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6:00 am, August 31st, 2026 - 95 comments
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Open mike is your post.
For announcements, general discussion, whatever you choose.
The usual rules of good behaviour apply (see the Policy).
Step up to the mike …
Well that was fun. The hosting site was getting overwhelmed with resources – mostly very short sharp spikes going over resource boundaries.Spent a large chunk of yesterday proving that was where the problem was.
That shouldn't be a problem now. It is on one of my home servers running a Ubuntu 7 on a 12 core + 12 virtual cores and has 128GB of DDR4 RAM.
Currently it is running direct to the server, but that was just to allow me to get certainty about configuration.
I'll be pushing it on to a more aggressive CDN profile with a better firewall tonight, which might cause some slowdowns running into tomorrow morning. It will want to load that CDN.
The search will be off at present. I have to hook it up again. But I'll do that after I have a look at loading. So far the highest was 2.2% of CPU, and half of that looked like it was from a SQL server instance.
Well done and thank you.
Thanks lprent. Good doctoring, my heart was troubled! Do you need some new donations to upgrade some of your equipment? Give us a chirp like the smoke alarms do if you are needing 'new batteries'.
The nice thing about it these days is that I'm largely self-employed and semi-retired. This is all equipment and services that I mostly use for work purposes, or has been retired from it.
The costs are very low because everything is dual-purpose, has no incremental cost between the cost of using it for my contracting and not. I have to buy multiple site licenses – so I usually buy lifetime and enough to cover foreseeable work. What doesn't fit the work use criteria is usually r&d anyway – I have to use some tools before I can find out if they are worth the price.
The hardware it is on is completely depreciated. It is running on a 2021 workstation machine that I upgraded the DDR4 RAM on for running virtual machines for specialized embedded builds – which I seldom do anymore.
The power and the data would be hard to separate and probably infinitesimal anyway. I can't even see the computer power costs over the heating costs in Southland. And the computers are efficient fan heaters anyway. My data costs are a monthly 'all you can use' fixed cost running at 2.5Gb because that is the speed I need to work effectively on the Sydney servers I do most of my paid work on.
I am going to get new batteries 🙂 Lithium uninterruptible power supplies. But that is because I don't want to stop working just because the Southland grid is a sometimes a little flaky and replacement parts have to come from Auckland or Christchurch. I regularly get brownouts and the odd power cuts in high winds and lightning storms. Lots of brownouts over the last week with all of those lightning storms.
The largest cost I have is my time – but I'm semi-retired and doing part-time remote contracts…
I didn't understand a word of that, but thank you.
I got 4 responses in the down period – a 404 and 500 response, then maintenance, then something about the site platform for CloudEdge.
I'll put up some graphs for August that explain the increasing resource constraints.
But the little cloud site that I put up last September has done pretty well up to date. It was put in place so I could load my home computers into a trailer (and a bed, cat, and some assorted household stuff) and spend a week driving to Invercargill from Auckland.
It stayed there because it was mostly working, and why move it if it wasn't really broken. But election time…
Not AI crawlers?
Your answer may or may not feed my AI paranoia.
There are always lots of AI crawlers.
They can only see public facing. If they try to come in the backend systems they get treated like malware.
I don't bother trying to exclude AI bots any more than I do for malware. You don't build immunities without exposure.
What I do is to limit them like all other crawlers. Go too fast and you will be excluded for a period of time. Try using a lot of IPs and I or my bots will exclude signatures of your bot. We will exclude blocks of IPs. Whole hosting systems. Whole countries. Use a exploit and at some point we will not only ban whatever tools you used, but I will also explicitly blacklist those as well.
This site is primarily focused at NZ and our diaspora. We don't advertise or raise money. We simply don't care about the freedom of bots and their authors to be dimwitted dipshits.
The only genuinely useful crawlers for this site are probably the google search bots by a very large factor and maybe bing or baidu. Bing is problematic and I have special rules for them.
The problem with elections is that all kinds of crawlers start to really focus on political sites. Malware because it is a good place to lay their wares. AI because there is fresh content in comments if nowhere else. etc etc. It also means more resource usage,
Two media items tell a dark story about modern NZ.
The first, and most recent, is “Rot never sleeps” (NZ Herald, 29 August). It records how the leaky building saga is continuing, with shonky houses and apartments still being erected. There is no licensing or regulation of people who do pre-purchase inspections either.
The second is “Milk and Money”, a 6-part documentary made in 2021 by Baz MacDonald. Available at NZ Onscreen (https://www.nzonscreen.com/all-series/milk-money/ ), it tells the true cost of milk production in NZ and shows the appalling environmental damage that has been done.
The upshot is we have houses not fit to live in and rivers unfit to swim in. But the myths persist, with Tourism NZ still pushing the line that we have a pristine environment and great scenery.
On top of all that we have a government that seems determined to trash the environment for the sake of economic growth. The government’s draft National Policy Direction, released on 28 August, is clearly taking that line: https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/consultation-launched-illustrative-national-policy-direction
The whole leaky building saga is just horrific.
And, it plays a very large part in the reluctance of Aucklanders (in particular) to invest in apartments for long-term living.
