The Guardian: One year ago, a deadly boarding house fire shook New Zealand. We must prevent another tragedy

Read the original article in the Guardian

One year ago, Wellington’s mayor said her city had endured one of its “darkest days” after a fire broke out at the Loafers Lodge boarding house, killing five people. On that day the air in New Zealand’s capital filled with black smoke and soot, and the city later mourned the loss of some of its most vulnerable residents.

Twelve months on, not enough is being done to prevent another such tragedy, experts believe.

Official data suggest there are at least 800 boarding houses in New Zealand. Predominantly multi-storey dwellings, they often house people who would otherwise be sleeping rough.

Loafers Lodge was a four-storey, 92-room hostel, described by visitors as a “rabbit warren”. Constructed in 1971, it was exempt from having a sprinkler system. Under New Zealand law, older buildings don’t have to automatically meet current safety standards, and even new ones don’t generally have to install sprinklers if they are under 10 storeys. A 48-year-old man has been accused of arson and charged with murder, and is due to stand trial later this year.

After the disaster, the government launched an investigation into safety and compliance at boarding houses across New Zealand. The findings released in March were alarming, identifying 134 breaches of fire safety and rental quality standards at 37 boarding houses. Loafers Lodge wasn’t part of the investigation.

The breaches included fire safety systems that were often severely inadequate, rendered useless by missing parts or certified compliant despite not being so. Fire alarm systems were frequently “damaged, obstructed, or not working”. Smoke detectors were sometimes missing, and only about half of those installed “were found to be in good working condition”. In many cases the battery had been taken out or was dead, or the alarm mechanism had been removed, leaving only the case.

Half of the buildings’ fire alarms, meanwhile, were not monitored. In one instance, the wires connecting the alarm to the monitoring company had been cut, while another building had repeatedly had its monitoring discontinued because the owner failed to pay the bill.

Despite being non-compliant, many fire safety systems had been signed off by the private inspectors who act as the first line of regulation. The report also noted that local councils struggled to even determine what counted as a boarding house, owing to “a lack of consistency” in the definitions used.

Clare Aspinall, Wellington-based housing researcher at the University of Otago, said boarding houses were “a very sad, very classic example of a systematic failure of policy and practice”. Responsibility for regulating them is “scattered” across multiple agencies and enforcement often underfunded, she said.

Aspinall, whose Master’s thesis examined boarding house regulations, said some of the failures highlighted in the March report had been raised with authorities as far back as 2010 – and little action had been taken.

In 2019, the then Labour-led government contemplated introducing tougher standards specifically for boarding houses, but focused instead on wider reform of residential tenancies and rental quality, according to documents released under the Official Information Act. Although these reforms notionally applied to boarding houses, the March report found a widespread “lack of basic compliance” with the new standards.

Now, steps are being taken to address some boarding house defects. Government officials have asked local councils to ensure the 134 breaches identified in the March report are fixed. Progress will be reported this month.

The Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) said in a statement that Cabinet had agreed to create a new offence for private inspectors who incorrectly certify defective boarding houses, with a maximum fine of $150,000. The minister for building and construction, Chris Penk, will review the fire safety provisions in New Zealand’s building code. Consultation on potential changes is expected later this year. MBIE is also investigating five of the boarding houses identified in the investigation for potential non-compliance with the Residential Tenancies Act.

Still, not enough is being done, many believe, and authorities are moving too slowly to protect vulnerable residents. Experts have called for a full register of boarding houses, simplified legislation that makes one public body clearly accountable for regulating them, and more resources for inspections.

Politicians have long been deterred from introducing tougher standards by the country’s lack of affordable housing, which could leave tenants homeless if their boarding house closes. But Aspinall argues that, alongside an increase in affordable housing, there must be “more responsibility and accountability” placed on landlords, especially those found to repeatedly flout the rules, and the worst ones should be “weeded out.”

But with seemingly little to guarantee the safety of the next set of boarding house tenants who find themselves at risk, the need to act more quickly appears clear.

The Spinoff: A record-breaking year for political donations is no cause for celebration

Read the original article on the Spinoff

A couple of years ago, a National Party contact told me it had “never been easier” to get big donations from businesses. Anger about the Covid-era “fortress New Zealand” policy, combined with an instinctive distrust of Labour, meant wallets were opening wide for the political right.

All this could be seen in the recent publication of political donations returns for 2023. In these returns, parties set out everything from anonymous gifts of $100 at a church hall fundraiser through to the $500,000 that manufacturing magnate Warren Lewis gave National.

Christopher Luxon’s party, unsurprisingly, led the way with a $10.4m total haul. Act, meanwhile, scored $4.3m – a startling sum for a small party, and a reminder of how it was kept on life support throughout the 2010s by dollops of cash from the likes of 80s corporate raider Alan Gibbs. The last of the coalition parties, New Zealand First, declared $1.9m, marking a distinct change from its pre-2020 strategy of using something called the “New Zealand First Foundation” to channel gifts of hundreds of thousands of dollars from wealthy supporters to the party, without actually going to the trouble of – you know – notifying the public.

On the left, meanwhile, Labour pulled in $4.8m, a respectable sum but half National’s amount, while the Greens declared $3.3m. Te Pāti Māori received just $160,000. All up, the left’s tally, $8.2m, was almost exactly half the $16.6m that the right harvested. The trade unions, which in right-wing mythology somehow balance out big business’s influence, contributed a princely $335,000 – less than that single Lewis donation to National.

Why does any of this matter? Because, in politics as elsewhere, money talks. It potentially generates undue influence: giving a political party large sums can induce it to look kindly on you. While there is little evidence of cash directly buying favours, one National donor, interviewed by myself and my Victoria University colleague Lisa Marriott in 2022, said donors had “more opportunity” to get a meeting with ministers.

