Results for “new zealand” 349 found
The culture that is Porirua (New Zealand)
The residents of a small city in New Zealand have been enduring sleepless nights for months due to drivers blasting Céline Dion songs from their cars in the early hours of the morning.
According to Agence France Press, car drivers in Porirua, a town of some 60,000 people, north of Wellington, have been loudly playing the singer’s tunes as late as 2 a.m.
They have been cranking up the volume on the Canadian songstress’s most famous ballads, including “My Heart Will Go On” and “It’s All Coming Back To Me Now,” according to AFP.
The nocturnal music-playing tends to begin as early as 7 p.m., continuing for many hours thereafter, Porirua Mayor Anita Baker told the news agency.
It’s part of the “siren battles” trend that has taken place in New Zealand for several years, which is particularly popular with indigenous people from the Pacific Islands.
These battles involve rival crews competing to blast the most powerful and clear sounds from loudspeakers attached to cars, or even bicycles, to win the title of “siren king.”
…They “love” Dion because they like “anyone with a high pitch and great tone in their voice,” the mayor explained to AFP.
Here is the full story, via the excellent Samir Varma. I have had very good fish and chips in Porirua.
From the comments, what will happen in New Zealand edition?
New Zealand’s great education decline
A growing proportion of children leave school unable to read an instruction manual or do basic maths. Over the last twenty years, our education system has slipped from being the envy of the world to barely mediocre.
Kiwi students once ranked near the top of international education league tables. In the latest results from the highly rated Progress in International Reading and Literacy Study, Year 5 students placed last among all English-speaking countries and 24th out of all 26 participating OECD countries. Students suffered similar slides in maths and science.
The New Zealand education system is also now one of the most unequal in the world. The gap between the educational “haves” and “have nots” eclipses all our English-speaking OECD peers. All this, despite Government spending per child increasing in real terms by more than 30% since 2001.
Here is more from Roger Partridge (2020). Here is a 2022 update:
Low attendance at school is another sign the country’s education system is slipping with children from lower socio-economic areas the worst affected, the executive director of the New Zealand Initiative says.
The New Zealand Initiative is a think tank which carries out research to help New Zealand plan for the future.
It has commented on new research by the Education Review Office that shows children are missing school more in New Zealand than other English-speaking countries.
The office found four in ten parents were comfortable with their child missing a week or more of school per term and a third of students did not see going to school every day as that important…
The education system had been declining for 25 years and data backed up his view, such as the Pisa study carried out by the OECD. As an example, in maths the knowledge of a 15-year-old New Zealand student equated to a student aged 13 and a half 20 years ago.
Also from 2022:
In the past 12-18 years, New Zealand’s scores had declined by 23 points for reading, 22 points for science and 29 points for maths. The OECD estimated that 30 points was equivalent to one-year of learning.
Here is the Kiwi establishment being vague about the causes of the literacy decline. What are the actual reasons for all this? There are plenty of regions of New Zealand without massive immigration, and they do not seem immune to these trends.
Here is some more circular blah blah blah, calling for a “holistic approach,” and so on. Does Kiwi culture work best when most of the citizens are more “tough-minded” than what is currently the case?
New Zealand fact of the day
Number of murders in New Zealand year: 35
Number of murders in New Zealand today/yesterday: > 35
The New Zealand real estate problem, with reference to Palmerston North
From my email, from Ryan Reynolds:
I’ve worked in Palmerston North, as well as Tauranga and Auckland (all briefly). I’m Australian too, so my perspective may be shaded vs what a Kiwi or someone from further afield might say.
The major issue is just supply of new dwellings and the permitting and development process. All the rest of the factors noted point to increases in demand (immigration, natural population growth, easy credit, real income growth, tax structures, chinese buyers) – but without a limit on supply you would have expected those factors to result in a building boom not a rapid price appreciation. That’s obviously not the way reality has played out.
From a permitting side, the Resource Management Act heavily constrains lots of building decisions and imposes a lot of bureaucracy (and time delays and uncertainty). Less specifically, Kiwi’s appear to have strong preferences for careful building and urban sprawl in lots of dimensions. That includes specific issues like building heights, overshadowing, retaining views of specific hills or valleys (including Maori heritage sites) and retaining its environmental and cultural heritage (however brief it may seem to outsiders). These preferences are captured in major urban plans which set out acceptable terms for developments, but often even urban plans won’t contain enough zoned land to meet demand (see the bun fight over the Auckland Unitary Plan from 2016), and even then those plans took years to put together. This plays out in a strong community undercurrent and politicians of both stripes use scare campaigns about the horrors of inappropriate development. Anything two stories or over can count as ‘inappropriate’.
From a policy perspective there seems to be no understanding of the practical trade off between housing demand and conservation, except from economists outside the planning departments (see NZ Initative or Michael Reddell, ex RBNZ) or from the central government threatening to unwind urban plans.