Not only do you risk having a major asset (for most people, the largest asset they will ever own) needing expensive repairs; you may end up hostage to a body corporate, for remediation that you can't afford, and a timeframe that you have no control over.
If the 'worst' happens to your stand-alone dwelling, you at least can decide what you can afford, and when (and have some capacity to DIY repair at least some issues)
If we are ever to move to apartments being anything other than short term housing solutions, then we need to address these concerns:
I broadly agree, particularly about the need to make apartment ownership a less terrifying long-term proposition.
My concern is where we ultimately allocate the risk.
I think there is a strong case for protecting existing owners from catastrophic losses, particularly with leaky buildings where failures in the regulatory system itself contributed to the problem. Expecting individual homeowners to spend years litigating against developers, builders, councils and insurers before they can fix their homes is plainly broken.
But I'm less comfortable with the Crown simply assuming the entire remediation risk. At some point caveat emptor has to mean something too. Property ownership carries risk, and completely insulating owners from it means transferring that risk to councils and taxpayers instead.
Joint and several liability makes that particularly uncomfortable. Where developers and builders have disappeared or become insolvent, councils can end up as the last solvent defendant and therefore carry costs considerably beyond their actual contribution to the failure. A government remediation scheme could reproduce the same problem at national level, with taxpayers ultimately underwriting poor-quality private development.
So I think there's a balance to strike: protect homeowners from financially catastrophic losses, especially where regulatory failure contributed, without guaranteeing private property owners against every loss.
Going forward, though, I really like your insurance proposal.
If developers and builders have to obtain meaningful long-term structural and design-defect insurance, then the risk is priced before the building is built. Insurers also have every incentive to refuse cover to shonky developers, builders and designs.
That seems much healthier than waiting for the building to fail and then arguing about which homeowner, council or taxpayer gets left holding the bag.
"Crouching Bureaucrat, Hidden Ideologue: David Seymour’s Flu Factory"
Something that was so easy to predict. Vote them out in November.
https://andrewdicksonnz.substack.com/p/crouching-bureaucrat-hidden-ideologue
You'll have to do better to draw a link I reckon as a parent of a college age kid I think it's been tremendous the toughening up on attendance, both in giving me a boogy man to use and also less mates not bothering to go,
Basically, this from Verity Johnson:
Both political parties underestimate how broke we are | Stuff
Irrespective of what you think about her literary style or take on politics, she's speaking directly to the problems facing millennial/xillennial voters.
Not Palestine, Trump or AI, but the very real material anxieties of being unable to even afford mince. And the increasingly strong feeling that neither of the major parties either give a damn or have even a vaguely plausible plan for addressing that fact.
Marx wrote over 150 years ago about the material basis of political consciousness: how the actual conditions facing actual people shape their politics, not merely abstract ideas.
We would do well to remember it.
Right now, it's difficult for most people to afford mince (it's ridiculously expensive)
But the whole cost-of-living thing in general is way out of control. It's been driven by over-inflated housing costs, and is now being driven by inflated food prices (and, for home-owners, insurance, water and rate hikes)
The food price, itself, isn't a major concern (although lean mince at over $30kg is outrageously expensive), if we had housing costs at 1/3 or less of income. But we don't. And when housing is taking half to two-thirds of what people make – every 'minor' increase in price for essentials bites home, hard.
TBH, it's not only the major parties who don't seem to have a plan. I can't see any realistic plan from any of the minor parties, either.
Do any of them have a sensible plan to realistically cause house prices to go down (preferably gently – because a crash is likely to be worse for the economy)?
Do any of them have a sensible plan to make the staples that NZ produces available at a realistic price to Kiwis?
Because regulating the heck out of the grocery duopoly isn’t working (although, making 163 million profit isn’t an outrageous amount for the size of the Woolworth supermarket chain (with around 5 million Kiwis that’s only $32 per person, which will buy you a kilo of mince)
Do any of them have a plan to grow a high-wage economy?
I can see how the UBI could be attractive in this space. However, there appears to be no realization of how the rental housing market is likely to react.
I agree with most of that, but I think I'd push back on one thing: for a lot of voters, food prices are the major concern.
We can look at household expenditure and say that housing costs are structurally the bigger problem, and I'd probably agree. But that's an analytical distinction which doesn't necessarily reflect how people actually experience their economic circumstances.
People buy food every week. They remember what mince, butter, cheese or a trolley of groceries used to cost. They see the difference constantly, and it becomes an extremely tangible measure of whether they feel they're getting ahead or going backwards.
That's really the point I was making about Johnson.
We can tell people that they've identified the wrong economic problem, but politically that doesn't get us very far. Telling voters that the evidence of their own everyday lives is somehow irrelevant, or that they're simply stupid and wrong about what they're experiencing, is not a great political strategy.
If a large number of voters are telling us that the price of feeding their families is one of their biggest material concerns, then it is a major political problem.
We still need to work out why it's happening and what, if anything, government can sensibly do about it.
But we probably need to start by listening to what people are actually telling us.
Hmm. Telling people that their rent is going down by (say) $100/week does a lot to address their budgetary concerns.
NB: I don't know how you get there, from here 🙂
But I don't know how you reduce the cost of food essentials either.
