While rolling your eyes is a micro aggression on par with a genocide of baby kittens, I think we all rolled our eyes this week when James Shaw got around to criticising the Government…
Greens co-leader James Shaw lashes out at Labour over rising house prices
Greens co-leader James Shaw has lashed out at Labour over rising house prices, labelling it “irresponsible” for refusing to entertain a tax on capital gains.
…gosh it’s ‘big and tough’ James Shaw this week now is it?
See his criticism could be taken tad more serious of he hadn’t forced the entire Party to eat a Dead Tofu Rat and accepted the cheap baubles of office.
Cause while he’s supping from their table, eating their food and drinking their wine, his ‘lashing’ means fucking nothing doesn’t it?
The Greens should have gone into the negotiations with Labour by threatening a civil war if they didn’t get meaningful policy gains, they didn’t do that, they went in begging, and as such got meaningless baubles instead.
Oh sure the Greens are allowed to agree to disagree but while the poor rot, while inequality grows and while the climate is in free fall, such polite Ponsonby Dinner Party rules of engagement are intellectually hollow.
With things set to get much worse, the Greens sold out any integrity they once had for the weakness of compromise.
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Regardless, he’s right to publicly highlight the infuriating side of Jacinda’s Labour government. Do nothing, see if it effects polling and if not, carry on doing nothing or at best, do something symbolic but meaningless.
However if Labour are serious about poverty, especially child poverty, then the very inconvenient truth of our housing market is things are about to get a lot worse. The longer the – do nothing – indecision goes on, the harder it is to fix and the bigger the intervention required. Trouble is I dont think Jacinda has the kahunas to intervene in the market when that big intervention is needed.
When houses in high rental/low income areas like Mangere East are hitting $900k which they now are, the shit is about to hit the fan, because filthy greedy investors want their pound of flesh back, in spades. And people WILL end up homeless. Then what?
Shaw sells his property and buys a remote piece of rural badland and converts it into a caravan park for everyone to live in, obviously…
In modern politics you spout a lot of nonsense to get elected, do nothing worthwhile but orchestrate a lot of damage while in office, and retire when things start to go against you…with a very generous pension. If you are still short of a million or two, head off to the UN for a pre-arranged position, or join the board of some planet looting company, or for the less ambitious, get your mates to have you elected as a mayor or councillor, in which position you can carry on rorting and partying at the public’s expense and share the booty with your mates.
You have to do something really bad, like fuck the vicar’s underage daughter and get caught doing it, or run over a toddler in a driveway and kill them to get yourself in real trouble.
Other than having to lie continuously and pretend you know what you are doing when you don’t, politics is money for old rope. Surely you know that deep down.
Instead of not wanting to appear partisan and leaving drug reform up to one spokesperson. The Green party would do well to unify and embrace reform wholeheartedly, without compromise as their primary political focus leading into the 2023 election. There are over 48% of NZ voters up for grabs.
@ XRAY: Do you mean “effects” or “affects”. IMO, your intended meaning is not clear – you could be missing precision of your INTENDED meaning.
Yes Mr Coca-Cola speaks with much gravitas on the evils of capitalism.
“Greens co-leader James Shaw has lashed out at Labour over rising house prices, labelling it “irresponsible” for refusing to entertain a tax on capital gains”.
Shaw seems a bit one-dimensional. I concede the five points are a pretty simple summation of the NZ housing crisis but I was interested in trying to tease out the different threads and how these seemingly different issues might be addressed by govt intervention. It seems to me that they (other than #4) are somewhat separate issues – but no doubt interrelated also – and probably more than a well-intentioned CGT is needed.
1, insufficient social housing (the legacy of neoliberalism and govt policies since 1984)
2, insufficient ‘affordable’ housing for those meeting mortgage criteria (rising construction costs / issues with the RMA / lack of local planning/ land availability/ supply vs demand in the face of immigration)
3, the acceptability of the housing market as an ‘untaxed’ investment (and can we only blame well-healed ‘investors’?)