In the same interview series, another donor, after insisting he enjoyed no special influence, noted that one party leader had come to his house, another was a social contact, and a third “popped in a couple of times and had a chat about life”. This was mentioned nonchalantly – as if the rest of us are constantly fending off politicians’ attempts to come round for dinner – but in fact bespoke a cosy world, evident right throughout our interviews, in which party leaders, fundraisers, MPs and donors constantly rubbed shoulders, with no firewall between decision-makers and coffer-fillers.

Consider this example. Last year, Chris and Michaela Meehan gave National over $100,000. Also last year, their company, Winton, sued the government for refusing to fast-track its Sunfield property subdivision in South Auckland. Also also last year, National MP Chris Bishop issued a press release backing Winton but not disclosing the donation. (Bishop says he was unaware of it at the time.)

Fast-forward to this year, and Winton is one of the companies specifically told it could apply to have its projects expedited under the government’s highly controversial Fast-track Approvals Bill. One of the ministers who would sign off on the fast-tracked projects is Chris Bishop. Another is Shane Jones, who has taken over $50,000 from individuals associated with Kings Quarry, yet another firm on the list for potential fast-tracking. The prospect of ministers ruling on projects run by the people who funded their election campaign seems – how can I put this? – suboptimal.

Donations can also tilt the political playing field. It’s not the case that great wealth can just “buy” an election: a Labour strategist once told me they’d rather have a great candidate with a great message and no money, as opposed to a terrible candidate with a terrible message and lots of money. National’s 2020 election campaign (relevant components: Judith Collins; “Demand the Debate”; more donations than Labour) bears this out.

But, the strategist said, all things being equal, they’d rather have more cash. National’s pollster, David Farrar, concurs: “You always want more money than less, because it gives you options,” he told RNZ last year. Money buys not just advertising but also polling, political consultants, voter databases, travel, venue hire and field organisers. No wonder, then, that the latest international research finds that more money tends to lead to more votes.

It’s worth noting, too, that when it came to donations under $1,500, Labour and Green fundraising ($4.6m last year) largely kept pace with National and Act’s efforts ($5.4m). It was in donations over $5,000 where the right ($6.5m) really smashed the left ($3.1m, a good chunk of which came from their own MPs). It’s that class of donor that made the difference in parties’ reach.

This resource imbalance may also be accelerating. In the three electoral cycles leading up to 2020, National pulled in $19.3m in donations (albeit we have no solid data on donations under $1,500 for that period). In just three years since, it has raised $16.5m. This is, as Farrar acknowledges, “unprecedented”.

It’s unlikely, though, that anything will be done about the problems donations pose. The answers – as set out in the report that Marriott and I wrote in 2022, Money for Something, and reiterated by last year’s Independent Electoral Review – are intellectually straightforward. Cap the amount that anyone can give at around $10,000 a year, ensure that only individuals (not organisations) can donate, disclose the names of more donors, give the Electoral Commission stronger powers to investigate fraud, and spend about $1 per New Zealander each electoral cycle to publicly support political parties.

The problem is that it’s not in National’s interest to implement such reforms, and Labour doesn’t want to wear the right-wing backlash that would greet any such attempt on its part. So we may be left with this stark example of inequality: late last year, Warren Lewis’s workers, many of them on or around the minimum wage, went on strike, asking for a pay rise. That’s New Zealand now, a country where the wealthy can find $500,000 for a party that will advance their interests, but won’t pay their workers a living wage.

The Post: The question we should actually be debating about the public service

Read the original article in the Post

Just as adults like to frighten children with tales of imps and monsters, so too do conservatives scare the public with large numbers out of context.

Last year we were told endlessly that Labour had increased public borrowing “to over $100 billion” – which sounded terrifying until one realised that state debt was still just 20% of GDP, around half the Australian figure, a fifth of the American one and one-tenth of the Japanese.

It’s the same story with the size of the state bureaucracy, one of the new Government’s great fixations. We’re told, ad nauseam, that between 2017 and 2023 Labour added 17,000 public servants. And that sounds like a lot.

But in the same time, the country’s workforce grew by over 300,000. Consequently, the core public service – the people who work in central government departments and agencies – have gone from 1.9% of the workforce in 2017 to 2.2% today. Hardly a drastic shift, considering that many public problems scale with time and population: every new technology that people invent, from drones to AI, poses new problems, which in turn requires new regulations enforced by more public servants. Hardly a drastic shift, either, considering how run-down parts of the state had become under National – a decay embodied in the raw sewage running down the walls of Middlemore Hospital – and the consequent need for rebuilding.

Put it a different way: each of the 65,699 public servants employed as of last December services around 80 New Zealanders. Again, in context, it doesn’t seem an extravagant number.

How, then, should we think about the Government’s public-sector cuts, which at last count will cost 3700 jobs (and rising)?

There is, arguably, some left-wing hyperbole about those numbers. Each potential job loss can be a source of great pain for those concerned, and for their families. (I should know: I have friends and relatives affected.) But in the last six months of 2023 alone, nearly 2600 extra public servants were employed, as agencies bulked up despite an impending change of government. The cuts currently proposed would only take us back to 2022 levels of employment.

If there is something catastrophic about a 3700-strong workforce reduction, presumably things were also in a catastrophic state in 2022. Yet no-one was saying that then.

The right-wing obsession with reducing state employment, though, is even more misguided.

First there is the manner in which the cuts are being made. Putting senior management in charge means that – surprise, surprise – not many senior managers are losing their jobs, despite the recent bloat in those areas.

And although some of the cuts are relatively surgical, as they relate to schemes National has scrapped, others are blunt. Some agencies’ policy teams are getting across-the-board cuts with little or no thought as to what capacity is needed or who should be retained.