However, none of the political parties have a road map forward. Perhaps the first one which does, will gain an groundswell of support. Which is (or should be) a concern. The rise of the Nazi party in Germany was directly driven off the hyper-inflation and the belief that they had a sensible plan to address it.
NB: Not saying that any of the current parties are the equivalent of the Nazi party (I shouldn't need to say, this, but just in case…..). The risk is that a lot of other policies may be camouflaged by the popular appeal of bread, cheese, butter and mince, at affordable prices.
I think that's exactly the point. It won't even need to be 100% correct, simply plausible enough for voters.
If people feel that their material circumstances are getting worse, they'll eventually gravitate towards whoever can offer them a convincing explanation for why, and a believable story about how they're going to make things better.
Whether that explanation is actually correct is, unfortunately, a separate question.
Correct non of the political parties appear to have a Road Map, every decision is Ad hoc and made on the Hoof.
To the point
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-31/one-nation-wa-byelection-win-danger-for-labor/107095314
This is an *overwhelming* win for One Nation in WA (well away from their base in Queensland).
I think you are right. The first political party in NZ which *looks* as though it has answers to the big issues affecting 'ordinary' Kiwis (cost of living, infrastructure, immigration) – is going to steamroller over the traditional parties.
Think about the surge of NZ Labour during the 1930s when it appealed to families suffering from the effects of the Depression: from mid twenties to 46% of the vote in the space of two elections.
Tops land tax would
A. Stall house inflation, and probably lower prices
B. Realise alot of hidden wealth to use liftvthe bottom.
Im not keen o it being applied to productive assets like farms though, I don't own any farm land btw
How would Top land tax lower prices?
Any landlord incurring the tax is going to pass it straight onto the tenants- who now have the UBI to pay for it.
Oh stop with the boogy man act, most of the land values are probably in owner occupied remuwera and the bachs of Omaha
Pretty certain that most of the landlord-owned rental accommodation isn't in Remuera.
Borrowers would have less money available to pay the interest on land ownership loans. The banks would have to reduce the amounts that they lend for land purchases.
PS: it would help if we were able to prevent the banks creating money from nothing. Perhaps by legislating against such practices. The government could then lend money to the banks to cover their lending, but it would come with a stipulation that it would be re-lent for productive purposes only.
I'm not particularly convinced that commercial banks creating money through lending is the problem we're trying to solve here.
You can certainly make an argument for directing more credit towards productive investment. That's something government can influence through the tax system, regulation, guarantees, public lending institutions, or other incentives.
But that's a rather different proposition from abolishing commercial bank money creation altogether.
I'm also not sure that redesigning the entire monetary system is necessary before we can make housing, food and energy more affordable.
You can certainly make an argument for directing more credit towards productive investment. That's something government can influence through the tax system, regulation, guarantees, public lending institutions, or other incentives.
Bank credit lending may not be the only thing bringing about increases in land prices, but it's a sort of sine qua non. I find myself sceptical that land price increase prevention can be brought about by means other than by such credit creation prevention.
We've had higher LTV restrictions I the past – hasn't slowed down the housing market one bit.
If the landlord has a higher cost to running their business (due to land tax) why wouldn't they put rent up to compensate for it?
The government could offer to buy the property, and then, after assuming responsibility for the repayment of any mortgage balance outstanding, operate it as a state owned rental. The rest of the mortgage could safely be paid off with fiat money, since that would not increase the money supply – it would only reduce the bank's loan account.
But why would the landlord sell?
When, by just putting up the rent to cover the cost of the land tax – they can continue to operate exactly as they are now?
A land tax ensures that much of the land's rental value is grabbed by the government, where it can be used for the development of infrastructure, or for the reduction of income tax, or (I dare say) for the payment of a citizens' income.
Problem is that "…much of the land's rental value is grabbed by the government…" also means that there will be either fewer rentals available or higher rental costs. Probably both.
In the end the cost of rentals will be borne by those who are renting either directly or as a result of tightened availability or by the government in lower tax takes from income profit on rentals. Both residential and business leasing.
Not sure where the trade offs economically or in redistribution are. What I am sure about is that another land tax (rates are mostly a land tax already – so there will be a double up) is that it is a good slogan – but probably not that productive in economic effect.
What it, or a more effective capital gains tax will do is to drive investors into other forms of investment – that is beneficial in getting rid of the pyramid schemes in untaxed residential, business and farming property gains . Especially while the property market is low.
Longer term it will cause significant increases in the cost of owning property and rentals. Not sure how much that will improve our lousy productivity record.
Problem is that "…much of the land's rental value is grabbed by the government…" also means that there will be either fewer rentals available or higher rental costs. Probably both.
It would mean more houses available for first home buyers, and high leveraged landlords exiting the market.
Why would "highly leveraged landlords leave the market"?
Why wouldn't they just put the rents up?
After all, thanks to the UBI money, tenants could afford to pay more.
After all, thanks to the UBI money, tenants could afford to pay more.
I was thinking more of land taxes imposed in isolation. However, if UBI were in place why would we be worried about increases in rent.