The second issue is that NZ also has a lot of partly and wholly government owned and operated utilities (water supply, networks and wastewater; electricity and gas networks; electricity generation) and services provided under government monopolies required for new developments (roads, education, healthcare, and other social services). In many cases the entities charged with providing these services are capital and/or budget constrained and they don’t have the funds to provide major new capex works in the short to medium term. Furthermore, the revenues earned from providing these services are often inadequate to cover economic costs. For instance, water supply and wastewater is provided at below cost price in many cases in NZ, and in large parts of the country water supply is un-metered. And there is serious community opposition to either privatization or changes in tariffs. As a consequence though, capex projects in the water sector are effectively large donations of capital for no return for the water corporation. As is the case for virtually all roads, schools, or hospital projects, any of which could prevent or stall major new urban developments. So even if new land was zoned as ‘fit for development’ (which it won’t be), the entities required to facilitate that development don’t have the funds to do so and nobody else is allowed to fill that gap.
And yes, Palmerston North is still dull. But then people say that Switzerland is dull too. I’ve seen much worse.
New Zealand facts of the day
All of New Zealand’s major cities were rated as “seriously” or “severely” unaffordable, with a house in the least expensive city, Palmerston North, priced at five times the median income.
Mr. Pavletich, one of the report’s authors, said smaller markets like Tauranga, a coastal city on the North Island with a population of 128,000, had seen an influx of people who had left Auckland in search of more affordable housing. Average property values in Tauranga had risen to $497,000 from $304,000 in the last five years, and Demographia now rated it among the 10 least affordable cities in the world — along with famously expensive locales such as Hong Kong, San Francisco, Sydney and Vancouver, British Columbia.
People, I have been to Palmerston North (though not Tauranga, which seemed too empty and remote, now the fifth largest urban cluster in a country of 4.8 million), way back in the 1990s, and I recall a feeling of dullness above all else. If you had asked me whether this outcome was possible, I sooner would have thought Donald Trump would be elected president.
Here is the full NYT story by Charlotte Graham-McLay. P.s. they haven’t built enough homes.
New Zealand fact of the day
…a recent report by Yale University concluded the country is suffering the highest rate of homelessness in the developed world with 40,000 people, nearly 1 per cent of the population, living on the streets or in emergency housing or substandard shelters.
…“The big change in homelessness is the number of working families struggling to find homes and pay rent,” says Ms Rutledge, who adds the situation is the worst she has seen in her 13 years working in homeless services in Auckland. Nationwide, some 5,844 people were on the social housing waiting list in September, a 42 per cent increase on the same month two years ago.
This FT article indicates the country will respond by banning foreign purchases of Kiwi homes — I guess the country is too crowded to allow for an elastic supply response.
New Zealand to Compensate Organ Donors for Lost Earnings
NZ Ministry of Health: People who donate a kidney or part of their liver can now do so knowing they can be fully compensated for lost earnings as a result of their donation surgery.
The Ministry of Health will be implementing compensation for live organ donors from 5 December. People who donate a live organ will be fully recompensed for lost earnings for up to 12 weeks while they recover. This will be paid weekly following the donation surgery. In the past donors received some assistance in the form of a benefit for this.
Former GMU student, Eric Crampton, now Senior Fellow at University of Canterbury had a role in the design.
Hat tip: Frank McCormick.
It seems they will ban foreigners from buying homes in New Zealand
Foreigners are set to be banned from buying houses in New Zealand as part of a phase of new policies outlined by Prime Minister-elect Jacinda Ardern.
The 37-year-old, who was elected as part of a coalition government on 23 September, said the new plan was designed to stop rising house prices and will apply to non-residents.
‘We have agreed on banning the purchase of existing homes by foreign buyers,” said Ms Ardern, according to AFP.
Here is the full story. Will the Kiwis be returning to their mercantilism of the 1970s? She also wants to renegotiate TPP. And here is the immigration update.
The Kiwi Labour, Green, and New Zealand First coalition
Eric Crampton makes many good points, here is one of them:
But that gets us to one of the risks: the intersection of Labour, Green and New Zealand First’s core beliefs is distrustful of markets and of foreigners. I can’t see how we get anywhere close to the proposed 100,000 houses built in any reasonable time without allowing foreign workers, materials, capital and expertise to help.
New Zealand’s Overseas Investment Regime already makes us the most restrictive in the OECD. Any land adjacent to a reserve must go through the screening regime, and it will be tough to ease that back under the current coalition. Heck, even New Zealand’s Fletcher Construction has to jump through Overseas Investment Act hurdles because it has foreign shareholders. New Zealand First has proposed cutting immigration numbers substantially, and Labour and the Greens have been very sympathetic to that view. The incoming government has also signaled an intention to re-negotiate trade agreements to allow banning non-residents from buying houses. If supply issues are appropriately addressed, the ban does no good and could backfire if it prevents foreign investors from building houses here to rent out.
Vernon Small offers a more pessimistic take.
The polity that is New Zealand
Sometimes proportional representation systems throw up surprising results, as they just did in New Zealand. National won the biggest share of the vote at 44%, but the new government is a coalition between Winston Peters and Jacinda Ardern:
Ardern’s stunning popularity was dismissed as “stardust” by English, but she went on to experience huge support from young voters and women and was credited with breathing life back into the New Zealand political scene.
