Pollsters give up and go to beach
There were two new polls over the last couple of days saying opposing and contradictory things. No surprise there; who wants to say sensible things to a pollster in the middle of January - unless they are polling on the Black Caps middle order or the Big Day Out lineup. The Greens do better in both polls, especially the Herald one; although it’s hard to read too much into one poll after a string of previous polls tell a worse story. As the politicians all know, it’s about trends rather than one off polls.The interesting thing though is the differing story the two polls tell about Labour and National, with the Roy Morgan poll showing National’s lead opening up further to a whooping 19% over Labour, while the Herald poll shows National falling below 50% and the gap between the two falling to 8.8%.
My suspicion is that a majority of new Zealanders don’t want a single party governing New Zealand and get very edgy when any one party starts to loiter at or above 50% in the polls. Labour seemed to feel this pressure in 2002, with voters looking around for a potential support party that could keep them honest. National is aware of this problem and is being careful not to talk about governing alone, or cutting off any possible relationships with other parties. But while it remains unclear to the voters whether National could actually work with other parties it continues to give Labour’s strategists hope.
Realistically the Greens and the Maori Party are shaping up as the most credible long term parties that Labour and National will need find a way to work with if they want to build a government. If that remains the case hopefully we will see a less divisive election than last time.
January 27th, 2008 at 8:58 am
gee..!..you go into frogblog search engine..
..jey in the word ’subprime’..(arguably ‘the word of the year’.?..)
and you get ‘no results’..
you go to whoar archives..key in word subprime..
and you get 40 stories..
(guess who ‘hasn’t been doing ther job’..?..)
phil(whoar.co.nz)
January 27th, 2008 at 10:35 am
Frog: Hollow men alert??
The Property Council, representing investors with interests worth $20 billion, wants zoning restrictions around city boundaries lifted.
INTRODUCTION
By Dr. Donald Brash
Once again, the Demographia survey leads inevitably to one clear conclusion: the affordability of
housing is overwhelmingly a function of just one thing, the extent to which governments place
artificial restrictions on the supply of residential land.
http://www.demographia.com/dhi.pdf
Monday, 21 January 2008, 4:05 pm
Press Release: Auckland Regional Council
“Independent research clearly shows that a more compact city results in lower housing costs per capita, an increased average income per person and is a more efficient, cost effective way of providing infrastructure.
“Urban sprawl that results in dormitory suburbs at great distance from employment and services negates the benefits of cheaper homes through higher transport costs, wasted time and poor access to services and employment.
“Ironically, this will be felt most by those who least can afford to own their own property – those on low and fixed incomes.�
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/AK0801/S00142.htm
NZ Opinion posted on Energy Bulletin
http://www.energybulletin.net/4319.html
January 27th, 2008 at 7:43 pm
Your point JH? How exactly do you disagree with the points you bold faced?
You reckon the current situation helps people to own their own homes?
January 27th, 2008 at 8:19 pm
Phil
Subprime has damned little to do with NZ afaik… at least not yet. The number of foreclosures here hasn’t broken any records. At least not yet.
The thing about the problems is that they aren’t JUST sub-prime issues. There’s a log of toxic paper out there and a lot of bankers vulnerable… more ways than I can count.
respectfully
BJ
January 27th, 2008 at 9:30 pm
BJ, The problem, as I see it, is that most of our land is mortgaged to foreign owned banks and most of our retirement savings have their risk spread across a multitude of investments with foreign connections. The newest methods used to spread the risk of subprime mortgages make all mortgages and investments higher risk than they used to be. That change from requires a shift in thinking on the consequences with a similar magnitude to changing from the Richter scale to the Modified Mercali Index.
January 27th, 2008 at 10:50 pm
Zen Tiger
I’m working on it. The issues aren’t simple but both sides can’t be right and one side has an enormous vested interest.
