Major von Tempsky have you considered that you get priority service from Telecom because of your wifes work
Printable View
Major von Tempsky have you considered that you get priority service from Telecom because of your wifes work
The dodgy National Party again..
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/poli...-to-dodge-poll
Consider that consummate politician, our previous PM Kiwi Keith Holyoake who won 4 elections and retired as PM.
He was a master of looking at political currents and when he deemed it expedient he would alter course, back off, go into reverse, regaining the majority.
If I was Labour I would be sobbing heavily at the thought of facing another Kiwi Keith..... :-)
Isn't this type of brainless policy the reason National got dumped for three terms? To put the flip-flops another way, you can't trust them in general.
Colin James follows the recent win for Labour over National. Shearer still needs coaching for being in front of the camera, but this was a win.
Quote:
Colin James's column for the Otago Daily Times for 12 June 2012
A win for Shearer. But much work still to do
It was a clear win to David Shearer, his first against John Key. Shearer instantly sensed parents' likely reaction to notes from teachers about Hekia Parata's brilliant scheme to raise class sizes to pay for more teacher training and a pay-for-performance system. He ran it top of his budget speech.
On Thursday Parata scrapped her scheme. Key said from Europe (his polls no doubt saying what by then Labour's were) that it was her decision.
Keep the boss clear of the mud, the tacticians say. Helen Clark was skilled at that. But it stretches plausibility rather tight that Parata could be still promoting her policy on radio one day and the next suddenly pushing senior ministers -- one a former woodwork teacher, another a tough-it-out tactician -- into scrapping it.
Why downgrade class sizes? Professor John Hattie, inventor of a method for teachers to test their effectiveness, told a Treasury semi-public lecture a few years back that class sizes are far less effective than other factors in lifting learning. Professor Dugald Scott backed that last week.
But parents, especially National-leaning parents, get skittish about their kids' education. To get parents onside would have required long, research-rich and well-led public debate -- of the sort preceding the 2010 tax changes and now starting to be prepared for a rise in the pension age. The only class size "debate" was a speech by Gabs Makhlouf, Secretary to the Treasury, not an agency parents would instinctively turn to for guidance on kids' education.
Makhlouf's minister should have twigged how parents would react. As education shadow minister, Bill English made hay out of Trevor Mallard's amalgamation of small schools, also aimed at improving learning. Clark squashed that fast when she saw how parents reacted.
Three points arise from the Parata gambit.
One is that, while the government will recover as this gaffe fades from the news, it will have lost a sliver of trust. This bit of political mismanagement, coming on top of several this year, could generate a downward momentum out of the recent small slippage in National's poll readings. And reversing momentum is a lot harder than forestalling it, especially if background factors -- consumer confidence and right-track-wrong-track readings particularly -- are also sliding, as they are right now.
The second point is that there is a public interest in good political management: stable policy. Poor political management leads either to backoffs -- remember the retreat from Gerry Brownlee's plan to dig up national parks in 2010 -- or to policy ping-pong as the next change of government reverses a policy for which there is not a solid voter majority.
Thus, National heavily softened Labour's emissions trading scheme and the next Labour-led government will likely toughen it again. National is reversing a swag of Clark-government workplace laws, which will in turn be reversed. The jury is out on SOE selldowns: if the sky doesn't fall in after the first one or two, public opposition will likely melt but the politics need managing much better than up till now. Unstable policy is bad for investment and bad for voter trust in the system.
The third point about the Parata gambit is that Labour's morale is up a notch and Shearer has taken one more step towards filling out as a party leader in a form recognisable to the public. Even if most voters won't have noticed, it is his first decisive win over Key.
The risk for Labour as its morale builds is to think it might sneak into office without changing too much.
That risk is not so much that voters might sniff out a coaster and deny Labour in 2014 nor that it leaves out the Green part of the governing equation that needs to be sorted well before election day. It is that the resultant government might be short-lived.
That puts the heat on Davids Cunliffe and Parker, Grant Robertson and Jacinda Ardern.