Well, given that the only land tax proposed has been from Top, in order to pay for the UBI – it seemed logical that this was the one you were discussing. Especially, since you referred to "a citizen's income"
But, my point remains. Most of the tax taken from landlords in a land tax, is going to return to them in the form of increased rents.
Which means, that the only 'losers' in the land tax/UBI scenario are homeowners who are also beneficiaries (mostly the elderly).
PS: land values would probably fall, and the tax therefor would fall in proportion, until a new equilibrium is reached.
A citizens' income would also replace rent subsidies, according to TOP, so in many cases any rent increases would have to be bigger than just the land tax recovery.
Another step the government could take would be to mandate that rents should not include interest costs, and these would of course be non deductible.
There is no evidence that land values would fall.
Especially in the only scenario presented to the electorate (Land tax + UBI)
If you want to debate *some other* land tax – then you really need to explain exactly what it would entail.
Since it's pretty clear that what you actually want is for only the government to be allowed to rent homes – then that's what you should actually propose, rather than fiddling around with taxes.
Suggest you lay it out in a separate post – making it clear that this is not the TOP proposal.
There is no evidence that land values would fall.
Since we have not had a land tax since it was abolished round about 1990 – and that tax applied only to land values above a certain threshold – no evidence is really available, and will not be available until we try it out.
Since it's pretty clear that what you actually want is for only the government to be allowed to rent homes – then that's what you should actually propose, rather than fiddling around with taxes.
I don't think I said, or even implied, that.
It would, I think, if the numbers of state houses available for rental were to be increased.
PS: I no longer seem to have an edit function. Would that have anything to do with the fact that I'm using chrome.
More likely it is a first order effect from me migrating the site yesterday to a new machine with a new way of guarding against lousy bots.
An AI and I have been fixing the site today.
Yes those would be the first order effects. So now look 5 years down the time line.
Why would property owner want to invest in renting property if they don't make a profit.
They currently pay a land tax via rates and pass that on to renters, This would be a another tax that they will do exactly the same thing with. So if rental rates don't rise accordingly their profit margin reduces.
They used to rent out even if they didn't make a operational profit because they'd get a capital gain. Capital gains doesn't look particularly likely to be significiant for some time. Capital gains were the big driver behind the housing bubble and in particular the rationale for building new housing for landlords.
So lanlords will exit the property market, probably selling to directly or indirectly to new home owners. Great for a few years, until…
The number of available rentals reduce, but there are a lot of people who still won't have the capital or income to purchase a home or business property. So if the rental stock don't go up, then the rents will as the rental stock gets more scarce.
The only countervailing forces would be increases in social housing – which is bloody unlikely with the demographic shifts leaving us no room for debt. And people who could own a house but decide not to because of the taxes. or a boom in building – but who’d buy if there was a exorbitant land tax competing with paying the mortgage.
When I'm looking at the land tax, what I see is that my old 1 bedroom apartment in a three story block on a tiny spot of land had a CV of $500k in 2004 or which $205k was unimproved value. @1.75% of the unimproved means a tax of $3587.50 per annum.
That would be on top of rates of about $1901.82 for 2025/6 which are also a land tax.
The modest house that I grew up in Mt Albert on Fowlds Avenue has a CV of $1,350k and a land value of $1,150k. So its land tax would be $20,125pa. Its existing rates is $4,550.76
So the total land tax would be about $25k. Roughly 5x what it is now. And around $500 per week to pay for in my old family home. So landlords would have about $400 per week more that they'd have to charge for rent.
Why would you want to own a house to rent. Where would people find rentals. And how would people buying a house be able to afford to do so if they have to pay a mortgage on top of that. A UBI would barely touch the sides unless there were a lot of adults in all housing. Queue over-crowding and even fewer children.
As I said earlier – a land tax of this magnitude is a good slogan for fools who who are simply incapable of figuring out obvious impolications.
As it stands at present, if TOP wins a place in parliament and is able to implement their policies, then it'd be a good time for a lot of people to leave the country permanently.
Our problem as thinking citizens – we tend to jump at ideas that have an appearance of solutions, but we don't sit down and think through the probable outcomes. That comes from a tl:dr approach to life, a hole in our reading facility that grows; instead we are getting information from moving pictograms. They had the static ones in ancient Egypt. Our brains are being underused.
As I said – great slogan.
Outside of programming and computers my three favorite things to study and think about are science fiction, history including military history, and sciences – especially earth sciences and climate.
That is largely where my interest in politics falls out from.
Human history is layer on layer of repeating the same damn things over and over again. Science fiction lives off pointing that out repeatably. Science tends to show why. That repetition usually expresses itself most clearly in politics. Great place to observe repeatable screwups getting serious.
Why would property owner want to invest in renting property if they don't make a profit.
Yes, why would they. Obviously, investing in an unprofitable business in the hope of making a capital gain, which may or may not eventuate, further down the track would clearly be a poor business decision. They would be better off staying out of the housing market.
They currently pay a land tax via rates and pass that on to renters, This would be a another tax that they will do exactly the same thing with. So if rental rates don't rise accordingly their profit margin reduces.
Many pay mortgage interest as well. That probably costs them more than a land tax would. Better they sell up – if they can find a buyer. Landlords with a freehold property out on rental could probably take a land tax in their stride.