January 27th, 2008 at 11:53 pm
I haven’t finished reading the Demographia Document but in the meantime I’ve been cheating:
This from Well Sharp
Spinning the Housing Affordability Crisis: Don Brash and Demographia try shift the blame, and the New Zealand Herald goes along for the free ride.
http://tinyurl.com/24s52a
“What this masks, of course, is the dichotomy between the coast (the most expensive markets in the entire study) and the interior (the most affordable markets in the entire survey, and affordable in an absolute sense.) A clearer sign that there is no unified “US housing marketâ€? would be difficult to find.”
http://macro-man.blogspot.com/2006/12/cautionary-tale.html
January 28th, 2008 at 2:58 am
jh, Also note that the most expensive markets in the US and British parts of the study are either financial capitals or centres for high-tech industries.
The use of median income rather than mean income can dramatic alter the findings. If you want to work out the mean income of 11 people you just add their total incomes and divide by 11. To work out the median income you simple put them in order from highest to lowest. Whatever income ends up in the middle is the median. In an area where there are a small number of people earning extremely high incomes the mean can be a lot higher than the median.
The simplest example of the inaccuracurate analysis in the report is this objection to developer levies: “In fact, the core infrastructure that was required to support the unprecedented growth that occurred from the 1950s and 1960s was largely financed by the rate base or tax base.” The reality of course is that the suburbs were built by subdivision companies that built their own infrastructure and included those costs in the sale prices which were then included in the mortgages of the purchasers. Thus the capital costs were spread over time and didn’t come from rates or taxes. The core infrastructure such as water treatment and electricity generation was also funded by loans thus spreading the costs over several decades. Most of the core road infrastructure was in place at the turn of the century and merely needed modernising. The fact that land did not need to be purchased at 1950s prices meant that these road works were easily affordable especially as the cost to the new suburbanites was being subsidised by the fuel taxes levied on all of the nations road users and not just those ratepayers who lived in the new motor suburbs.
The ARCs claims are equally dodgy. I haven’t seen any independent research that clearly shows that a more compact city results in lower housing costs per capita, an increased average income per person. I have seen research showing a correlation but none that asserts a causal link.
The densist cities tend to be the oldest cities and they are generally political or financial capitals with an extremely high density CBD and above average incomes. Their compactness is helped by an absence of industrial sprawl.
Conversely many of the great industrial cities of the early twentieth century are in decline. They are victims of a population drift to the south, especially among the middle classes and tertiary graduates. Their lack of density is also the result the huge amount of land occupied by derelict sprawling indurstrial sites rather than modern suburban sprawl. The lack of jobs leads to low average incomes.
To further complicate the picture much of the urban intensification is being acheived with highrise condos rather than lowrise apartments. Not only is the capital cost of building upwards greater than for building outwards but the value of the view is added onto the price.
January 28th, 2008 at 7:50 am
a hatchet job on russel norman has been done by the herald..
http://whoar.co.nz/2008/dr-norman-is-a-middle-aged-middle-class-politi cal-junkie-who-has-begun-to-distinguish-himself-by-a-lack-of-the-colla borative-gene/
phil(whoar.co.nz)
January 28th, 2008 at 7:57 am
is russel norman the green parties’ bill rowling..?
i mean..he is so ‘un-hip’..
he should be called ‘no-hip’..
phil(whoar.co.nz)
January 28th, 2008 at 8:10 am
and hey..!..russel..!
when your..and fellow conspirators..long planned/plotted/successful dirty-tricks campaign to get nandors’ rightful job..
(and now his seat in parliament..)
reaches the beginning of the final act..
and you walk into parliament to take his seat..
daniel going into the lions den will be nothing to what you will face..
apart from the political desires of those sitting there licking their chops as you enter..
you are/will be also walking into a wall of personal animosity towards you..
cos’ nandor is well-liked/respected by pollies of all stripes in there..
and they all now know about the (dirty) white-anting/backstabbing campaign run by you/bradford/delahunty et. al. against nandor..
that has got you there..
and you know ..any many other greens know..that they will ‘eat you’..
and i must admit..
i’ll be skinning up..puttin my feet up..
and ordering a side-dish of schadenfreude..
you russel..are about to set a new benchmark in ‘hollow victories’..
(btw..how did that ‘learning charisma’ workshop go..?..)
phil(whoar.co.nz)
January 28th, 2008 at 8:21 am
How come you trust the NZ Herald poll more than Roy Morgan?
The NZ Herald poll asked 750 people while Roy Morgan asked 1588 electors.
It is obviously logical to trust the Roy Morgan Poll more.
