Social-justice ideology is having a growing and pernicious influence on our educational institutions.
For example, many UK schools are being encouraged to become ‘actively anti-racist’, which would mean adhering to the precepts of critical race theory. A significant number are promoting the contested concepts of gender ideology, and some are keeping children’s gender identities hidden from their parents. So prevalent is trans ideology, in fact, that one girl was recently hounded out of her school for arguing that biological sex is more important than gender identity. Even nurseries are busy ‘decolonising’ the minds of staff, and ‘decolonising the play spaces’. – Alka Sehgal Cuthbert
To a greater extent than ever before, it seems that schools, nurseries and other educational institutions are now being used for directly political ends. The cumulative result is not education, but indoctrination.
Teaching seems to have lost its purpose. It is no longer about disseminating knowledge to the young. It’s about instructing them in correct thought, versing them in the political orthodoxies of the age. – Alka Sehgal Cuthbert
To resist this woke instrumentalisation of education, we need to return education to its foundational ethos. Schools should be places for the passing on of knowledge to the young. They should expose eager minds to the best which has been thought and said – not force them to recite questionable identitarian orthodoxies. – Alka Sehgal Cuthbert
Identitarian indoctrination should have no place in the classroom. – Alka Sehgal Cuthbert
We’ve just found out today that up to 10 police officers are now dedicated to dealing with these protestors.
Up to 10 police, between 7am and 9am daily, waiting to find out where the protest is, then responding quickly to get them off the road and get traffic flowing again.
Those are ten police officers who are now unable to do their actual jobs, which is to deal with crime.
Harsh at it sounds, I’ll say it again, these people should be put in jail so that this stops. – Heather du Plessis-Allan
Labour’s industry transformation plans are proving transformational only to the consultancy industry – Michael Woodhouse
Almost four years on, only two of the eight plans have been completed. The ITPs are vague or in some cases non-existent. Only seven reports have been completed or released in draft form, meaning the process has so far cost more than $72,000 per page.
With an eye-watering $140 million budgeted to write and implement the plans, we can expect millions more will end up in the pockets of consultants or wastefully taking up endless time of officials.
Rather than being transformational, the plans have been described as tentative, half-hearted and telling us what we already know. Given the huge budget, taxpayers deserve better.
Industries know what they need, which is for the Government to set a nimble regulatory framework that allows large and small businesses compete and grow, then get out of the way. We do not need to line the pockets of consultants to learn this. – Michael Woodhouse
Labour has repeatedly taken credit for funding extra nurses. However, they have refused to admit how many nurses have left – and now it is clear why.
“New data shows that almost 19,000 nurses have left over the last five years under Labour.
“What’s worse is that the number of nurses leaving has been steadily increase each year, jumping from 2,963 nurses in 2017 to 4,752 in 2022 – a 60 per cent increase. – Shane Reti
The health sector is in crisis and has been crying out for more workforce support, but the Labour Government took too long to act and refused to put overseas nurses on the straight -to-residency pathway, even when they had this worrying data showing how many nurses were leaving the profession.
At a time when there is a global war for talent, New Zealand should be doing everything it can to be an attractive destination for essential workers. While countries like Australia and Canada were offering health workers easier immigration access, Labour refused to act.
The Labour Government has failed the health sector and refused to take accountability for inaction. Sick and injured New Zealanders are going to be paying the price this winter. – Shane Reti
New Zealand’s once world-leading school education system is in a state of deep malaise. Objective international measures show an ongoing decline in key achievement areas, including literacy, numeracy and science. Too many students are leaving school ill-prepared for tertiary study, work and life. – Dr Michael Johnston
The reports compare apples and pears. They compare actual income of middle-income earners to unrealised hypothetical capital gains of wealthy New Zealanders. Presumably this means the Government is planning to try again with a Capital Gains Tax, but not just on realised gains but on unrealised gains – which would be I think unique in the world.
