As someone notes in the responses:

"Congestion pricing is such a good idea everywhere there is rock solid public transit alternatives. Where there’s not, it just becomes a tax on the poor."

If most of the poorer and working class road users cannot shift their transport times (and typically they can't) and then you don't have good and affordable public transport options for them to take instead then it effectively becomes a charge that the people who can't avoid it pay so that those with flexible lives can enjoy a smoother commute.

Which is to say that it might well reduce congestion but the cost of doing so is lumped on those that can least afford it, rather than those that can. As with most things its a choice of who pays for what to reach the aim. I would prefer that we increase taxes on wealthier people and fund expanded and free(er) public transport with a huge increase in safe cycling routes.

Nobody trying to make money on YouTube is going to stop click bait; its a necessary evil to get your videos fed by the algorithm. It sucks, but its here to stay until the algorithm starts punishing it.

Breathtakingly stupid policy in my opinion.

Rather than inducing more traffic onto roads I would rather see freight moved onto rail and coastal shipping instead.

That's not the only way to read that at all. Your interpretation is that sexual harrassment was not ignored & was addressed; but the sentence is actually that allegations were not ignored and were addressed.

The short answer is basically that the Resource Minister lied, likely not for the first time and an increasingly consistent theme from this government's ministers. If it continues the appropriate response from media would be to publish no comments from these ministers without fact checking and correcting in the original story.

If heavy road freight paid RUCs more in line with the damage they do to the roads, then sure, but given their lobby paid for the National government that's not going to happen.

For people living paycheck to paycheck RUCs are a bill shock proposition so will mean many of them fall behind and inevitably start getting fined and dragged into the court system. The huge advantage of fuel tax is that its easier to administer, easier to enforce and far easier to pay as its just as you go.

You will naturally get a fair bit of variance to opinions on this from us Kiwis, so rather than replying to any of the poster's below I figured i'd just add my own two cents separately. You're essentially asking for the vibe, not the truth - and realistically your own experience is going to be the most valuable way to determine what it is like for you.

NZ doesn't have any out & out fascistic parties anywhere close to political power, but there are still right, and far-right political ideas prevalent in our discourse along with other pet issues that would not be misplaced amongst most other alt-right movements worldwide.

Many Pākehā will argue against this - but my contention is that from most measures NZ is a fairly racist country. Naturally, given it was a colonised country, this is particularly noticeable against Māori, but it also impacts Polynesian people, and to a lesser extent also to Asian, Latin and African peoples.

The 3 right-wing parties in / close to parliament all use dog-whistle style politics to gain support by attacking initiatives that would attempt to redress the imbalance in social outcomes - health, education, justice etc. Some parties bring out that rhetoric most loudly come election time (NZ First), but the two elected parties (National, Act) do it so casually that it sometimes gets missed how much they use it as a crutch to solidify their support base.

Many of the other pet issues for the alt-right are thankfully still fairly niche here. Though the anti-trans as a gateway to anti-LGBTQ is getting stirred up as well. A lot of extra stuff kicked off around the covid-19 pandemic, and there's a lot of misinformation, disinformation and people peddling bulls%&t to suckers for money.

Mostly this initially comes in from foreign grifters or religious fundamentalists which is to be expected I guess, but eventually we seem to produce local versions of the same. Supporting that effort there is also a group co-opting free speech movements as a basis for importing more alt-right, far-right and fascist speech into regular discourse. That's a complicated movement as some people involved probably are genuinely in support of free speech as an ideal, but its certain that others use it the same way all fascists do.

I think that's a reasonable snippet of the cultural far-right politics here, but probably another thing to realise is that New Zealand has had a neo-liberal economic consensus since the mid-late 80s. This means that economically our "centre" is actually right wing. Low tax, low government intervention, small government in terms of GDP, selling off of state assets, lots of user pays style things, minimal support for those unable to work etc.

To be sure there's loud arguments that Labour^1^ are socialist commies, all about traditional big government etc, but really them and National^2^ are economically two sides to the same coin. Particularly as neither will do anything to increase taxes on the wealthy, neither will do anything significant to address inequality, or improve housing affordability or have policies that will actually allow the country to reach pollution related targets etc.

