke China as an attempt to manipulate home into a conquest of China by use of such weapons.
Trump was gratuitously bombing Iran a few months ago.
Trump could say drinking petrol is bad and there'd be people on the left who'd start chugging it down just to 'own' him
It's not a peace plan, it's an ultimatum to either surrender and permanently abandon any possibility of self-determination for Palestinians – or be annihilated. Its purpose is solely to give Israel a bogus justification for finishing the ethnic cleansing that it always intended to do, and insofar as we can see, it will finish and will never be held accountable for.
I'm guessing you'd rather see this fail then see Trump get a win
Another misleading headline by NZ MSM and the Coalition Government’s PR-propaganda machine.
https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/new-investment-boost-nz-bioeconomy-and-drive-export-led-growth
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/574957/government-announces-more-funding-for-natural-pharmaceutical-sector
It looks like spin entanglement between MSM and the Coalition that’s just too spooky.
I'm watching the Prime Minister doco. Can someone please remind me why Peters chose Labour over National after the 2017 election?
https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/13-09-2018/we-chose-the-harder-path-winston-peters-on-election-2017
Why do some people confuse explaining with justifying when discussing hot controversial topics, e.g., starting a war? An explanation can go a long way towards a justification but they are fundamentally different, I think. For example, a good debater ought to be able to argue from the opposite viewpoint to strengthen their own arguments and this obviously doesn't mean that they 'justify' the opponent's conclusions; it means that they have some understanding of, and likely some respect for, where the opponent is coming from and why they hold the opinions and views that they do. Similarly, some people confuse citing a view or opinion held by somebody else as an endorsement, support, agreement, approval, apology, or excuse even.
My reckons say it's tribalism and identity.
The Department of War post was a good example.
The article cited by SL Kananthan gave good background and context to the Russian Ukraine conflict that shows the issue didn't just start with Russian invasion.
But folk make up their minds, put a lot of stock in their position and conflate that with who they are.
Too many are too keen to see things as black or white and when someone hints at a shade of the colour, they are wrong.
..of the other colour…
Most of the people debating the matter have done so for years and knew all the factors in play. None justify resort to military action.
You don’t say.
PS The Department of War is not established until Congress makes it so. It's not yet a reality.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/09/05/trump-legally-rename-department-of-defense-war/85990088007/
So, does dear Christopher's chrome-dome denote hair certainty or uncertainty? Discuss.
https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2025/oct/04/trumps-decomposing-ear-of-corn-what-does-hair-certainty-tell-us-about-our-leaders