The research also ignores the effect of inflation on assets. So if an asset increased by 7% and inflation is 7% it is worth no more in real terms, but Parker seems to think it should be taxed. – David Farrar
One thing the research did so, was highly progressive our tax system really is. If you take into account income tax, GST and transfers, the net effective tax rate for each income decile is:
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- Decile 1: -52%
- Decile 2: -55%
- Decile 3: -36%
- Decile 4: -2%
- Decile 5: 6%
- Decile 6: 18%
- Decile 7: 21%
- Decile 8: 23%
- Decile 9: 26%
- Decile 10: 29%
So the bottom 40% of income earners receive more in transfers than they pay in tax. Even those in the 5th decile only pay an effective tax rate of 6%, because the vast vast bulk of tax is paid by those in the top deciles. – David Farrar
Hipkins’ sausage roll scoffing small town social democracy is one many New Zealanders increasingly want to leave behind, figuratively, societally and increasingly, literally.
Those who choose to stay in this country for Hipkins’ reasons probably lower the 1Q of New Zealand – while we lose the best and brightest, the entrepreneurial, the innovators, the trained and talented, the ambitious, to Australia.
To put it another way, if this is Hipkins’ vision of New Zealand then the old tourist cliche of ‘Welcome to New Zealand, put your watches back 20 years’ is sadly true, or rather, actually now out of date. It’s ‘put your watches- and your expectations and ambition back 50 years.’
Working in the New Zealand tertiary system I can tell Hipkins that his vision of New Zealand and his idea of what will make people stay in this country has no resonance with the bright, ambitious, educated young people it is a privilege to teach. All such rhetoric and attitudes do is increase the sense that our universities are just ‘adding value for export’. – Mike Grimshaw
I think that it’s really important for children to read books and have some sense of when the books were written. You just cannot go on rewriting Dickens and rewriting Shakespeare to suit people. – Sir Michael Morpurgo
“Rich people”. The term conjures up a variety of thoughts. Many will run to the immediate vision of the “Trumpesque” character — brash, arrogant, sometimes even obnoxious.
While that description may apply to a few, the great majority of our wealthy people are considerate and respectful of others. Most are bright and some can be quite charming. That’s how they became successful.
In New Zealand, we don’t have a great attitude towards wealth and wealthy people. But then, we don’t have a great attitude towards success either. In fact, our collective distaste for tall poppies is a longstanding and negative part of the Kiwi culture. – Bruce Cotterill
In the 1980s, our business high-flyers flew visibly. We had Bob Jones, Tony Gibbs, the Fletchers, Fay, Richwhite, Myers and the like. But with the exception of Jones, we wore them down and ultimately they and their successors retreated to the shadows. As a result, our wealthy people tend to hide away or leave our shores.
But where would we be without them? You see, the great majority of our very wealthy people get to where they are because they do something extraordinary. Simply put, they do things the rest of us don’t do. They take risks we won’t take, think of things we don’t (or can’t) think of, and build things we cannot conceive.
They are variously productive, creative, constructive and accumulative. Mostly their success comes as a result of doing things very well over a long time. They make their money from the land and from the movies, from our construction sites and from technology. They sell us our cars, jewellery and sports equipment, the packaging that wraps around it, and the transport that moves it all around.
Those who operate on the spectrum of envy and jealousy don’t like them much. Many of our politicians fall into this category. – Bruce Cotterill
But we underestimate them at our peril. Elected officials don’t build our cities, property developers do. Can you imagine our cities without the developers who visualise something better, who borrow millions and build our urban landscapes and heavenly skylines? Every time the economic cycle dips, a few of them go broke. They take thousands of people and millions of dollars down with them. There’s a reason this happens. The risks they take are huge. But if they pull it off, the rewards are huge too. And that’s okay. And whether they succeed or fail, they usually leave the city behind them looking better than it did before they arrived.
Then there are the technology entrepreneurs who make our book-keeping easier, our purchases more streamlined, or even our sports viewing more engaging. The brilliance of the creative minds whose work entertains us on the big screen and those who conceive and make the toys our kids play with. They are people who change our lives for the better and they make plenty of money in the process. And that’s okay too.
They’re also the people who keep our charities running. If you think that building and running hospitals is the government’s job, consider the following.
Starship Children’s Hospital would not exist or operate without the contributions from our wealthy. These are the same people whose contributions make sure that our swimming pools get built and our universities get their new buildings.