I have been told of brilliant mid-ranking staff, people with private-sector experience and leadership potential, who are nonetheless being let go – and thus potentially lost forever to the public service – because of the unbelievably hasty and blunt manner in which the cuts are being made.

Those cuts are already affecting frontline services – foodbanks, wheelchairs, teams who help catch paedophiles – despite National’s promises to the contrary. The distinction between front and back office is, in any case, somewhat meaningless. If, for instance, back-office police staff are cut, officers may simply end up doing more paperwork.

The bigger point, really, is that the size of the state workforce is the wrong focus. What matters most is not how many public servants we have but what we need them to do. Which problems, in short, are they required to solve, and are they equipped to do so?

As I look ahead, I see an ever-growing pile of public challenges. We need to future-proof our infrastructure against climate change. We need to unravel the intertwined problems of poverty, mental health and educational failure that afflict so many young people. We need to build homes for the 25,000 families on the state-housing wait list, and work out how do so more efficiently – and beautifully – than before.

All these tasks will be solved, at least in part, by people working in the public service. Recall that government comes into existence, as the humanist John Dewey argued, when people cannot just live privately but find themselves bumping up against each other. It is a collective attempt to solve collective problems, to undertake tasks that people cannot do, or do so well, by themselves.

The scale of these tasks, the number of these problems, the extent to which we rub up against each other in our complex world: all this will only increase. Mass public-sector redundancies, then, make little sense. We should be redeploying our existing public servants to new goals, and ensuring they work more effectively, rather than letting them go en masse.

Spinoff: Government risks own goal in cutting funding for Growing up in New Zealand

Read the original article on the Spinoff

The government risks sabotaging its own targets – on school attendance, for instance – if it cuts funding for one of the jewels in the country’s research crown, the Growing Up in New Zealand study. It also risks wasting money already spent preparing to collect the study’s data.

That’s the message from people who know the study well and have spoken to The Spinoff while ministers debate whether or not to renew its funding.

Since 2009, Growing Up in New Zealand has tracked the life course of 6,000 kids, starting with pre-birth interviews with their expectant parents. The study collects data from the families across a host of issues – from housing quality to health problems, from poverty levels to immunisation rates, from school results to reports of depression and anxiety. It holds a treasure trove of information about the problems affecting young New Zealanders – and the potential solutions.

“The better our data are, the better we can make decisions,” says Kate Prickett, a Victoria University academic and one of the lead researchers for the study. Without this kind of research, she adds, the country has “less confidence that government resources are getting to those who need them, or whether the money we’re spending is making a difference”.

Growing Up in New Zealand is, crucially, a longitudinal study: it follows the same group of people, rather than interviewing a new cohort each year as standard surveys do. This allows it to say far more about cause and effect: researchers can look at changes in families’ lives and see whether they are linked to a particular policy. In this sense, Growing Up in New Zealand is like the famed Dunedin study, but focused on a younger, more diverse cohort.

Waikato University’s Polly Atatoa Carr, another lead researcher on the study, says it has already changed policy. Its findings on the number of rentals lacking smoke alarms, for instance, directly influenced a 2016 decision to mandate alarm installation. Its research into families’ experience of paid parental leave similarly inspired extensions to that programme.

Yet the axe hovers over Growing Up in New Zealand. It received $30m over four years in the 2023 budget, but in February the contract to carry out the work was not renewed by the Ministry for Social Development. 

It is not clear why: the move may reflect scepticism about the study or just a general desire to run the rule over all pre-existing spending. Social development minister Louise Upston told RNZ that her government “values the work that the … study has produced over time, and we would like to see it continue. We are considering options for ongoing funding of the study and will be making decisions on this in due course.”

Something for Upston and colleagues to consider is whether they can even achieve their goals without surveys like Growing Up in New Zealand. Take the much-heralded drive to reduce truancy. “Context drives outcomes,” Atatoa Carr says. Families may be dealing with multiple life shocks, or having to help others in their community, or experiencing poverty that forces their children into work. “If we are interested in government targets on school attendance, you actually aren’t going to understand the drivers of attendance, or non-attendance, without really rich data from those families and the children themselves.”

Some of the study’s findings have been startling. Last year, for instance, it revealed that between the ages of 8 and 12, half of all children move house, one-fifth doing so multiple times. Often these are involuntary moves, caused by events like rentals being sold, tenancies terminated and rents increased. Families’ links to local health services – GPs, immunisation appointments and the like – can be disrupted, sometimes permanently, while school and other community connections can also be lost.

“The changing situation of families is extraordinary,” Atatoa Carr says. “We never expected to find the level of moving house that we found.” And the longer the survey continues, the more valuable it is. The positive impacts of early childhood education, for instance, may not fully show up until adolescence. “We’re only just starting to get those outcomes now.”

Both the study and its participants are at a sensitive stage. The children are now 14 or 15, and this year’s planned interviews – now on hold – are the last before they turn 16 and will have to consent to data collection in their own right.

If, in other words, this year’s interviews don’t take place, researchers will have no chance to explain to the young people why they should take part in the next round, set down for two years’ time. The risk then is that, approached in 2026, they feel they’re being cold-called after a four-year gap – and refuse consent and drop out, weakening the study’s coverage.

Significant sums were also spent this summer training and equipping dozens of workers to carry out this year’s interviews. If they don’t go ahead, that money – an as-yet-undisclosed amount – will be wasted.

Protecting the study’s budget would make sense on many fronts, Atatoa Carr says, not least because the biggest expenses by far – designing the study and recruiting participants – were committed long ago. Money spent to maintain the future interview rounds – expected to last until the participants are 21 – would be “a marginal cost for maximal benefit”. She, and others, hope the government heeds that message.