The two Davids' job is to cherry-pick the now fast-evolving international economic policy thinking to fit a Labour agenda. Cunliffe, who has the pivotal economic development portfolio, was to emphasise investment in human and physical capital in a speech yesterday after this went to press. Shearer wants a "new economy", research-based.
Robertson's role is to freshen environment and education thinking, oversee a general reapplication of Labour principles to modern conditions -- decades overdue and a Shearer ambition -- and lead the deal-making with the Greens. Robertson has yet to generate much of that but these are early days.
Generation-Y Ardern's role is to recast social assistance policy. She has been pushing the child-centred policy which Labour curiously neglected in the election and has been gathering a group to rethink "welfare", which she is calling "social security", thereby reviving the original 1930s notion of reciprocity.
Few outside a small circle will quickly notice much of that. But it is every bit as important as Shearer's win over Key on class sizes.
-- Colin James, Synapsis Ltd, P O Box 9494, Wellington 6141
Ph (64)-4-384 7030, Mobile (64)-21-438 434, Fax (64)-4-384 9175
Webpage http://www.ColinJames.co.nz
In 2008, the IRD scored the best recent results for clawing back some unpaid taxes from the top tier wealthy. This was an amount of over $100 million. Labour was out of office in 2009 and now the target is back to the average. The top 250 individuals in terms of wealth (or ability to control wealth) have been asked to pay evaded dues of at least an extra $500 million over 10 years.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/n...ectid=10813402
$50 million per year on average is only 0.08% of the tax take, but perhaps it wouldn't cost too much to target a smaller group like this. Except one of these individuals had 197 companies, and it would appear that many use tax havens and other avenues, some of which are not illegal per se.
It appears that the word 'aggressive' means (in this group anyway) that IRD will be taking a good look.Quote:
"Aggressive tax arrangements can include the use of tax havens, transferring profits to associated offshore entities, using trusts to divert taxable income, and showing lifestyle and luxury assets as business assets," said IRD investigations manager Stuart Duff.
I suspect it would make interesting reading to see the average tax rate paid by these people on extremely high incomes, and I doubt it would be anywhere near the highest tax rate.
Bill English extols farmers to ensure their own staff are trained well, and to keep on the path of improvement in productivity.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/n...ectid=10816094
He was on safe ground in that meeting. But from the sidelines, there is much to be bemused about with the farming sector. Here is an entire group of people who arguably focus on paying as little tax as possible, and they can achieve that by being only averagely productive most years. Every so often the sector will see bumper prices and favourable weather, and that is the time to pay a bit of tax, sell the farm and take the tax-free capital gain. A simple proposition that has worked for generations.
Why am I so sure of myself on this? You just have to look at the power requirements for milking sheds around the country for example. Most run completely off the mains supply. There are heat exchangers available to recover the warmth from the vat chillers and use it to heat the washdown water. The payback period would be 2 years. Solar tubes could be used to heat the water with an efficiency of 85%, an even quicker payback. But farms overwhelmingly choose not to buy this equipment, even though it would free up power for industry without requiring a new power station.
The reason they don't buy this gear, and lots of other equipment like it, is that dairy farms are often worked by a contractor or a sharemilker. These people don't have an interest in capital items of plant, because they might be off the farm next season. But they also have to pay for all the power on the working side of the farm. The farm owner doesn't buy the gear because they will only see a long-term gain perhaps, and the plant might expire before the farm is sold off.
So this is why you can walk into a dairy plant and see all the equipment that was there 25 years ago. It's still working, very inefficiently, and the farming sector puts up with it because of their crazy job contracts.
el Zorro Are these farmers on take or pay contracts. I have had nothing to do with this industry for some years, but in those days most farmers left their house & cowshed lights on 24hours a day amongst other power wasting options & were still only paying their guarantee payment. They had to contract for this large minimum payment or the power boards would not supply them. All facts are needed to give a judgement not just your side of it. Have you even taken the extra interest costs into consideration, even if they can borrow that amount of extra capital. Also who pays for it the farmer or the share milker. It just sounds like sour grapes because you cannot sell your product.