4, inflation of rental market
5, RB lowers interest rates in the face of a Covid–caused recession giving well-healed investors cheap capital, further inflating the housing market
Your number 4 is clearly connected to the massive imported population growth through immigration.
Yes. And now I think of it a direct relationship between refugee resettlement (prev 750 annually + family reunification) and social housing. Almost all refugees end up in long-term social housing, which has shrunk as housing stock sold off under neoliberal policies. Makes it harder for others in hardship and on waiting lists. But refugee resettlement is a part of AO/NZ’s humanitarian commitment to the UNHRC refugee resettlement programme and quite a different story to mass immigration under the points system and associated schemes.
Quite possibly; the refugee numbers are minuscule compared to the race-to-the-bottom tsunami of work and student visa holders, though.
This was the case fifteen years ago, but about 50% of refugees go into private housing now.
The fundamental, elemental, bare bones problem that plagues AO/NZ is that for years its primary agrarian ‘industry’ has been plundered mercilessly for its export earned revenue.
There you go.
That, is it.
My 26 Words have described our dilemma with eye watering clarity and I don’t give a fuck that I wrote them which I know opens me up to all manner of derision and scorn of course. All tall poppies need a good, old fashioned whacking down aye boys?
But. I. Don’t. Care.
We AO/NZ’ers are a bit fucked until we come to realise that it is that which is the problem.
They’ve cleaned us out and now that they’ve been sprung by the likes of me, a farmer ironically, and you guys as being a means to broadcast myself so that must cause much late night sheet twisting and not in that good way.
The Green party should be all over our farmers with patience, understanding, advice and guidance on more sustainable and regenerative farming practices and the Labour Party should be all over our farmers with patience, understanding, advice and guidance but also camaraderie and fellowship.
Farmers are not your enemy, urban workforce and people in the cities. Our urban people are not your enemy either @ Farmers. Indeed, with a reliably strong country/urban collaboration ( Without the wanky, hokey, belittling down-on-the-farm vernacular the hideous little criminal elite’s plaything, rnz, like to portray our farmers as being to segregate and divide.) we, as a country would be a sparkling force to be reckoned with.
Instead of this. This tangle of faux values and where greed is good. We have a stunning country by any measure and yet we can barely make a fist and there’s only 5 million of us on a land area greater than that of the UK by 25 thousand square kilometres. The whole of Holland could fit within Canterbury alone and yet we have starving kids, miserable homelessness and billionaires.
A word of caution:
If you don’t see immediate movements from Labour and the Greens towards the two fundamental issues I’ve raised above then you will see our AO/NZ become someone else’s and you too will be living in the streets.
Unless, of course, your billionaires.
What happened to the Greens (and Labour and NZ First) to be against the TPP – yep Greens get a brownie point for still being against, but a canning for actually doing nothing about it while in office.
NZ First got punished and no longer in power, and Labour managed to pretend that it was a different agreement.
What is clear is that trade deals are burdens on smaller countries, big countries like China regularly break the free trade rules and then just claim ‘food infractions’ to get around them.
Trade agreements are for large organisations to take natural resources and power off sovereign countries and for larger countries to use coercive pressure on other nations..
“China has a history of using coercive economic pressure as a political weapon.
In 2011, for example, it restricted salmon imports from Norway after the awarding of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo. In 2012 it banned bananas from the Philippines in the wake of territorial disputes in the South China Sea. And so on.”
https://theconversation.com/theres-no-need-for-panic-over-chinas-trade-threats-149828
But such pressure has been narrowly focused, and China has been careful to maintain “plausible deniability”, using excuses like food safety concerns to avoid being taken to the World Trade Organisation for flouting international trade rules.”
The “trade rules” can be against the best interests of a country in which case they have the power to vary their degree of participation.
That is quite different to the sanctions imposed by the US led warmongers, against relatively helpless and struggling nations.
Lets have a bit of real world perspective.
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