Many of our young athletes, golfers, motor racers or cyclists would not have made it to the world stage without the generous contributions of our wealthiest people. Surf life saving clubs wouldn’t have inflatable rescue boats and communities would be without their netball courts or basketball gyms. – Bruce Cotterill
I’d like us to be better at celebrating all of our successful people, including those who are our wealthiest. But sadly, the aforementioned politics of envy has been on display this week and seems set to continue. In a week when the Aussies made it easier for us to join their economy, I’m puzzled that our Government, led by Revenue Minister David Parker, has chosen to declare war on that small portion of our population who are deemed “wealthy”.
Parker’s tax review, supposedly of New Zealand’s 350 wealthiest people (although only 311 participated), presents a major signal that we should all be concerned about. The most staggering aspect of the review was that they chose to include “unrealised gains” in their assessment of income.
Since Wednesday’s announcement, I’ve been asked what “unrealised gains” means in this context. Simply put, it means the increased value of an asset that you own, but have not yet sold. Such assets may include property, shares, a business or a farm. To this writer’s knowledge, there is not a country in the world that seeks to regard unrealised capital gains as assessable income for the purposes of calculating tax. Doing so would mean that a taxpayer has to find or borrow money from another source in order to pay the tax on the increased value of an asset which they continue to own.
Imagine you buy a few shares. In my view, the intent of Parker’s analysis and his subsequent interview comments suggests, despite the fact that you may choose to hold onto those shares for the long term, you may be asked to pay tax on any gains made in a 12-month period, even though you haven’t sold them. Most people would have to sell a few shares to pay the annual tax bill. The end result would be that your little nest-egg disappears over time. This is the opposite of encouraging savings. It discourages savings. In fact, it discourages anyone who wants to do better.
Of course there is a flip side that this Government doesn’t seem to be talking about. What if we make unrealised losses on our investments? Is the government going to allow us to claim a tax deduction on unrealised losses? – Bruce Cotterill
It compared tax paid by our wealthy few, on all income, including that which is unrealised, to come up with a percentage of tax paid against assessed income. The result was 9.4 per cent. This was the headline number that the Government and many media commentators jumped on. However, if unrealised income was excluded, the result was 30 per cent.
They then compared that to the tax paid by an average person earning $80,000 per year. That proportion was 22 per cent. They did include the GST that middle-income earner paid, although it’s not clear whether they included GST in the tax contribution of the higher-spending, wealthy person. Their analysis didn’t appear to include an assessment of whether the $80,000 earner had a few shares, an old sports car that had gone up in value, or heaven forbid, their own home which might have appreciated as well.
In other words, so desperate are they to demonstrate that the wealthy aren’t paying their way, that they have analysed the figures on one basis for the wealthy — including unrealised gains — and a different calculation for everyone else. The result is a misleading deception which in my view is designed to move public opinion further against our tall poppies. – Bruce Cotterill
They’re not going to come up with a new tax for the 300-odd uber-wealthy survey participants. They’re likely to use this study to come up with a new tax for the top 10 per cent of Kiwis, those who already pay just under half of the country’s personal tax bill. And they’ll base that tax on what they think the top 300 should be paying. And you know who will carry the can.
The great shame here is that New Zealand’s tax policy is already well-regarded internationally. We sit in the middle of the OECD’s tax-to-GDP analysis. And the Tax Foundation’s “International Tax Competitiveness Index”, which measures the extent to which a country’s tax system is competitive and neutral, suggests that we have things about right.
Competitive means that marginal rates are kept low, to attract capital rather than pushing capital elsewhere. That’s important for a small country.
Neutral means that our system doesn’t favour consumption over saving, as happens with investment taxes and wealth taxes.
In 2022, New Zealand ranked third in the world for tax competitiveness. – Bruce Cotterill
The moves being considered would represent a major and aggressive change to our tax policy. And despite the minister’s protests to the contrary, they don’t do press conferences like the ones they did this week, if they are not considering such revisions.