The Post: Country’s populist shift manifests itself most clearly in Mr Jones

Read the original article in the Post

Half of New Zealanders think that to fix the country, we need “a strong leader willing to break the rules”. Bracing stuff, isn’t it? The finding comes from this week’s Ipsos survey, in which 55-65% of the country apparently agreed that the economy is “rigged to advantage the rich and powerful”, and that experts and political parties neither care about nor understand them.

There’s clearly something in this populist shift. I’m on a Statistics New Zealand advisory board, and our briefings show anti-government beliefs are causing more people to refuse to fill out surveys. Then there’s the general sense of alienation and Covid-related anger, seen most obviously in the 2022 Parliament grounds occupation.

The 2023 OECD Trust Survey, meanwhile, found just 44% of us are confident that government institutions “listen to people”. Only 37% believed that if they took part in a public consultation, “the government would adopt the opinions expressed”. And that belief is even weaker among poor New Zealanders.

The country has long had a pronounced anti-establishment streak. I’ve met older Kiwi blokes whose conversations with strangers consist largely of anecdotes about how they “got one over” the authorities and the so-called experts. “That woman from the council came out to have a look at our project and, well, she didn’t know a thing! We soon showed her what’s what.” And so on.

This doesn’t mean, though, that we should unquestioningly accept the Ipsos survey. If half the country really hates the establishment that much, the fringe parties in last year’s election would surely have recorded something larger than a vote share you’d need a microscope to locate. Even Winston only got 6%.

Bear in mind, too, that in the Ipsos survey, 60% said we shouldn’t raise taxes to increase general public spending – but 70-80% argued for increased funds for specific areas like education and health! People can be incoherent; how one asks the question matters enormously.

So too with populism: if one polled people on specific scenarios where politicians could “break the rules” – appointing their son to a public-sector board, for instance – I suspect most would respond unfavourably.

Recall, too, that although the number of “hard” refusals to fill out the Census has doubled, it still stands at just 10,000 people. The vast majority of us completed the forms last year. The country doesn’t feel like it’s about to fall apart at the seams.

But nor can we ignore entirely the Ipsos results. Even if people are just venting, their answers suggest a broad frustration with elite decision-making, failing public services, and social and economic inequalities.

There is, of course, a significant difference between perceived left-wing elites (academics, some media, and progressive politicians) and right-wing ones (big business and conservative politicians). Probably the anger is aimed at both: people don’t seem to like our supermarket duopoly very much, but nor do they particularly like university professors.

The man most obviously channelling the latter sentiment, and currently dominating the news, is New Zealand First’s Shane Jones. He is overt in his dislike of people who want to protect endangered native species – clearly a middle-class indulgence, in his view – and is attacking the integrity of parts of the judiciary, notably the Waitangi Tribunal.

The Fast-track Approvals Bill, which would give him and two colleagues unprecedented power to unilaterally approve what may be environmentally damaging projects, is the clearest expression of his credo. Careful processes and judicial oversight are for weak-minded pen-pushers; the strongman gets things done.

Such an approach invites criticism – but then a large problem looms. Jones is a little like one of those cartoon villains who feed off their opponents’ energy: each time they are punched, they somehow grow stronger. Criticism from the likes of myself can just boost his standing among his supporters.

The solution? Take great care with the material and tone of any critique. Less wailing about Trumpian tendencies and the violation of abstract principles; more concrete, grounded examples of harm.

If Jones, as he has previously done, attempts to influence judicial processes involving a relative, we should say to voters: what if you don’t have these connections? Should your success – in, say, winning contracts or influencing government decisions – be influenced by having friends in high places?

We should also be better at showing exactly what happens to ecosystems – and thus our lives – when endangered species die out. And we need, finally, to recognise that although some of the current distrust of government is exaggerated, much is well-founded.

Our politicians have created or enabled a situation in which just 1% of the country holds one-quarter of the wealth, most New Zealanders don’t have enough savings to deal with major life shocks, and many of our schools and health services are inadequate, especially for poorer families. It is not – or not just that – the people are wrong; the system must also change.

The Spinoff: A flagpole, a failed space, and a confused history of white fragility

Read the original article on the Spinoff

I pass it almost every day, yet never see it used. The flagpole, placed on a grassy hill above Wellington’s CBD, surrounded by trees and houses, and accessible only by a labyrinth of pedestrian walkways, seems not to serve any function. But it does have a strange and knotty past, as well as an inadequate present.

Its location, Flagstaff Hill, is a sloping parcel of land above the St George Hotel on Boulcott Street, bounded on its other three sides by the Terrace, the Dixon Street state-housing complex, and a sheer drop to the Willis Street Village. Largely unknown, it is little more than a patch of lumpy grass, perhaps 40m on each side, dotted with shrubs and rubbish, and containing, most obviously, the flagpole.

Having passed it so often, on my regular walks into town, I began to wonder: what purpose did it serve? Researching its history, I was intrigued – and disturbed – to read news stories implying it had been part of a bizarre defence system for the first European colonists. In 1843, in an incident given the rather vague title of the Wairau Affray, 22 settlers were shot dead by Ngāti Toa fighters several miles north of Blenheim. In response, alarmed Pākehā decided they needed an early warning system. “After the Wairau Affray,” the Dominion Post noted in a 2017 story about Flagstaff Hill, “settlers established a series of flagstaffs in Wellington to warn of impending Māori attack. The first recorded flag was raised on the site in 1857.” A Wellington City Council press release of the same year claimed cannons had even been mounted onsite.