Our housing market by all accounts is three or four times over priced. That's the problem we should be addressing.
Incidentally, if the land that I own with my wife was worth only a third of its present valuation the land tax that we would pay (@ 1.75%) would be about $60.00 per week. I don't think this would put off very many would be tenants; however $180.00 per week might be another matter.
Dumb argument, and a case of ridiculously wishful thinking.
The value of land over decades is pretty much related to its scarcity compared to population and possible use. Sure, you get blips upwards. But the the only economic blips downwards that show up in the historical record are directly related to climate shifts, disease, pollution of various types, resource extraction, and wars.
If you want to argue that, then point to one that lasted more than a decade or so.
Sure we may get some over the coming century. There is a good chance that the age demographic shifts in all of the world population towards stability or decline will reduce demand. Or that the depletion of aquifers in a number of semi-arid agricultural areas will make the value of fields drop. We could get the Justinian plague or the Black Plague, or the Spanish inflenza that affect significiant casualties, or a massive war.
But these have reasons for the shift in the value of property. More often than not, within a decade or so or a century at the outside, the value of land returns as the population does and improves it.
Offhand I can only think of a few cases in the historical records that hasn't happened. Most of them involve the Sahara region as the climate got over the last inter-glacial and slowly dropped towards another glacial, or polar edges like Greenland or Iceland or Scotland.
Even the first damaging documented instances of Black Death that it depopulated vast areas of Europe and depressed land values has the land values recorded as returning to the same real values within 5 decades – and that is despite repeated waves of the plague.
Probably not. I see that you and Trump share a belief in economic magic. Him in the idea that exporters and not US consumers will adsorb the tariff taxes. You that investor property owners will adsorb the costs of a tax that offers them little or no benefit.
The answer to that is that they won't. They will either drop the investments if it doesn't return a better return for risk than other investments. Or they will raise rents.
So you are simply avoiding the point. Can renters take the land tax and increased rents and/or reduced availability of rentals? After all a UBI is of little use if your major budget cost, accommodation, rises with it.
The value of land over decades is pretty much related to its scarcity compared to population and possible use.
Land prices also depend on how much banks are willing to lend on properties; and if a lot of dumb boomers fancy themselves as landlords and want to own several properties, this pushes up the demand for land in an artificial way, and the banks are more than willing to to accommodate them. Are you really surprised when you hear that banking seems to be one of the most profitable industries these days. The rise in property prices benefits them greatly.
When I was studying economics many years ago I was taught that it wasn’t just demand that mattered, , it was demand backed by the wherewithal to pay.
The point that I have been making is that it is not proposed taxes that are the problem. It is more the fact that property prices have gotten out of kilter. This why so many are using food banks. The prices of mortgages and rents are taking too much of their income. We need a way of taxing property that doesn’t affect the average person. Perhaps my comment at 5.1.1.1.1. would be relevant.
Precisely. That includes those paying the taxes – both landlords, homeowners, and renters.
I don't believe in magic thinking in economics. Someone always has to pay one way of another. Increases in productivity expand the pot. I can't see any productivity increases coming from this particular form of land tax.
A UBI may have some in terms of reducing the overhead of providing benefits – basically it has the same benefits as our superannuation system, a drop in the overhead costs of providing welfare from about 12% to about 1%.
But what it will do is to increase all of overheads in providing accommodation. That is completely unproductive, and will obviate most benefits of having a UBI. Pairing the two is insane.
It is going to penalize the poor because of rent hikes. It will make it harder for the younger and not affluent to purchase housing. Make it harder to find housing because it will reduce the reasons to create it. It will penalize everyone who doesn't have the income to pay the tax.
Residential housing that people just live in simply doesn't directly generate income. It isn't like renting, airbnb, businesses, farming, airports, even or even roads.
It isn't a simple tax. There are planned to be exemptions and there will be more exemptions. So who is going to administer all of those? Probably the same people who currently provide the insane cost overhead on the welfare system. How is that productive?
Sure it will probably suppress a housing speculative bubble and the waste of productivity that goes with that. But all it does is move the stupidity.
Our existing taxes mostly work on the basis of taxing profit for work (income tax, business tax), consumption (eg GST), public usage of resources (eg rates, sewerage costs, water, roads, parks, libraries, increasing value of unimproved land, fuel tax, etc), or target expensive unwanted activities (tobacco, alcohol)….
The land tax does none of those. It is simply taxing a static resource without any particular economically useful purpose and being a costly tax because it is gong to have so many economically expensive exemptions.
The land tax does none of those. It is simply taxing a static resource without any particular economically useful purpose and being a costly tax because it is gong to have so many economically expensive exemptions.
The "particular economically useful purpose" of land tax is to raise revenue for the crown, and it does so without having an effect on production. It does not impact on productive resources such as labour and energy (which get used up in the productive process). Land itself is not a productive resource, but merely a collection of sites where production may take place. If the supply of land was unlimited it would have no monetary value and a land tax would therefor be pointless. As it is, it is limited, and it takes its value from features like fertility, topography and location, rather than production.
