A word of appreciation to Steven Joyce

March 8, 2010

Apropos of nothing much else in particular, I’m posting a brief note registering approval of the way Steven Joyce is going about his job.

Steven is the Minister for Quite a Few Things in the current NZ government, it seems, including infrastructure, communications and transport. When he was first appointed I was one of many I know who were rather apprehensive, given his reputation leading up to the last elections for “astute” right-wing political dealings.

For all I know (not having met him or seen him in person), he may be an expert in back-room political machinations, or he may be a humble, thoughtful but direct man. His demeanour on television and radio certainly suggests the latter.

What I do want to praise is the unusually honest way he deals with the electronic media whenever he’s interviewed. A real breath of fresh air. I’m becoming increasingly weary of politicians and public officials who have clearly been taught the standard avoidance technique, the “What I can tell you … ” ploy:

“And Mr Official, does this mean that you will be changing the procedure to speed up the service within the next few months?”

“Mr Interviewer, what I can tell you is that we are committed to providing the fastest possible service.”

“So will it be a few months or a few years before the procedure is changed?”

“What I can tell you is that going forward changes will be made that the public will really like.”

Joyce is one of the few politicians I’ve heard in ages who simply answers the question, without a hint of pre-assembled on-message preaching in sound bites (as per Phil Goff), jovial but evasive near-enough truths (a la John Key) or straight-out avoidance of saying anything factual that might come back to haunt them (pretty much every other NZ politician).

For all I know, this may be a technique Joyce uses to disarm his interviewers or opponents. But I still want to record that I appreciate his style of politics. He comes across as confident and unflustered, seems to have an astute brain, clearly works hard, has avoided scandals so far, and has a physical presence.

For the record, I also agree with many of the things he’s introducing to the governing policy mix, including much of the changes to the problematic road safety rules.

2 Comments | Media reporting, Politics | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by David Armstrong

The minimum driving age must be raised

March 3, 2010

Surprise, surprise! Once again I find myself agreeing strongly with John Key and supporting him, this time as he stands up to the feeble arguments of those who want the minimum driving age in New Zealand kept at 15 years.

I first drove a car in Melbourne, where I spent the first 25 years of my life. The minimum age there was (and still is, I believe) 18, and at the time that never bothered me. I simply waited because that was the norm there and then.

What has always bothered me since choosing to live in New Zealand was the minimum driving age of 15. I cannot understand how anyone can believe that most 15 year olds are capable of making the fine judgments required to drive on increasingly busy roads with all the distractions provided by modern technology and cavalier attitudes to the use of increasingly powerful cars.

Of course, not all teenagers are like this. Most are not, I imagine, but there are enough 15 year olds around who are clearly not mature enough that I would prefer to err on the side of caution. For my sake as much as for theirs.

The standard rebuttal to this argument, employed particularly by the rural lobby, is that if 15 year olds cannot drive their kids would miss out on job opportunities and social occasions, relying instead on parents to ferry them around.

This is a completely spurious argument. If there was any soundness to it then the logical extension is to allow driving by 14 year olds. And 13 year olds. And 12 …….

Anything below about 17 or 18, the age limit is almost totally arbitrary, a number plucked out of the air, a result of habit. A change to 16, or 17, would annoy kids approaching the magic driving age, as well as their parents, but within a few years it will become the norm and those under that age will simply see a new number to look forward to. Parents will have to help out with transport just as they do now for 14 and 13 year olds.

A more important argument, to my mind, is that a driver’s licence should be seen as a privilege, not a basic right. The longer you have to wait for that privilege, the more likely you are to respect and appreciate it.

When I drive I want to feel as confident as possible that all the other drivers on the road have the maturity to take their role as driver seriously and be capable of respecting the safety of others.

2 Comments | Politics | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by David Armstrong

XT failures highlight problems with belief in “market forces”

February 26, 2010

I may be wrong but . . . . I think I have the answer to the problems caused by Telecom’s XT mobile network failures. Telecom should be privatised by the government and run by business people rather than public servants. After all, private enterprise always does a better job than governments, right?

Woops, sorry, forgot, this was already done, back two decades ago. Phew, problem solved!

Weak attempt at satire over!

I know there are lots of very funny jokes out there about XT. Telecom is clearly suffering as a result. (Which means that many of us who aren’t even customers will suffer because our savings may be directly or indirectly invested in Telecom, whose share price is bound to suffer.) But that’s the free market at work, right?