These stories had a disturbing undertone because, contrary to Pākehā belief at the time, it was the settlers themselves who were largely responsible for the “Affray”. Attempting to evict Ngāti Toa leaders from land the latter had steadfastly refused to sell, the armed posse of settlers appear to have sparked the carnage by shooting dead the wife of one of the rangatira. The phrase “white fragility” can be overused, but the Wellington response to the “Affray” – a mass panic by the very people responsible for the problem at hand – was surely a prime instance.

Something, though, troubled me about these newspaper accounts of Flagstaff Hill: they didn’t cite any primary sources. Just to be on the safe side, I started searching Papers Past, the online newspaper archive, and consulting books at the Wellington City Library. These sources hinted at a high degree of confusion as to where “Flagstaff Hill” actually was.

A trip to the council archives then cleared everything up: it’s the wrong hill.

A detailed report by heritage consultant Michael Kelly, prepared for the council in 1997 and based on archival records, noted that in colonial Wellington, multiple flagpoles were erected; accordingly, multiple spots were known as “Flagstaff Hill”. The one that appears to have been used to warn of “impending” Māori attacks, and where settlers mounted two 18-pounder guns they had taken from Matiu/Somes Island, was a hill known then as Clay Point, which sits above the junction of Willis Street and Lambton Quay, a spot now referred to as Stewart Dawson’s corner. It is only a few hundred metres north of modern-day Flagstaff Hill – but it is a completely different place.

How had this geographical error occurred? Kelly’s report argued that, in the 1920s, the location was still being correctly identified, but by the 1948 publication of Fanny Irvine-Smith’s The Streets of My City, the “myth” about modern-day Flagstaff Hill “had become entrenched”. The council’s recent records show just how quickly confusion can regain the upper hand. A late-2000s memoranda from council staff, attempting to summarise Kelly’s report, bizarrely repeats the myth that the hill was used as a gun emplacement. The message, long familiar to historians, is simple: always check the primary sources. And read things carefully.

The pole that gave Flagstaff Hill its name was not, in the end, a very interesting erection. It appears to have been raised by the Houghton family, early settlers who lent their name to one of the southern bays. Deeply involved in maritime activities, they lived on Flagstaff Hill, and may have run flags up the pole to inform the nascent port’s inhabitants about ship arrivals. The flagpole’s erection, Kelly wrote, was “likely … linked to the commercial activities of the Houghton family”.

As the city evolved, so too did Flagstaff Hill. In the 1920s, responding to complaints about the steepness of the path up the slope, the council acquired part of the hill in order to build a cable car from what is now the Willis Street Village to the top of the current cable car, passing under the Terrace “at a depth of 90 feet”. The plan was dropped only when it turned out that “newly improved” buses could manage the climb.

The hill then passed through various hands, including those of New Zealand Breweries and Massey University. The site of the original flagstaff became a car park in the 1970s, and is now covered in townhouses. Ironically, the current flagpole, erected in 1973 to commemorate the restoration of “historic Flag Staff Hill”, according to its bronze plaque, is some 50m away from the original spot.

From the early 1970s onwards, the council leased the current grassy area, maintaining it as open space. It was regularly used for events organised by the Flagstaff Hill Area Residents’ Association, which even had a flag that it would raise “on occasions of neighbourhood festivities”, in the words of Neil Prior, its former chairperson. City councillor Iona Pannett, who grew up on the hill, recalls a “really awesome” neighbourhood that sported a community garden and allowed children to run free, and where the adults held progressive dinners. But with the decline of the association, regular use of the flagpole – and indeed the open space – seems to have petered out.

Nonetheless, in 2015, the council bought the land from a couple, Mike and Gay O’Sullivan, who had built the nearby townhouses and obtained planning permission for a further dozen on the hill, but then had a change of heart. The sale, the Dominion Post reported, had gone through on the basis that the land be kept as a reserve. (Returning it to its original mana whenua owners does not seem to have been contemplated.)

In the run-up to the purchase, several councillors got lost on their way to a meeting at the site, raising – not for the first time – questions about their general levels of competence and professionalism. Undeterred, one councillor, Helene Ritchie, enthused about the site’s potential, predicted it could become an outdoor theatre space or a community garden.

It feels almost redundant to state that none of those things happened. Now, the land just sits there, largely unloved, providing nothing more than a spot to read or eat lunch for a vanishingly small number of users.

When contacted by The Spinoff, the council did not appear to have any plans to improve the site. But could other uses for it be found? Housing is out. So too, in all probability, a playground: the stroller access is awful. But how about a natural enhancement? The hill could host an orchard of fruit trees, or a glade of native specimens, supporting the halo effect of kākā and kererū spreading from Zealandia, the Karori wildlife sanctuary. Or, as Ritchie envisaged, a community garden for a post-renovation Dixon Street flats.

The current failure to adequately use the site speaks to a certain neglect of public space. In an ideal world, public bodies are problem-solvers, finding potential in languishing sites and, in conjunction with their communities, building something better. This spirit, though not totally absent in Wellington, is hardly at its greatest height. The result is a desperately underused space punctuated by a largely redundant flagpole – a phallic symbol, like all such things, but not an especially virile one.

The Post: Luxon needs to live up to his maiden speech, and his beliefs

Read the original article in the Post

This Easter, many kids will have got chocolate eggs; others got a slap in the face.

On April 1, the National-led government increased the minimum wage by a miserly 45c, or 2%, even though inflation is running at 4.7%. Tens of thousands of minimum-wage workers, and their families, were handed a metaphorical parcel marked, “Falling living standards inside”.

In his 2021 maiden speech, Christopher Luxon listed his Christian heroes, among them Kate Sheppard, Martin Luther King and the anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce, all people who looked out for the underdog. So some of us expected better from the prime minister. Maybe that makes us April Fools.