It takes those other resources away from potentially productive purposes to pay the land tax. Unless you can demonstrate a productive gain then it diminishes productivity. As you say, it is of a static value – and in the case of a family home a completely anti-product use because the land tax adds absolutely no value in of itself. It is simply a burden on the people living there.
And a residential property has no direct productive value. At best it produces children, who are probably a nett burden on the productivity of the adults producing them. Which is probably why the reproduction rates is diminishing. So what is the product is the productive use in adding $8k to $20k in a urban area to a residential property annually going to provide, either to the people living there raising kids or to country as a whole? Less kids?
Actually you are completely wrong. If that was the case then land that was similar to yours in Auckland would have the same unimproved land value as your land.
The 20 sq metres of my old apartment (about 60 sq metres / 3 stories) has a unimproved land value of at least twice what the land you and your wife own – which will be way more than teh pocket of land in a multi story apartment block. It is perched on a steep hill below the ridge to with a great view of the bottom of Newton gully. It had no fertility, a terrible topography, and its location would be terrible without the city around it. It has virtually no inherent value as land.
Perhaps you should look up the definition of unimproved value of land.
They do include things like drainage, retaining walls, and levelling. So that 20 sq m works out as being having a value of more than $10k per square metre as land value.
What it does measure is the improved value of the city or country about it. The local roads, the businesses, the parking, the sewer and water systems, the utilities in general, public transport routes, the motorways, the access to employment and overall that people want to live there because it is a productive place.
Which really exposes the transparency of your argument. You sole justifications for wanting a land-tax appears to be that
Incidentally we just sold that apartment for about $450k (my own similar but smaller apartment there sold in 2022 fro $570k). We were really reluctant to give it up – I'd been living in the block since 1998. It is a hell of a productivity boost for a single or even a double if you're working in the jobs in Auckland.
But it was too small when both of us starting doing most of our work from home and in my case heading towards 'retirement'. We're renting in Invercargill while my partners does some hands-on work to help her dad.
The house we're renting is about 170 sq metres floor area and about the same again in gardens. Its RV in 2024 was $540k, LV of $285k. But the jobs here in my fields are extremely limited. I'm working part-time remotely and have my UBI (aka super). We'll buy property again, mostly so I can put solar in and a serious set of working areas. It may be near in Auckland – my partner is from here so she knows it too well… I kind of like the idea of Australia, especially if I have to pay expensive land taxes
It takes those other resources away from potentially productive purposes to pay the land tax.
It takes some of the tax burden off the backs of labour and passes it to the landowner.
Actually you are completely wrong. If that was the case then land that was similar to yours in Auckland would have the same unimproved land value as your land.
Yes, but I did mention location as one of the factors, and I accept there may be other factors that I didn't consider. In fact a land tax should perhaps be called, more correctly, a location tax.
It takes those other resources away from potentially productive purposes to pay the land tax.
How? It doesn't change the amount of labour employed. And the fact that profits from that labour may be spent on a tax rather than, say, groceries doesn't change that. Land tax would only affect rent, and rent is only a transfer of monies from one person to another. The actual income content of such a transaction is not changed.
Both National & Labour have been eating up the country's capital and resources over the past 40-50 years and achieved F*ck All. In the past Governments built hospitals, schools and critical infrastructure. Today's Government's spend $100's of millions of SSS's on Consultant's and still can not come up with any recommendations.
I like Verity Johnson's work generally. Reading that article, mostly I'm thinking ok, so 66% or people rate CoL as the number one priority, but how many people have been living like that for years and where were the millennials then?
We've had an underclass for decades, welcome to it.
Now what are you going to do? Because rhetoric about selling off Granny won't change fuck all. If Labour do get in, do you think much is going to change?
And yes, I appreciate the point about voting and what matters to this demographic but that just makes them look selfish like everyone else.
Yes, I get it. But for a lot of these people poverty and economic insecurity were things that happened to other people, hidden behind a reassuring story about how they and their families had worked hard and therefore deserved what they had.
Now Nan and Grandad can't afford the rates on their house, Mum and Dad are stretched thin despite having decent jobs, and you're discovering that a degree doesn't guarantee you a decent career, let alone a house.
And you're right: none of this is particularly revelatory. We've had people living with that kind of insecurity for decades. What's new is who is experiencing it.
And politically, that matters. Not because millennials are uniquely selfish. They're probably no more selfish than anyone else. But because material conditions have a remarkable ability to change what people suddenly regard as an urgent political problem.
The interesting question is what we do with that discovery. Do we lecture them about the sad realities of life: "soz, not soz, but the economy is kind of cooked." Or do we say: "Yeah, we get it. The system is rigged, and far too many of us were OK with that until it started being rigged against us."
Because the latter at least gives us somewhere to go. And, perhaps more importantly, it makes people feel like we actually give a shit about what is happening to them.
Neoliberalism wins every time a Coconut the top 10% keep getting richer and the rest are constantly going backwards. The middle class here in NZ are becoming the NEW POOR.
Yes. And that's precisely why I think this moment is politically important.
Because neoliberalism isn't successful because it's some inevitable force of nature. It's successful because its basic story has remained politically popular and legible, often in defiance of the material evidence.
Work hard and you'll get ahead. Get a degree and you'll get a good job. Buy a house and you'll build some security. Let markets work and prosperity will eventually follow.
