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Author: tworuru
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Taxpayers’ Union pet policy to cost taxpayers billions, again
I did not want to take this newsletter out of hiatus. I really didn’t! I have my kids to look after, I have projects to do, I have lawns to mow. As I write this my absurdly cute 8 month old daughter is chasing my laptop around the house, as she has picked today to learn how to crawl. As much as I’d like to I do not have time to fish around in the incredibly depressing minutia of New Zealand’s one-degree-of-separation think-tank powered politics.
But I have to, because the think tanks are at it again, and somehow the media is mostly neglecting to mention it.
In its latest deeply neoliberal austerity Budget, the Government has managed to find billions – potentially tens of billions, or more – for big businesses, in the form of capital expensing. As usual all this is hidden behind frustrating obfuscatory language, but what it means is that if you’re a mining company that wants to buy the Leveller from Fern Gully you can now claim 20 percent off the cost of the thing upfront, against the taxes you’d otherwise have paid. Tax deductions for depreciation already existed, of course, but depreciation is a recognition that things slowly break down and have to be fixed or replaced and this costs businesses money – as time passes. Capital expensing is going “oh, this would have broken or worn out at some point in the future, so look, why don’t we just kind of buy a bunch of it for you?” And that I suppose is fine if you’re a small or medium business. The issue here is that – as per Marc Daalder’s excellent reporting – there appears to be no limit to how much this misbegotten corporate tonguing will cost the country which means that we’ll soon start subsidising, oh I don’t know, oil rigs.
This is largely the result of months of Taxpayers’ Union lobbying. They’ve been in the ears of MPs, sending them asinine “briefing papers” (their latest is a frothing neoliberal wet dream dripping with outright disinformation about government debt1 that can be summed up by the words “PRIVATISE EVERYTHING”; naturally, it landed TPU Executive Director Jordan Williams a spot on 3 News). They then spruik these efforts in their horrible newsletters that go out to all their members and anyone who thought they were getting a Ratepayer’s Report from Stuff, and in these missives they meticulously document their policy and public discourse wins.
You are reading an excerpt from a Taxpayers’ Union newsletter. Roll 10d12 psychic damage. The TPU’s position was for full capital expensing; that the government should rebate the total cost of the Leveller, not just 20 percent of it. They are calling the upfront rebate – which is, to reiterate, a gigantic sweetheart deal, just imagine if you could write off 20 percent of a shiny new flatscreen TV against your next tax bill! – a flop.
This is posturing. For the TPU and its junk-tank Atlas Network fellow travellers like the New Zealand Initiative, anything other than total victory will always be a flop, and for them total victory would be the government abolishing all taxes and public services, and ceding sovereignty to a consortium of noble captains of industry. They will be privately pleased with the developments in this miserable budget. For them, they represent progress. What bothers me, as always, is that these groups are deeply entrenched in business, media and Government decision making; their policy prescriptions are often picked up either piecemeal or wholesale, and despite this (or because of it) the media tends to take their pronouncements about fiscal responsibility at face value while ignoring the catastrophic cost of the policies they’ve advocated for.
Let’s recap some of those, shall we? Before the latest boondoggle, the TPU took full credit for torching Labour’s 3 Waters, legislation that aimed to take the (very high) capital costs of water infrastructure off ratepayers and on to Government books. Achieved through a racist whataboutism campaign aimed at Maori, the TPU’s successful campaign meant that many councils were forced to massively hike rates to pay for their decaying infrastructure instead of handing it off to Government. Thanks for the enormous tax hike, Taxpayers’ Union!
Before this, the TPU embedded their chair Casey Costello – also formerly an Act party candidate – on the NZ First party list. Upon her election to Parliament, she immediately set out doing practically everything the TPU (and NZI) had lobbied for around tobacco policy; scrapping world-first tobacco legislation, cancelling excise tax increases on tobacco products, and purchasing vapes from tobacco companies to hand out to smokers – policies that came out of mysterious anonymous briefing papers that spontaneously manifested on her desk. The cost of the thwarted and introduced policies once again runs into the billions; the cost of healthcare for smokers, the lost revenue from excise taxes, the subsidies for the tobacco industry’s addictive, environmentally ruinous products, and the deaths of an estimated 5000 New Zealanders each year.