Still: charity, as they say, begins at home, and Luxon has an opportunity to address hardship in his own backyard.

Under the last government, core public sector employees were brought under the ambit of the living wage. Whereas the minimum wage, now $23.15 an hour, is a legal requirement, the living wage, soon to rise to $27.80, is voluntary.

It’s a rate an employer pays if they want to ensure staff have something above the bare minimum – and with it a chance of feeling they belong to, and can participate in, the society they have helped build. Life, in this view, shouldn’t be a matter of mere survival, of just putting food on the table. Work should enable a life of warmth and dignity, one where families can afford birthday presents and new clothes, maybe even a holiday or two.

Modelled on successful overseas campaigns, and launched here in 2012, the Living Wage Movement represents grassroots change, the agglomeration of energies of New Zealand’s churches, community groups and unions. Adept at mobilising frontline workers to tell their stories and win over business owners and politicians, the movement has signed up some 370 firms and organisations – including seven councils – that together employ 50,000 staff.

Each worker earns roughly $10,000 a year above the minimum wage. In an era when the people who keep the economy afloat – cleaners, bank tellers, retail staff and the like – have so often struggled to make headway, the living wage is a local success story, a beacon of light.

The last government, as well as placing core public sector employees on the living wage, began requiring state agencies to put their most vulnerable contractors – cleaners, caterers and security guards – onto the higher rate as their contracts came up for renewal. But when questioned this week whether he’d preserve the policy, Luxon gave a tepid answer.

Although change was “not a priority for us at the moment”, ministers would contemplate it “further down the road”. This uncertainty, as one Ministry of Health cleaner told The Post, creates “huge anxieties”.

If Luxon is to live up to the “compassion, tolerance and care for others” that, in his maiden speech, he said Jesus embodies, he surely must promise these low-paid, precarious contractors that they will indeed get the living wage.

He’d do well to remember, too, that ensuring work pays is hardly a crazed left-wing notion. Indeed it’s a core tenet of what is sometimes called compassionate conservatism, the belief that, even if large hierarchies are inevitable, everyone has responsibilities to each other. We all, in this view of things, share the same boat, and anyone in work should enjoy the full fruits of the Kiwi dream.

Overseas, living wage advocates have included Britain’s Conservative finance minister, George Osborne, and the “Big 4” accounting firms, which – like most employers – have found that staff paid the living wage are better motivated and quit less often, reducing turnover expenses and recouping some of the payroll costs immediately.

Closer to home, literally every bank in New Zealand is now a living wage employer, thanks in part to an endorsement by the Banking Association. And for many years now, the wage’s rate has been calculated by the Reverend Charles Waldegrave, in a fine instance of applied Christianity.

Over and above the 50,000 workers in formally accredited living wage organisations, there are, at any given moment, dozens of jobs advertised as paying that rate – even in firms that haven’t officially signed up.

For the movement’s executive director, Gina Lockyer, this shows the living wage “has become a really accepted thing, something that people aspire to”. More broadly, she thinks, “It’s changed the conversation about what a wage is designed to do and… what your life at home should look like as well”.

It’s even been mentioned on Shortland Street – a sure sign it has entered the vernacular. The movement’s plans now include getting more multi-nationals on board and pressing Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown to fulfil his promise to adopt the rate. And, of course, trying to ensure that our prime minister lives up to the values he espouses.

The Spinoff: Chris Hipkins might just be the one to make a wealth tax work for Labour

Read the original article on the Spinoff

The year is 2049, and the recently elected leader of the Labour Party is calling for “a conversation” about taxes and New Zealand’s failure to tax either wealth or the income it generates. This scenario is, following Chris Hipkins’s re-opening of the tax debate last Sunday, a wearyingly predictable one. We have been here before, had this “conversation” countless times, to no avail. It is the tax obsessive’s equivalent of Groundhog Day.

Here, though, is another, equally plausible scenario: the year is 2019, and the recently elected leader of the Labour Party, having unequivocally campaigned in 2017 on introducing a capital gains tax, is now overseeing the first year’s takings.

This scenario is credible because tax reform in this country is not, despite its many setbacks, a lost cause. Its failures to date have as much to do with internal Labour Party dynamics as with any obstinate reluctance on the part of the public to entertain the idea of change.

The recent history of our tax debates starts in 2008, after Helen Clark’s government, having not overseen any major changes bar a new 39% top rate, is removed from office. At this point Labour clocks something the Greens have long since identified: a massive loophole in the tax system. Income from wages and salaries is taxed, and quite thoroughly to boot; with some minor exceptions, income generated by selling assets – capital gains, in other words – is not.

This loophole – for such it is, even if the term is not always used – spurs Labour to campaign in 2011 and 2014 on a capital gains tax (CGT). The proposal is only modestly popular, achieving perhaps 30-40% support, and leaders Phil Goff and David Cunliffe both get tripped up in debates trying to answer questions about it.

Next comes the crucial moment: Cunliffe’s successor, Andrew Little, takes CGT off the table, saying he won’t campaign on it. This is vital because, when Jacinda Ardern comes to power just before the 2017 election, the party has not carried out detailed policy plans, campaigned on or even been prepared to defend a CGT for two and a half years.

It is thus entirely unprepared for the wave of National Party attacks that begin once Ardern throws CGT back into the fray. Labour panics, promises a tax working group, and then, in government, is unable to defend its own policy for 18 months while the group does its thing. In the meantime a torrent of right-wing attacks, CGT counter-arguments and outright misinformation pours into the breach. The debate is lost, Winston Peters (at that point deputy prime minister) opposes any meaningful CGT, and the opportunity vanishes. Ardern rules out a CGT not just for now but for all (her political life) time, something that effectively prevents the party from making good use of its post-2020 absolute majority. It remains entirely possible that, had Labour campaigned consistently from 2011 to 2017, it could have faced down the attacks, won the debate, and got a CGT over the line; but that is not what has happened.

