Also the choice of @pault.bsky.social and his legal team to seek only a declaration that the HRC appointments had not followed the law rather than the removal of the two commissioners from office means the Crown's back wasn't against the wall. Sensible litigation strategy all round imo.

Excluding own-residence but including rental property &c I presume

Anyway this website has been shitting the bed so I've struggled to reply more, but TLDR:

* low productivity is a symptom of policy failure & unserious business culture
* raising productivity is the cure, not an example of the disease
* workers have practically no ways to do this, govt & firms do

I mean houses are a store of net worth

Not quite decoupled from wages, but the only way it manifests in wage terms is in reluctant & incremental minimum wage increases that simply flatten the national wage structure at a low median

When what is needed is levels of punishment that force firms to pay higher wages for competence

The example I keep coming back to is the foregone climate change boom that we could have been global leaders in, had the Clark ETS held, & had successive govts delivered on research funding promises that could have given NZ firms (especially in energy, ag, & transport) tools to raise productivity

And imposing this type of productive discipline is MUCH more effective at firm level than for individual workers

Decades of (mainly but not exclusively) Nat govts coddling & pandering has done NZ firms a huge disservice, and closed off avenues for increasing productivity. It's a generational shame

As you may know, I am not a fan of going easy on those I support. I think it tends to drive laziness & complacency when what struggling institutions need is a sense of fear that forces them to find new ways to improve

That's well recognised when it comes to workers & beneficiaries, but not firms

Basically we have govts who have refused to accept responsibility for the failure to drive productivity by policy, largely by the mechanism of going easy on firms & wealthy individuals (by deregulation, tax cuts, & exemptions) to give them a leg up, rather than using policy to drive firm performance

The causes are primarily a suite of policy settings & a business culture that make it easier for firms to drive down labour costs & lean harder on workers rather than investing in tech, plant, and new business models to compete

That's not on individual workers. But the culture blames workers for it

very strange to read a piece whose premise seems to be “i think you are too stupid to go look at the magazine i run and the writers i employ and see if i am telling the truth”

I regret to inform that twitter has the juice

In truth I don't think the govt is even doing it because they presume a few % of swing; they just want to avoid the sadfeels they got when the election night count had Nat + ACT forming govt, then the rug got pulled in the final count and they had to loop NZ First in

~400k voters enrolled and voted within the advance voting period in 2023, well over 10% of the electorate. Maximally that implies potential for a few points of swing in favour of the govt. BUT that assumes the change does not also prompt greater vigilance, reg campaigns, &c &c. So I just don't know

We do have past data, and we do know that the changes will have nonzero voter suppression impact that will fall disproportionately on the left (specifically Māori, Pasifika & ethnic minorities, disengaged voters, new voters, those in precarious housing &c)

But I think impossible to know how much