(For readers not familiar with New Zealand’s telecommunications industry, the main player Telecom has been having dire problems with its new (< 1 year old) mobile platform, infuriating its customers who have been losing service for up to days sometimes.)

I’m not a user of the XT network. In fact, I rarely use my cellphone, and try not to rely on it any more than I did on smoke signals back before mobiles were invented. But I am aware that many people, particularly businesses, are so dependent on their mobile phones to operate daily and to make their living, that these outages can be quite damaging. A few tens or hundreds of dollars of compensation means nothing for some people if they lost a million-dollar business deal because they missed a vital call. The stakes can be extremely high.

So I find myself reflecting on how we react to such failures of basic, vital infrastructures. And some of these reflections come back to the wisdom of placing our lives in the hands of private businesses, and the old arguments about private vs public ownership and management of infrastructure.

It is ironic that many of the people who are (a) badly affected and (b) staunch supporters of government keeping out of business, are the loudest in now calling for the government to call Telecom to account, and even to legislate or regulate to ensure that Telecom’s networks remain effective. Today’s news talked about demands for new laws to be enacted to ensure the 111 emergency service works even when the networks are down. As if punishing Telecom will make the problems go away any faster.

Time for a reality check!

1. Government laws and regulations don’t make phone networks work. People like technicians and engineers do. Whether employed by the public service or a private business, they do the same work.

2. Advocating privatisation of all goods and services until they go wrong and affect us, and then demanding government to fix the problems, is just childish. I have never been impressed by the argument that private businesses will always do a better job of running a commercial operation than public services can. I’m close to 100% confident that this has been shown by the electricity sector “reforms” in New Zealand since the mid-90s, and I’m leaning this way on the telecoms industry as well.

3. If you believe that market forces alone should be used to provide your needs efficiently and reliably, then take the consequences on the chin when things go wrong.

4. If a privately supplied commodity (like cheese) goes wrong, then market forces usually do work to get redress and then to punish the supplier. But this XT episode shows us that if vital infrastructure supplied by private companies goes wrong, market forces are pretty ineffective. You can’t just go changing providers every time something goes wrong. It ain’t that simple.

I may be wrong but . . . . key infrastructures on which civilised society relies should, in my opinion, be controlled by democratic governments, and leave less important goods and services to the private sector.

But I know it’s too late for things like power and telecommunications. Those horses have well bolted by now.

So all I can say is – if the free market structure is the way you wanted it, don’t grizzle when those market forces you believed in so passionately turn out to be rather less effective than expected.

2 Comments | Business | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by David Armstrong

Budget must address the huge problem of property booms

February 15, 2010

I’m no great shakes when it comes to understanding micro-economics and fiscal stuff. (Macro-economics for that matter too.) But several people have asked me what I’ve thought of the New Zealand government’s recent pre-budget announcement, particularly in relation to tax. So here goes.

I may be a bit strange, but I tend to look at budgets more in terms of fairness to all and what will make the citizenry better able to face the future, not so much in terms of how much better or worse off I will be. My long-term thinking is that the fairer and more sustainable the way our representatives collect and spend tax money, the happier most people will be and therefore the more pleasant and positive-thinking the community I live in will also be. If this happens, I win in the end even if my financial wealth status is down a bit.

Which it will be, in all probability. Being “older” and dependent on superannuation plus releasing money I saved over the years, my tax bracket is so low now (it wasn’t once, mind) that I doubt I’ll get much of a boost from any tax cuts. But it appears I will still be paying extra GST that will be compensated for only in the component of my income that comes from NZ Super.

However, although I do sympathise with people who are really struggling and simply cannot tighten the belts any further, I see the GST rise as being pretty minor in proportion to the general money coursing around the economy these days. I’m more concerned about the fairness of tax rules for those who are comfortably off, and how these may affect the ability of our economy to settle at a more sustainable state than it was in during the last property bubble.

Meaning what? Meaning that for years I, like quite a few others, have been particularly concerned at how the tax loopholes in favour of property investment (over savings or investing in something that actually benefits the country) have skewed our way of life so much that we are now collectively in so much debt. And I’m now equally concerned that the people who indulged in property trading (“climbing the property ladder”) and renting out in order to get fast tax-free capital gains, and use ludicrously unreal depreciation rules to get rich quickly, at the expense of people doing productive work who were/are being priced out of owning a house.

If any of these unfair and unequal uses of tax rules are actually implemented come budget time, to anywhere near a reasonably fair system, then certainly there will be lots of people hurt as a result – both property investors and people forced to rent. And house values will probably drop again.