The Tax Foundation suggests that uncompetitive tax structures will drive people and their capital away. At a time when our productive young people are leaving for brighter pastures, the risk our Government is taking is that we will also lose many of our wealth creators, and with them, the contributions to the communities they serve. I’m sure many of our wealthiest people will happily pay a bit more tax. But we should be cautious. If we continue to abuse those people with lopsided commentary and poorly structured debate, they too will leave our shores. And they will take their money, their ambition and their generosity with them. – Bruce Cotterill
Everyone who contributes to traffic congestion already pays for it in about the worst way possible: through their time, and through excess wear and tear on – and emissions from – vehicles idling in stop-and-go traffic.
Shifting to congestion charging would help ensure freer-flowing traffic. It would make buses run more reliably, unhindered by peak-time congestion. Achieving net-zero climate goals would be less costly with fewer congestion-related emissions.
And by shifting some travel to times when the roads are otherwise less used, it would encourage better use of existing road capacity. The roading system could handle more trips, overall, with less need to add new lanes. If a movie theatre is full at peak times when ticket prices are zero, it makes a lot more sense to start charging for tickets than to build more screens. – Eric Crampton
A congestion dividend could rebate collected revenues back to those road users scaled to their use of the roads, but without regard to time of use. Drivers who only drove at peak times would receive a dividend, but one that would be small relative to the congestion charges that they had paid. Those driving at off-peak times would receive a dividend while paying little in congestion charges. And households with Community Services Cards could receive a higher dividend.
That kind of system could not be a revenue grab. The congestion dividend would offset cost-of-living pressures. And it might help strengthen continued political support for the charging system overall. – Eric Crampton
We definitely live in strange times when it comes to democracy and capitalism. Everything has been turned on its head. Democrats and even self-styled radicals cosy up to big business, imploring it to put its money where its mouth is and Do Something about social injustice. Meanwhile, ostensibly pro-market right-wingers behave like student agitators of yesteryear, condemning the capitalist elite for its political overreach and threatening to boycott its wares. – Brendan O’Neill
We definitely live in strange times when it comes to democracy and capitalism. Everything has been turned on its head. Democrats and even self-styled radicals cosy up to big business, imploring it to put its money where its mouth is and Do Something about social injustice. Meanwhile, ostensibly pro-market right-wingers behave like student agitators of yesteryear, condemning the capitalist elite for its political overreach and threatening to boycott its wares. –
Many parents agree that under-10s should not be told there are 72 genders. DeSantis won a landslide victory in the midterms in November, securing the votes of many Latinos and working-class whites: the kind of people who are deeply opposed to the ideological capture of education by the purple-haired ideologues of the new elite. Call me old-fashioned, but I believe the views of these voters should hold more weight than the views of Disney’s clique of aloof bosses.
The second reason we should support DeSantis against Disney is because this clash might just be the start of a much-needed fightback against the woke corporate assault on democracy. –
This is an oligarchical onslaught against the workings of democracy. It is an attack on citizens’ fundamental rights to raise money for political campaigns, to freely associate with one another, to express their political views, and to expect that their voice will count for as much as the voice of richer people who run big businesses like Disney. GOP members who cry ‘But what about the rights of private companies?’ have failed to clock the existential nature of the battle at hand, which is between an unaccountable elite on one side and reason, democracy and the common sense of the electorate on the other. I know which side I’m on. Cry more, Disney. – Brendan O’Neill
We didn’t spin off out of a university or Crown research institute. We only had what money I’d saved. It was very difficult. We’re a materials company, we needed chemicals. I was ordering chemicals from overseas to my residential address – they didn’t want to give me any chemicals without being a proper laboratory.
We started as a medical devices company because I wanted to help my dad walk. He has polio. I’ve always wanted to help my dad walk since I was young. His name’s Dennis, and we’ve named the company after him.
But it now goes far beyond assisting people out of wheelchairs. The material benefits robotics as a whole. We have a lot of interested organisations in medical robotics, aerospace, military and industrial robotics, and we’re building them prototypes. – Anvil Bañez
Science, for me, is the latest evidence base of what works and what doesn’t work and what we can do better in the future. – Rachel Barker
There is a lot of focus on scientific research, but not necessarily enough focus on the integration of that scientific research into society. We publish a lot of stuff. But the number of science-based startups, for instance, is much lower than you would expect for the kind of research output that we have. I think the commercialisation of that research needs a lot more funding and attention than it currently has. – Imche Veiga
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