January 28th, 2008 at 9:15 am
BJ, Sub prime is affecting the Banks cost of funds. All our Fixed rate mortgages are securitized and sold off shore. As the cost of funds is going up, that is being passed onto the NZ and Australian consumer.
Agree, our Banks have written a small % of sub prime. But the high cost of funds is affecting our ability to invest. Your average household is struggling to stay afloat and the matter is made worse by our high tax rates. NZers just dont earn enough.
January 28th, 2008 at 9:22 am
The Greens aren’t getting far because (essentially) incumbents are pushing their world view on the populace.
January 28th, 2008 at 9:45 am
Kevin, Thanks. There is an important issue here and that is influencing the voter (Spin). Most people can’t digest a document like (size and statistics) that but the presentation and having an ex governor of the reserve bank introducing it is powerful. Also they say :
“There is a general consensus among economists that the principal cause of the housing affordability loss has been prescriptive planning, the strategies of “urban consolidationâ€? or “smart growthâ€? that ration land and impose excessive fees on development.”
I would like to see it systematically dissected ( For Dummies)
___________________________
A cynical view:
“The encouragement of migration from overseas, in order to provide continuing work and business opportunity for businesses that would have otherwise languished. In a seemingly never ending cycle, shopping malls (with their mandatory acres of car parking remote from housing developments) were constructed, to provide new citizens with the opportunity to spend money they did not have, while houses were constructed to provide homes for new migrants in order to fill the shopping malls with patrons.”
http://globalpublicmedia.com/articles/345
January 28th, 2008 at 10:40 am
I read that Demographia report in full last week. I hadn’t expected it to be a political propaganda tool, perhaps I was just being naive. However, I felt the conclusion generally was erroneous, and the understanding of the NZ property market upon which the conclusion is (in part) based is just plain wrong.
It fails in many ways, but I’ll just pick a couple.
There are a lot of folks in NZ who have invested in property but that have mortgage financing to acquire that property. So they are not actually investors per se, but something else. The mortgaged house is then rented out to pay the mortgage. For this system to continue to operate there has to be a continuous supply of renters. If renters had the option of buying a house affordably, many would, and thus the property investment wagon would come off the rails bigtime due to lack of renters.
Where I am, there is no shortage of land to build on within the current building zone system; as I commute many KMs to work (this is in North Canterbury) I pass many KMs of fields that could all have housing along the road edge, within commutable distance of Christchurch. However the farmers that own said fields aren’t willing to sell at todays high market rates, what would make anyone think they would sell them for less?
January 28th, 2008 at 11:31 am
Phil- why do you post about Russel in every thread that has to do with the Green Party’s polling in any way? I can understand if it’s important to you but Russel really isn’t under discussion here.
As for the Herald’s view on Russel- good god, I think that article is worth a letter to the editor or two. Personally speaking, Russel’s role in the party assures me that they are grappling with my biggest doubt about them- that they could lapse into xenophobia in some areas because of how independent they want New Zealand to be. It’s great to see an Australian in the Green Party, and I wish we had more people who chose to be New Zealanders present, rather than just so many that were born New Zealanders.
On the actual topic, I definitely agree with Frog that New Zealanders are edgy of giving any one party a majority under MMP, and rightly so. The system is not designed for outright majority government. I’m also glad so many people on this blog are cautious about survey and poll results. Good on you. Those are best used to get a picture of the trend of people’s opinions, rather than as an actual indicator.
January 28th, 2008 at 2:40 pm
phil wtf?
you were in some other thread about the poll issue & complaining it hadn’t been mentioned in this blog, now that it has, you are here talking about something else? (which has also been covered with a thread elsewhere) this isn’t a news site ffs.
you complain about “censorship” being practiced here, yet they tolerate you constantly plugging your own website which i for one will never visit for the same reason i avoid any other product which befouls my airspace or my space in general with irritating advertizing
January 28th, 2008 at 4:17 pm
your loss..andrew..
phil(whoar.co.nz)
January 28th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
you seem a bit slow on the uptake..andrew..
phil(whoar.co.nz)
January 28th, 2008 at 4:20 pm
you need to be told things a few times..?
phil(whoar.co.nz)