Tax reform, then, seems dead and buried. But the party keeps making ham-fisted attempts to disinter it. Post-2020, Cabinet agrees to let David Parker commission a report from Inland Revenue that – it should be clear even at this early stage – will expose the fact that rich people effectively pay very low tax rates. Cabinet does not seem to have thought hard about the problem this will create: either the government will have to bring in some kind of tax to deal with the situation, or it will have to stand up and say, “We are very pleased to have exposed this terrible issue that we intend to do nothing about.”

When the report comes out in April 2023, and reveals that our richest people pay a tax rate on their income (including capital gains) of roughly 9%, Cabinet ostensibly chooses the second option. Among tax reformers, a now-familiar sense of despair descends. Then, in June, it transpires that, for the past 12 months, Parker and finance minister Grant Robertson have been exploring not a CGT but something altogether more radical: a wealth tax.

Whereas a CGT taxes the income people earn when they sell an asset, a wealth tax, as the name suggests, just taxes the wealth itself. Labour’s proposal, it turns out, was to ask people to pay an annual 1.5% levy on all the wealth they hold over a $5m threshold. The plan is similar to, though less ambitious than, the policy on which the Greens campaigned in 2020. The moment the public learns of this plan, however, is also the moment Hipkins rules it out. The gloom of despair becomes an enveloping black cloud.

But post-election, it becomes clear that, by dangling the prospect of major reform and then taking it away, Hipkins has sparked serious discontent within Labour, and indeed the wider left. As one Labour MP told me last year: “We’ve uncorked something here that can’t be put back in the bottle.”

Hipkins knows all this history, and must be aware that to call once more for “a conversation” on tax and then do nothing would surely spark more than just discontent. While the ability of the Labour Party to disappoint its support base should never be underestimated, the intent this time must be serious.

Life has moved on, too. A CGT, for instance, is now a familiar – if still controversial – topic. I have seen unpublished polling that has support at roughly one-third of voters, opposition at one-quarter, and the vast majority of people unsure or neutral. The public is at least open to being convinced, and a CGT has a ready-made pitch: income is income. Let’s tax it all the same way. A wealth tax also seems to do well in surveys, although pollsters suspect that its support crumbles once people better understand the idea.

There are, finally, growing pressures on public spending – the need to deal with climate change’s effects, for instance, or the health demands of an ageing population – that will be hard to answer without major tax reform. It is not impossible, of course, that we are still in a tax-based Groundhog Day loop, and have just reached the equivalent of the point in the film where Bill Murray has spent several thousand days learning to play boogie-woogie piano. But we may also have broken the pattern. This time, it might be different.

The Post: Charter schools won’t fix our educational failings

Read the original article in the Post

Is the government about to waste tens of millions of dollars on a schools policy that won’t achieve anything? It’s a question that’s been bothering me ever since the coalition agreements were signed.

The National-ACT agreement envisions setting up an undefined number of charter schools, which would be able to abandon the New Zealand curriculum and employ unqualified teachers, among other dubious benefits. Based on an American model, a few such establishments – unsuccessfully rebranded as “partnership” schools – were set up under John Key’s 2011 agreement with ACT, but brought into the state system by Labour.

This time, though, there’s a big difference: ACT leader David Seymour wants existing state schools to convert to charters. It’s an ambition befitting a larger and more confident party.

The problem, though, is that charter schools are an ideological rather than a pragmatic project. They don’t address any of the actual issues we face. An overly strict curriculum and excessively qualified teachers, for instance, are not the things holding back our education system.

Charter school advocates claim principals need more room to innovate, but there’s already immense leeway for experimentation. We have Māori immersion schools, special character schools, Catholic and Protestant schools. We have one of the world’s most flexible education systems.

The American data on charter schools, meanwhile, are deeply unimpressive. Charters’ unqualified teachers are less effective than their public-school counterparts. A 2016 meta-review – a summary of pre-existing research – found that standard public schools outperformed charters on six of seven major categories of learning, including Year 4 maths and Year 8 science.

Charters probably worsen performance in nearby schools, skimming off the pupils with the most motivated parents and reducing those schools’ per-student funding. Overall, researchers have concluded, charters “are not, on average, producing student achievement gains” compared to standard US high schools, which themselves are not high performers internationally.

Charter schools, in short, won’t turn around New Zealand’s educational failings. But they can rack up vast costs. A recent official information request suggests the Key-era charters cost up to $48,000 per pupil, far above the $9000 allocated to each student in mainstream schools.

Worse still may be in prospect. If, under Seymour’s plan, state-school boards decide to convert, their teachers’ employment situation could change dramatically. For charter schools to be meaningfully different, principals might want staff to transform their work patterns, teaching longer hours or being paid on a different basis. Boards might also want to push staff onto individual contracts less generous than the recent raft of union-negotiated ones, which have started to address the long-term underpayment of teachers.

Things could then get pretty murky. Labour law experts say charter schools could be deemed, in essence, the successor to the teachers’ current employer, the Ministry of Education, meaning that existing terms and conditions would be carried over. So if, as seems likely, boards wanted change, they could end up in messy bargaining with justifiably angry teachers or face even messier industrial action.

If, moreover, someone’s job changes significantly, New Zealand employment law quite rightly allows them to argue they’ve effectively been made redundant and are entitled to a pay-out. Bearing in mind that a teacher’s standard redundancy pay-out could be in the order of $100,000, and that even just 50 converting schools could employ thousands of staff, redundancy costs could easily spiral into the tens of millions of dollars. And this would be money spent to achieve nothing: the purest possible form of waste, delivered by a government supposedly obsessed with efficiency.