Her personal popularity and the huge crowds she drew around the country was hailed “Jacindamania”, and she was compared to rock-star politicians such as Barack Obama and Justin Trudeau.
A Labour government has pledged to wipe out child poverty, make tertiary education free, reduce immigration by 20,000-30,000, decriminalise abortion, introduce a water tax and make all rivers swimmable within 10 years.
Here is the full story, further evidence that politics is changing for good, and not just because of narrow economic reasons. Last year the New Zealand economy grew 3.9%. Jacinda by the way “Was brought up as a Mormon but left the church over its anti-homosexual stance.”
New Zealand to Compensate Organ Donors
New Zealand will now compensate live organ donors for all lost income:
Today’s unanimous cross-party support for the Compensation for Live Organ Donors Bill represents a critical step in reducing the burgeoning waiting list for kidney donations, according to Kidney Health New Zealand chief executive Max Reid.
“The Bill effectively removes what is known to be one of the single greatest barriers to live organ donation in NZ,” Mr Reid says. “Until now the level of financial assistance (based on the sickness benefit) has been insufficient to cover even an average mortgage repayment, and the process required to access that support both cumbersome and demeaning. The two major changes that this legislation introduces – increasing compensation to 100% of lost income, and transferring responsibility for the management of that financial assistance being moved from WINZ to the Ministry of Health – will unquestionably remove two major disincentives that exist within the current regime.”
Eric Crampton (former GMU student, now NZ economist who supported the bill) notes that a key move in generating political support was that New Zealand MP Chris Bishop framed the bill as compensating donors for lost wages rather than paying them. A decrease in the disincentive to donate–an increase in the incentive to donate. To an economist, potato, potato. But for people whose kidneys fail in New Zealand, the right framing may have been the difference between life and death.
This is also a good time to remind readers of Held, McCormick, Ojo and Roberts, A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Government Compensation of Kidney Donors published in the American Journal of Transplantation.
From 5000 to 10 000 kidney patients die prematurely in the United States each year, and about 100 000 more suffer the debilitating effects of dialysis, because of a shortage of transplant kidneys. To reduce this shortage, many advocate having the government compensate kidney donors. This paper presents a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of such a change. It considers not only the substantial savings to society because kidney recipients would no longer need expensive dialysis treatments—$1.45 million per kidney recipient—but also estimates the monetary value of the longer and healthier lives that kidney recipients enjoy—about $1.3 million per recipient. These numbers dwarf the proposed $45 000-per-kidney compensation that might be needed to end the kidney shortage and eliminate the kidney transplant waiting list. From the viewpoint of society, the net benefit from saving thousands of lives each year and reducing the suffering of 100 000 more receiving dialysis would be about $46 billion per year, with the benefits exceeding the costs by a factor of 3. In addition, it would save taxpayers about $12 billion each year.
Anglo average is over New Zealand is too small
The world’s highly skilled immigrants are increasingly living in just four nations: the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia, according to new World Bank research highlighting the challenges of brain drain for non-English-speaking and developing countries.
I don’t think we have thought through well enough the final equilibrium here. English will be the global language for a long, long time to come, and China will remain robust as a major source of indigenous talent. A lot of Chinese could leave and there would still be a lot of smart Chinese around in China. I do fear, however, for the politics in this semi-cosmopolitan but not cosmopolitan enough Anglo-American world in the making…
That is from Adam Creighton at the WSJ.
Auckland, New Zealand markets in everything
Officials announced that they will now offer families up to NZ$5,000 (about $3,500 US dollars) to relocate to another area of the country.
The relocation grant is specifically for Auckland residents who meet the low-income requirements that make them eligible for social housing, or the city’s subsidized public housing program. The move comes at a time when there are more than 3,500 eligible people in the city waiting to be matched to a home. Forty-two percent of those people identified as Māori, according to the city’s most recent quarterly statement.
Here is the full story, via Richard Kuo. Auckland has for some while been the world’s largest and most splendid Polynesian city, but perhaps that will not last forever.
Does New Zealand have the best-designed system of government in the world?
Dylan Matthews says yes. He cites their mixed-member proportional representation, their unicameral legislature, and monarchy. He left out the biggest advantage of New Zealand government — not very much federalism! Admittedly, more populous countries cannot achieve that same outcome with equal ease.
I also would make a case for preferring the earlier New Zealand Westminster system to proportional representation. What is really the advantage of giving those small parties — not all of which have a fully responsible sense of governing — leverage over their pet issues? The process of coalition formation decreases accountability and blurs what elections are really about. PR makes more sense in fractious or ethnically split countries, where various groups require a sense of representation. New Zealand has long had separate arrangements for special Maori representation, and in any case Kiwi PR has not evolved to be primarily about giving Maori added voice (the ostensibly “Maori party” holds only two seats). To the extent such additional voice is desirable, it can best be done other ways.
That is from Ben Smith. For the interested, here is some New Zealand election coverage.