That story becomes much harder to sustain when people do all the things they were told to do and discover that the promised security still doesn't arrive.
And when an old political story stops explaining people's material reality, there's an opportunity to tell them a better one.
That's not a crisis for the left.
That's a political opportunity.
Perhaps. And perhaps if voting citizens before their first choice, were to take two courses on practical macro and national economics and how government starts everything or stands behind the greater financial system, so we don't think it is all 'Pennies from Heaven'.
All the education that we have had dished out for so long and we are not yet financially literate about the basic monetary and investment system that makes everything go beyond bartering; and also that the sharemarkets are a rich gambler's excitement parlour which can lead on to parliament! There is a strong thread relating to our wealth and resources that we could all follow just the same as blind people, if we knew about it and could grasp it to keep us from being completely in the dark as we now seem to be.
Let's take a deep breath, start doing better before the election, and listen to some guys sounding good. Perhaps Love – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toYfeN0ACDw John Denver and Placido Domingo
Yeah, nah.
Better economic and civic education? Absolutely.
Making people's right to participate in democracy contingent on demonstrating that they understand economics sufficiently well?
We've tried variations on "only the propertied, educated and respectable should have political power" before.
It didn't end particularly well.
Besides, have you met a first-year economics student?
They've generally learned just enough economics to be absolutely certain they understand how the economy works, while not yet having learned enough economics to understand how little they understand.
I'm not sure that's the electorate I'd design deliberately.
what would be cool though would be citizens education made freely available online to those that are interested. Not studying for a degree, but classes designed to upskill around MMP, how parliament works, law making and policy, economics and finances, local governance and so on.
Economics is hard because it's a lot of weird stuff, but they could teach 'this is what various mainstream economics is', neoliberal economics, other historical systems, doughnut etc economics, limits to growth etc
I don't really see any appetite for this from the electorate.
People (in general) don't want to spend their limited free time doing civics classes.
And, those who do want to learn have plenty of other avenues.
what avenues are tehre for learning about NZ economics as above?
Podcasts, YouTube channels, etc.
Plenty of niche people who have an interest in the topic, and like to share knowledge and/or opinions.
ok, so nothing specific about NZ economics in context of civics tutorials.
ok, so nothing specific about NZ economics in context of civics tutorials.
Do you think that Kiwis don't create social media channels?
These, just off the top of my head:
I'm sure there are heaps more.
Basically, earnest (and boring) lectures are a total waste of time. Existing social media channels are already all over this – if there is an audience, there are people highly motivated to exploit it.
those are all for people that already understand the basics of economics. They're not tutorials. I think I explained what I was talking about already.
what avenues are tehre for learning about NZ economics as above?
Well if you're looking for absolute basics of civics education, there are plenty of YouTube introductions – intended for students, but gets the basics across to everyone.
Like this one:
https://youtu.be/EPIuehqUV3s?si=YafB1U_xFjyxXtjg
Really, there is plenty available if you're looking for it.
I don't need a 6 min intro to civics. I'm talking about a tutorial based course that takes people through economics in the NZ sociopolitical context (and preferably modern enough to not just rely on conventional economics). So people can understand our economy and politics.
If there is nothing which already meets your requirements – then it would seem a golden opportunity for you to create the just-right-sized educational offering.
My belief is that the potential market is already well served (and there is no niche for a tutorial course on NZ economics in the sociopolitical context) – but I'm sure you can prove me wrong.
That's the great thing about social media – almost zero start-up cost – and you can do it in the comfort of your own home.
lol, no, I'm barely surviving.
I think you might have missed my point.
I really think the best place to start is right back in primary and high school.
Economics is really not that complicated, at least at the level required for basic civic literacy. It's just that a lot of neoliberal theory gets accepted as objective truth because it has the enormous advantage of already being intuitively legible to most of the electorate.
Which creates a challenge: any alternative first has to overcome the gravitational pull of that default worldview before it can be considered on its own terms.
Economics (and civics) is already part of the NZ curriculum. So kids will be getting the basics already (at least in Years 7 to 10 – when it's not optional).
Of course, you can lead a horse to water…..
Learning actually works better when people are self-motivated to understand a topic. So, self-paced, engaging content via the social media channels that people are already using – is likely to be more effective.
Because, I can guarantee that the worthy, but oh-so-dull civics and finance instruction, goes in one ear and out the other.
hell of a lot of people not at school though. Yes def should be taught at school, but if we want things to change now, we need the adults now to have the informational and conceptual tools.
Agree that with economics in particular it would be challenging.
true and I don't see Millennials are more selfish, but they have been sold this idea that they are good and boomers are bad, and that's dangerous.
I'm glad they're taking it seriously now, but I also know that if conditions improved most will go back to living as if the underclass doesn't exist, we will be forgotten about again.
Also agree about the current situation gives us a place to go. Not sure if we are up to it, but an opportunity for sure. I would say though that the underclass as been feeling like this for a long time, and NZ largely doesn't care about what happens to them. So why would it care what happens to Millennials etc?
If the left wants to step up, we also have to care about people that think differently than us. Because those people are the ones that determine who wins elections.