But I think that that’s something we have to face as part of a move to an ultimately more sustainable and fair system. A one-off hit for a few years. In recent decades (particularly the last), property investors have in the main done very well indeed, thank you very much, at the expense of the rest of us. All tax changes hurt some people and sectors and please others. Until now tax rules have operated to please investors and hurt people trying simply to own a home. It seems this is about to change, and I’m glad of it.

I’ve always been comfortable with GST as a tax mechanism, as it forced tax dodgers to actually contribute to paying for the public goods and services they use. It’s not perfect – GST does constitute a much higher proportion of the disposable income of poorer people than the very rich – but it’s better than PAYE and Company tax mechanisms alone (spoken as someone who until the mid-80s paid PAYE with no ability to dodge it).

GST percentage changes are for most people only marginal changes. But the tax dodges allowed and encouraged through property investment have been having an absolutely huge impact on our economy through the recent property boom, so much so that when the property bubble looked like popping (though it looks like it only deflated a bit), the result was a huge wave of fear and insecurity through the rest of the economy. So if we don’t take action to address this, by changing property tax rules, then I believe it is inevitable that we will soon re-live the recent past, to our greater detriment in the medium-term future.

I would much rather see property prices hold for as long as they can, or even drop quite a bit, and reach a sustainable equilibrium that’s fair to all, than to see everything go back to property boom days. I’ll support any taxes that will make this the number 1 priority – even if it means that some now-well-off property investors take a big hit.

11 Comments | Business, Economics, Politics | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by David Armstrong

Tolley and her friends show their true colours

February 5, 2010

First, thanks for all the encouraging comments by readers of this blog, especially in relation to the National Standards debate. This will probably be my final post on this issue (unless the debate moves to newer ground or a higher level – not expected any time soon). I’m not a teacher and have no great axe to grind, apart from a strengthening opinion. But I am seeing some interesting facets regarding human nature, people and politics which the debate is bringing to the surface.

Increasingly in recent years I’ve found myself mulling over the characteristics that make people tick. What makes people react in such different ways to events and opinions? In the case of National’s current contentious education policy, why are the two sides so adamant they are right? What’s driving the thought processes?

I think it’s best viewed in terms of some good old dichotomies. The traditional ones are left-wing and right-wing, economically wet or dry, socialist versus capitalist.

I interpret so much of human behaviour and reaction to events in terms of the type of spirit imbuing the people concerned. Often I see them as being fundamentally either generous-spirited or mean-spirited. In the same way, I assess people I interact with as negative or positive people, punitive or forgiving.

In relation to national standards, I think a similar polarity is in action. There are those who believe the best way to get improved performance, behaviour or whatever desired achievement out of anyone (employees, families, pupils) is to encourage, foster and work co-operatively with them. And on the other hand there are those who believe the best method to get results out of people is to point fingers, make them feel bad or inadequate, and trust that this will make them ‘pull up their socks’.

Those who naturally find themselves in the former group are characterised and labelled as “wishy washy liberals, touchy-feely, hand-wringing, angst-ridden (and, yes, tree-hugging often) soft touches” by those who subscribe to the latter view.

Anne Tolley and her (often) middle and upper class following are clearly in the “pull your socks up” brigade. Normally I would have thought that John Key was not, but sadly he has aligned himself with her on this issue, so in my opinion he has slipped a couple of respect pegs.

In this national standards debate, there is clearly a drive by the government and its followers to use name-and-shame as a threat to teachers, principals and schools to work harder (with the same resources) and toe the line. The threat indirectly carries through to the pupils as well. “We know lots of you are not achieving well enough; soon we’ll know exactly who you are so we can apply pressure for improvements through your teachers and schools.”

We can tell this by the fact that, as I’ve argued in my previous post, the government has no logical course of action planned for post-standards times. There’s very little extra money to actually do anything to help teachers lift their abilities, and no significant programmes in place to help kids identified as “failures” (or “non-achievers”).

It’s like the US’s preparation to invade Iraq – the plan and equipment was there to go in and throw their weight around, but then no idea how to manage the invaded country apart from defending themselves from the people they had violated.

Tolley and her supporters believe pointing the finger and exposing poor performance will do the trick and cause standards to lift as a result of compliant pupils wanting to avoid the shame. The other half of us are wired to believe that you best achieve the desired results by working co-operatively and with generosity of spirit and, above all, encouragement rather than shaming, to help our young people learn.

3 Comments | Education, Politics | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by David Armstrong

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