NZ Politics

https://www.greens.org.nz/taxcalculator

Other coverage:

• Stuff: ACT's contractor plan finds favour with BusinessNZ, but unions says it will worsen inequality
• Newshub: ACT unveils contract worker policy, proposes amending law so 'gig economy' staff can't challenge employment status
• NBR: Contractors, not employees: Act's Uber employment policy

<Michael Wood has quit as a Cabinet minister after it emerged he had more shareholding interests in areas that clashed with his portfolios.

Prime Minister Chris Hipkins confirmed Wood’s resignation today, saying he became aware of the fresh issues yesterday.

It has emerged Wood held further shares in Chorus, Spark and the National Australia Bank, further to his Auckland Airport shares, that have since been disclosed to Hipkins.>

This is a summary of the Future for Local Government report - He piki tūranga, he piki kōtuku.

Recommendations that stood out to me were reducing the voting age for local elections to 16, implementing ranked voting (STV), and increasing the term limits to four years.

Also, not mentioned in RNZ's summary is the recommendation that the number of local councils is reduced from 80 to about 15.

Luxon again with the “look, what I really mean is…”

Stuff gave it a far more clickbaity title: Government thinks its climate policy is planting too many trees

The article focusses pretty heavily on local production of "sustainable aviation fuel", but the draft Tourism Environment Action Plan looks at lots of ways to make NZ tourism more sustainable. They are currently seeking public input. From MBIE:

The draft action plan aims to ensure tourism has a positive impact on the natural environment and proposes 6 focus areas to achieve this. These areas or Tirohanga Hou (new pathways) are:

• Tourism journeys are decarbonised
• Tourism champions biodiversity
• Visitor management is optimised for te taiao (nature)
• Accelerated technology uptake and innovation enable regeneration
• Tourism businesses are incentivised and enabled for sustainability and regeneration
• The tourism system and its levers are optimised and resourced to support regeneration

Each area has multiple actions that will deliver positives not only for the environment but for communities and tourism operations.

Some actions see the tourism industry working with communities to create a picture of what healthy visitation looks like. Others focus on supporting and incentivising tourism operators to adopt sustainable or regenerative practices. Rapid investment in low-carbon technologies for long-haul travel is another key action.

The full draft plan is here, along with details about how to make submissions - including an online survey.

Edit: Just did the survey. It takes about 10 mins.

RNZ have been putting these out over the last few days:

On repeat: What hours of interviews reveal about the obsessions of our political leaders (Luxon overwhelming focuses on taxing and spending)

Who hogs the microphone when political leaders do their weekly rounds? (they all hog it pretty equally, Luxon slightly more than Ardern, Hipkins slightly less)

Christopher lucks in as the real Mr Chippy (Luxon uses slightly more positive and negative language than Ardern or Hipkins, who are pretty similar)

What Chris Hipkins says when he wants to change the subject (Luxon uses much more "block and bridge" statements than Hipkins or Ardern. His favourite is "the reality is", while Hipkins's is "as I've indicated" and Ardern's was "as I say")

I've just added a banner and icon for the community.

The icon is supposed to be the Lemmy logo crossed with the orange voting guy, but I have no idea if that comes across. And I can't get the colours right.

So if anyone's got any thoughts for a banner or icon, let me know.

Edit: Just updated the icon. Got rid of the lines (thanks @bradmoor@lemmy.nz) and fixed the colours a bit. Still very keen on banner ideas. The current one is only just better than nothing.

Hi all, we have another new mod joining the team.

@RaoulDuke@lemmy.nz has been appointed as a mod of !politics@lemmy.nz, and will be starting to look at fleshing out the details of the community.

I know you’ll make them feel welcome :)

So Luxon, whilst bashing the gov about the clean car scheme and it being used to buy teslas, whilst owning his own tesla, whilst being a very rich person, was asking the crown to buy him another tesla. Sigh.

He's claiming

"I subbed several stories that way over the past number of years," journalist Michael Hall told Checkpoint.

"In fact since I started RNZ and … I have done that for five years and nobody has tapped me on the shoulder and told me that I was doing anything wrong."

I took an introductory journalism class years ago. It wasn't even Journalism 101 it was like the precursor to that and literally the first thing we went into was bias.

This guy absolutely knew what he was doing.