^1^ nominally centre-left, but IMHO more centre-right thanks to the left splitting off from them after the neo-liberal reforms of the 80s, eventually mostly coalescing into the Greens

^2^ nominally centre-right, but IMHO they're 3 parties smudged into 1, centre-right, religious fundamentalist and far-right

"AI" for health is already known to be very problematic, and nobody wants to see a 10 years down the track commission of inquiry about why some women were not diagnosed correctly from their mammograms.

The chatbots Judith is talking about for tutoring children regularly hallucinate and come up with such stupid things as cooking recipes for petrol spaghetti and other reckless trash. Sounds like a fast way to destroy the education of a bunch of children, but all the rich kids will still be in their private schools with low pupil numbers and enjoying private tutors so why would Judith care.

It seems like BS eh. Other folks I've seen are suggesting its just because they want to ditch easy anti-cheat to go with EA anti-cheat which (apparently) is windows only with no plans to develop for linux.

A reminder to anybody that isn't aware, that the structure of our economy requires a level of unemployment to keep wage demands low and combat inflation (even when the bulk of that inflation is imported through overseas cost & profiteering).

So the economy guarantees some people won't have jobs, and this government aims to be punitive to those people who don't have jobs; including the people the same government is actively forcing out of employment.

AKA Nactional Fist will sell the country to save the property portfolios of their donors.

Remember when NActional Fist cancelled the pumped hydro storage project?

I saw something the other day in response to I think Amazon demanding workers work from office. If its so impossible to be productive working from home, then as soon as you walk out of the building at the end of the day, stop looking at your work phone, never reply to emails, don't answer the phone.*

*That's as it should be anyway, don't do free labour for your boss!

Its hard not to wonder if they're also held to a different standard; there's no way a Green candidate who beat the shit out of a younger kid with a bed leg and was credibly accused of being a bully later in life would be allowed to stand for election.

From what I understand its a couple of nights a week while he's in Wellington for say cabinet meetings, or a session in the house. Its much more like a hotel you go to regularly than an actual house.

But, its basically a tax free allowance of NZ$52k, I think I saw someone calculate it out as being around NZ$80k that a regular person would need to earn to have that much money after tax.* In terms of the cost to the taxpayer its nothing, the issue is that it was basically a rort, because the actual cost to himself for that mortgage free apartment is nowhere near the $52k - and we have to pay for the upkeep of the Prime Ministerial apartment whether he uses it or not. He was also the first Prime MInister in about 30 years to claim the benefit; and in that time there's been a couple who also owned their own homes in Wellington but didn't claim it.

His claim is that the official lodgings are really bad, but he won't let any media in to take footage of it to see how bad it really is; and just over a year ago Jacinda Ardern lived there when she was in Wellington often with her toddler child - so the assumption is that it can't be that bad. One suggestion I heard was that his private apartment doesn't have to keep a register of guests so he could meet with anyone there. But I think the truth is that he's just a classic rich ex-ceo, book every expense against the company (or now the country) and milk the job for all its worth while you're there.

*This is more than the median wage in New Zealand, so its a pittance for a guy worth millions like Luxon, but a lot of money for a regular Kiwi.

If I understand the argument is that we have no expertise in finding and extracting it, so we have to offer bigger concessions to get anybody to do it.

Which sounds like the wrong solution to the problem, but what would I know?

In case you were wondering why National & Act were so keen to dump on poor people in order to give tax breaks to landlords, and are so keen to sell off more of our housing to overseas buyers, further doubling down on making NZ a basket case economy of selling houses to each other with a few tourism and farming bits tacked on.

I buy that with Utes; back in the 2000s and 2010s. But early on when SUVs were becoming vogue it was definitely a perception of safety, particularly for the urban buyers using it for around town, school and sports runs etc.

Nowadays a twin cab ute has fairly well taken over that spot, particularly for urban drivers but whether perceived safety is as much of a selling point for them I'm willing to concede.

Sure, a Leaf might weight something similar to a Ranger; but the big difference in danger from a Ranger is its height and particularly driving around town poor visibility for pedestrians.

And in any case, I'm not barking up much of a tree, read the study - it's pretty clear that Utes & SUVs in that study were a lot more dangerous. Also note I tied safety fears to SUVs, not Utes.

The next step for Newshub is to go through all of Jacinda's covid era livestreams from Premier House to stitch together a cribs style walkthrough of the apartment to see what its like.

Look he's just entitled to the entitlements man, what could he do - its his entitlement, he's entitled to it.