I now see OP as a bridge to that. Good to see Wong and Swarbrick on the same stage at BHN debate, hope there is relationship building happening in the background.
I don't really disagree with much of that.
And yes, the underclass has been living with this kind of insecurity for much longer. But I think that's partly why the present moment is politically interesting. You don't actually need everyone to arrive at the same politics, or even for exactly the same reasons.
You simply need enough people to recognise that they have overlapping material interests.
If Millennials and younger voters are suddenly discovering that housing insecurity, precarious work, concentrated wealth and weak public services are problems because those things are now happening to them, then sure, there's an element of self-interest in that.
Politics has always worked that way.
The opportunity for the left is to turn that temporary alignment of interests into something more durable and universal, rather than getting into an argument about which generation or group has suffered most.
And I very much agree with your last point. We have to be interested in people as they actually are, including people who disagree with us.
They're not an irritating obstacle to our politics. They're the whole point.
It's one of the reasons I've come around to OP. Wong seems to be the only person in politics talking publicly about the need to transcend the L/R divide. I disagree with her that L/R is redundant now, but instead that there is a third politics (that OP and others speak too). Her kaupapa is very much about conciliation. She reminds me of Shaw.
It's one of the reasons I've come around to OP. Wong seems to be the only person in politics talking publicly about the need to transcend the L/R divide. I disagree with her that L/R is redundant now, but instead that there is a third politics (that OP and others speak too). Her kaupapa is very much about conciliation. She reminds me of Shaw.
If it is about what government can do about food costs
then it is about policies
*MW increases at the level of the CPI increase, or more
*a proper Food in schools programme
*government support for Food Banks
*Fair Pay Agreements (which includes pay equity)
It is not even a contest, the coalition government needs to go.
PS
*Export food costs (beef and lamb and cheese are impacted by the global market), governments cannot do much about it.
*As for energy – the National 1990's Bradford model and then the Key 49% sell-off model was not designed to provide lower power prices but ensure the consumer was a cash cow for government.
^Those paying attention noticed this was their model for water – first to generate revenue for water infrastructure from higher cost to the public, then later the profits for a sell-off.
Sure. And I'm not really arguing that we're short of possible policy interventions.
We can argue about the merits of minimum wages, Fair Pay Agreements, school lunches, competition policy, housing, electricity market reform, tax, transfers and a dozen other things.
My point is that policy has never existed independently of politics.
You can have the finest policy programme imaginable sitting in a manifesto somewhere, but unless you can assemble an electoral coalition willing to give you the power to implement it, it's just a document.
What interests me about the present moment is that the constituency for a different economic settlement may be getting substantially larger.
People who previously thought the existing system basically worked are discovering that it doesn't work particularly well for them either.
That's the opportunity.
The question for the left isn't simply "what policies would we implement?"
We have plenty of answers to that.
It's whether we can persuade enough people that those answers offer them a more credible path to material security than another three years of the same.
Because we can't implement any of this from opposition.
During periods of high inflation or severe cost-of-living crises, how much money a political party's policies are going to put into ones pocket is one of the most powerful political drivers when it comes to persuading voters.
Agree, its fertile times – re the constituency for a new economic settlement possibly becoming larger.
Which, right or wrong, is the wave TOPs seem to be riding. With a number of voters seemingly losing trust and giving up hope in the already established parties.
Which is exactly the argument I've been making for weeks.
It doesn't matter if their policies are objectively correct: sufficiently large portions of the electorate are starting to believe they can be.
There is no evidence that land values would fall.
Since we have not had a land tax since it was abolished round about 1990 – and that tax applied only to land values above a certain threshold – no evidence is really available, and will not be available until we try it out.
Since it's pretty clear that what you actually want is for only the government to be allowed to rent homes – then that's what you should actually propose, rather than fiddling around with taxes.
I don't think I said, or even implied, that.
It would be good, I think, if the numbers of state owned rentals were increased. I also think it would be good if highly leveraged landlords were chased from the housing markets. Why should that market have to suffer from the crappy business decisions of a lot of "boomers" chasing capital gains.
So, lets start by defining what you are talking about in terms of a 'land tax'.
And whether there will be any increase in public finance (AKA 'citizen's income) as a result.
Let's just wait and see what happens.
Well, there is little point.
Both wealth and land tax have been ruled out by Labour, so we're going to be waiting for a very long time.
Gareth Morgan when he first started the party, advocated an equitable rate of return tax, and this was continued when Geoff Simmons assumed leadership in 2020. The ERoR tax was abandoned by a new leader, Raf Manji, for the 2023 election, and replaced by a land tax. The ERoR tax would probably not have been popular since it would have been imposed on all home owners. I have a feeling the land tax will not be popular, whatever its merits, for much the same reason.
However I seem to recall that few years back a variation on the ERoR was developed by Susan St John and Terry Baucher, which bypassed most of the population and landed only on the very wealthy. I think they called "fair economic returns tax (FER)". I am beginning to think that that would be the way to go. It's probably too late for TOP to change course at this stage, but if they get into parliament and find that there is no support for a land tax, they may find that an FER would be worth looking at.
I cannot give a link for this since it is just something I came across a few years back.