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notices and features - Date published:
6:00 am, December 31st, 2025 - 5 comments
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The Detail has a good podcast on the controversy over the proposal to extend coal mining on the West Coast's Denniston Plateau: https://www.rnz.co.nz/podcast/the-detail/2025/the-fierce-battle-over-mining-on-denniston-plateau)
The usual bait is being laid out before the locals (jobs) and no doubt most of them will swallow it.
The podcast interviews one person who makes the point that a mine has a limited life but if the Denniston Plateau is left in its natural state it can be enjoyed by NZers present and future.
The miners stress that mining is done nowadays in a much more environmentally-friendly manner. Even so, if the mine extension goes ahead the Coast will still be left with a toxic waste dump in the form of a tailings pond with the potential to leach acid into water supplies. And as the podcast notes, a tailings pond will eventually fail.
I don't see that as a good trade-off, but I'm not a politician.
same shit happening in Central Otago at Tarras/Bendigo. It's all about the money. 100% Pure NZ was a Key Government money making scheme built off NZ's environment. Now NACTF have moved onto a slash and burn economy.
We should fight though, because as you say, the pollution is forever and it won't stop in just these few places. The greed behind it wants everything.
https://www.interest.co.nz/public-policy/136727/thinking-outside-box-marcelo-santos-suggests-replacing-progressive-income-tax
Something to chew on, gst on steroids with no income tax
That's an interesting idea. So you'd put in an annual return of your income less savings and be taxed on the difference. With a progressive taxation rate the more you spend, presuming that the rate would start at near zero for a minimum wage spend and get out near 50%, or more, for someone ranging through 200K/yr.
It'd be a solid kick in the slats for consumerism, and strongly encourage saving / investment, so might make us into a rather dour penny pinching lot. But we'd probably be a hell of a lot healthier and happier, kinda like we were in the 50's and early 60's when we didn't have the consumer choice and demands we have now. We'd probably have a thriving economy too with money going into savings being invested back into business and growing the economy.
Seems pretty good, and easy, for individuals, but I'm interested to see the concept fleshed out to explain how it would work for business to provide the same incentives to reduce spending and increase savings / investment. A major mindset shift here and could result in cost accountancy on super steroids.
In macroeconomics you need to take things like the paradox of thrift into account (as Keynes showed already in his book, "The General Theory", which still applies). To explain that we should understand what is actually being described by GDP. All the transactions which are part of GDP have two sides, one side makes a purchase (or investment), and the other side provides the goods and services and collects the income (maybe on behalf of a business). Understanding this makes it obvious that GDP is a measure of income directly but loosely it also produces an indication of how much goods and services are transacted in the economy, which is (to some degree) an indication of the standard of living going on.
This should be enough context to understand the paradox of thrift which is what happens when a sharp shift in the intended savings rate has no effect on the savings rate achieved overall. This occurs because when one household sharply increases its saving it removes spending from its usual suppliers, decreasing the income of those households or businesses. The result of this occurring on a large scale is usually understood as a recession. Unfortunately, this is simple dismissed with a throw away comment that in the longer run the balance ought to be better. The simplistic version of Keynes is that at this time it's mandated that the government run a deficit to smooth out GDP, rather than have people unemployed. A deeper reading of Keynes actually suggests that the government can keep spending until there is no involuntary unemployment (unemployed people who would willingly take a job at the going wage), without threatening the price level, which is also the point at which everyone's savings buffers are full (everyone has as much income as they desire including their savings desires). To reinforce this conclusion, it should also be sufficient to understand that collectively the ability to save comes from two sectors of the economy, either overseas by running an export surplus or from that government spending allowing everybody to earn as much as they desire, by working more, including for saving. NZ persistently runs an export deficit (like most first world economies) leaving the basic result our saving is down to the accumulated govt deficits facilitating that.
It's also worth looking at who are the kinds of households who typically end up in involuntary unemployment and unable to save sufficiently. It's of course the same lower income households which this policy purports to be helping.
The point to make here is that to reach that conclusion I didn't mention any specific taxation policy. Regardless of the specific taxation policy you will not have an increase in the populations savings unless the accumulated govt deficit sufficiently facilitates that (with the unemployment rate going way down below 2%), and with the present progressive income tax this result is already fully possible.
Finally, to say something about 'consumerism' it's not really the same as consumption. There are two categories of spending on goods and services in the GDP framework, consumption and investment both are in relation to income. The only difference between the two is how long before the purchases are utilized and it's a fairly arbitrary 18 months' time frame which splits the two apart. So, I don't think the break down between the two describes a more or less 'consumerist' economy. There are also many, many ways the pattern of spending in NZ could potentially change to less consumerist which would at the same time have zero change in that split described in GDP.