Ministers could probably legislate to remove teachers’ redundancy protections. But that would be hideously ironic from ACT, a party ostensibly committed to the sanctity of contract.

As things stand, the situation remains unclear, and hard questions must be asked of Seymour. Either way, it’s all a colossal distraction from the real task of fixing education.

Some of the repairs must be made outside the classroom: we should reduce poverty, for instance, so that thousands of kids don’t have to miss class because they’re working to support their family. And we should lift our financial assistance to poorer schools, which is low by international standards.

When it comes to what happens within the school gates, we have a reasonable idea of what’s needed. Better qualified teachers would help. So too a knowledge-rich curriculum that provides more learning materials, greater guidance to struggling teachers, and enhanced clarity about what they should teach, rather than the overly loose curriculum we have now. We also need better structures to spread successful teaching practices from school to school, just like the old system of advisers and inspectors did.

All this will take time, energy and resources. There isn’t, famously, a lot of free cash lying around. The last thing National can afford is to waste huge amounts of it on something entirely tangential to the educational task at hand.

The Spinoff: Luxon’s budget problem is not going away

Read the original article in the Spinoff

“Don’t tell me what you value: show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.” This phrase, a favourite of US president Joe Biden’s, resonates here at a time when our National-led government is reducing the rate of benefit increases in order to fund a $2.9bn tax cut for landlords.

Budgets more generally are also posing a problem for Christopher Luxon and co. Every week that passes seems to tighten the fiscal noose – a noose, moreover, of their own making.

Last month came the little-reported news of a massive financial mistake in National’s estimates. During last year’s election campaign, the party had claimed that by increasing benefits more slowly than Labour had planned (linking them to inflation rather than wages, in technical terms), it would save $2bn over four years. The true figure, it turns out, is $669.5m. 

And the news keeps getting worse. Two weeks ago, we discovered that National’s largesse towards landlords, reinstating their ability to deduct mortgage interest costs from their tax bill, will cost substantially more than the $2.1bn previously estimated. And last week, Inland Revenue estimated that the planned tax on online casino operators would raise just $145m over four years, far short of the $719m figure National bandied about on the campaign trail.

Yet worse news may be due. Last year National costed its plan to raise tax thresholds at $8.9bn. But wage increases since then will have pushed more people into higher brackets, further raising the cost of cutting their tax bills. The Climate Commission, meanwhile, has warned that auctions of carbon credits – earmarked by National to help fund $2.4bn of its tax cuts – are “not a reliable source of income”. 

And don’t forget that – thanks to Winston Peters’s veto – National has to do without the $3bn that it (somewhat implausibly) claimed it would get by taxing foreign house-buyers. Even just based on what we already know, the government has to find at least an extra $5.7bn to fulfil the financial plan it outlined on the campaign trail. Peters acknowledged as much at the weekend.

It is, admittedly, hard to cost policies in opposition, when a party lacks access to Beehive spreadsheets and models. (Which is why the finance minister, Nicola Willis, should make good on her previously expressed support for an independent fiscal institution that would, among other things, cost opposition policies.) But despite National being supposedly the party of the economy, and despite Luxon having had a much-vaunted team of fiscal wonks advising him, the party seems to have made a terrible fist of the job. 

Not only were independent economists right to be sceptical last year about the party’s pledges; its future claims will be even more closely scrutinised. New Zealanders expect their leaders to be both compassionate and competent, but currently National is struggling on both counts.

It also faces a familiar dilemma as the May 30 budget approaches. To fill the $5.7bn gap and run its promised surplus by 2028, it has three main options: raise more revenue, borrow more, or cut more public services.

User charges – such as the higher car-registration fees trailed by transport minister Simeon Brown – could boost the coffers, but not by $5.7bn. The tax threshold rises could be delayed, effectively increasing revenue – but at the cost of some embarrassment to Willis. Borrowing more for infrastructure, and delaying the date of returning to surplus, would be perfectly sensible, and Luxon has refused to recommit to the 2028 target. But any big moves here would run counter to National’s anti-borrowing rhetoric.

Deeper public service cuts, therefore, may be in prospect. National has insisted that its efficiency drive, including 6.5-7.5% budget cuts for dozens of agencies, will, over four years, shave $6bn off government spending without harming “frontline” services.

But while most public servants would admit there is some back-office fat to be trimmed, analysis by trade union economist Craig Renney – who was consistently right about National’s financial problems on the campaign trail – suggests some services currently within scope for cuts are absolutely those that Joe Average would consider “frontline”. These include Customs, firefighting, search and rescue, Predator Free New Zealand, cybersecurity and District Court services.

The axe may, ultimately, fall elsewhere. But even the prospect of cuts to such services heightens the absurdity of the $2.9bn landlord tax break.

Bear in mind there is no hard evidence that Labour’s removal of the interest-deductibility provisions increased rents. Treasury research refutes the idea that landlords’ costs are the main driver of rent increases; far more important are tenants’ incomes, which determine how much landlords can realistically extract, and a lack of houses, which inhibits the competition that might otherwise force rents down.

There is no serious reason to believe landlords will pass on any substantial amount of their $2.9bn tax cut to tenants. Nor, at a time when we want to shift investment away from property and make life easier for first-time buyers, is there any logic in allowing landlords the same interest deductions that other businesses enjoy.

And so the tax cut remains a huge handout to people who are, according to Statistics New Zealand surveys, disproportionately concentrated in the country’s wealthiest tenth. A handout that comes as the government is cutting funds for food banks and wheelchair users. A handout that is, in the final analysis, funded partly by taking away from beneficiaries some of the extra money they would have got under Labour. What was that saying about values?