Some media, to their credit, tried to identify links between the TPU and Costello, despite widespread and illegal stonewalling. But in doggedly searching for or turning up the usual paper trails – names on briefing papers, emails, overt commonalities between Costello’s mysterious documents and tobacco industry propaganda – they missed the wood for the trees. Costello is the Taxpayers’ Union! She stepped down as chair of the TPU to be parachuted into a job as an MP, doing many of the exact things the TPU advocated for during her tenure as chair, and once she finishes her catastrophic innings, she’ll be launched right back into the loving arms of some cosy industry body or lobby group. This is New Zealand politics; everyone knows everyone else, and they all gets a sweet job after their time in the trenches is up. (The media are not exempt from the merry-go-round; political journalism is practically a job interview for the job of a party comms person or corporate executive. If you’ve ever questioned the weirdly out-of-touch, navel-gazing, anodyne, optics-obsessed quality of the Labour party’s public statements, you will find your answer in the fact that a chunk of their comms team consists of ex-Press Gallery journalists.)
Given the state of things, it is probably folly for me to beg the media to make the link between the think tanks, the ruinous policy they so successfully advocate for, and the resultant costs to the country – or, to put it another way, the cost to taxpayers. But I’m going to do it anyway. The Taxpayers Union, NZI, and others dress up their advocacy for greater corporate control of the commons in the language of freedom and choice. They are frequently platformed and even embedded in our media, often for sneering at public projects like overly-expensive playgrounds or a set of steps at a beach. But these so-called blowouts pale in comparison to the multiple billions the policies championed by the TPU and their ilk cost the country as a whole. The least the media could do is tell the other side of the story: the outsize effect that these groups have on the formulation of public policy, and the catastrophic cost of those efforts to all New Zealanders.
- The report makes the case that the Government’s debt is both unsustainable and like a household’s, a nonsense which is still repeated ad nauseam by political and financial reporters. Verity Johnson’s excellent op-ed makes short work of this absurd claim. ↩︎
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Your phone is the mind-killer
Today’s TLDR
- Yes, the medium is the message, and it might be rewiring your brain
- If digital media modes are leaking into your meatspace, try putting the phone down
- Litany Against Smartphones
- Unlike, Unsubscribe
I am here, in my mode
There’s a thing called Tetris Syndrome I think I’ve remarked on before; essentially it’s that thing where if you spend all day playing a videogame you’ll keep seeing it when you shut your eyes. I get the same thing, but for books; if I read something compelling enough I spend the next while hearing my inner dialogue as if narrated by the author. I assume this happens to other people, although when I’ve mentioned it to other people I’ve weathered a brief stare followed by a quick subject-change. It can be like time-travel, especially if you’re reading Austen or O’Brien or something in similar prose.
It happens with other media as well. I know that if I spent too long – any amount of time, really – on Twitter or the increasingly Twitter-like Bluesky, I start to think in terms of tweets, replies, the omnipresent strident snark, witticisms I could render into Tweetish form (which I would get oh so many likes and reposts for). This is as horrible as it sounds. Lately, I have been wondering if something similar happens with all our regular digital diets and interactions.
Medium, meet message
If you did media studies or similar you may have come across the theories/ramblings of a bloke called Marshall McLuhan who is remembered today for coining “the medium is the message,” a tricky little phrase that essentially means that the meaning of a piece of media is inextricable from the way it’s delivered. A letter has a different vibe – and a different effect – to newsprint which is different to a movie which is different to TV which is different to hypertext on a computer screen which is different to the endless algorithmic scroll of TikTok on an iPhone.
McLuhan’s mostly impenetrable but prescient guff came to mind again when I went to Bluesky to try to copy my username and accidentally found myself scrolling for what was probably only a few minutes. Afterward, I felt the echoes of the online conversations I’d glanced at for hours.
(And even now I feel a silent urge emanating from the smartphone within eyeshot. It’s like having a Tamagotchi, except it waterboards you every time you pick it up.)
My contention is that the mediums of modern information delivery – hypertext, email, algorithmic scrolling, doomscrolling – are modulating how we think, act and react to things in the non-digital realm; if you find yourself absently composing tweets while you’re doing the dishes, mentally framing conversation as comments, or ruminating about something you read on that curiously addictive gossip site before realising you’ve got no idea why you walked into the kitchen, this could be why. This isn’t an original idea; it’s essentially what authors like Johann Hari are on about with the likes of Stolen Focus, but if I pay attention I can quite definitely feel it happening, live, in my day-to-day.
O rly?
My anecdote is one thing, but actual evidence for this specific effect is harder to come by. My research well ran dry on this one (perhaps readers can help) but there’s enough here to put a glaze on my half-baked theory. For instance, there a psychology paper called “Linguistic Style Matching in Social Interaction,” about “the psychometric properties of language in dyadic interactions” which makes me think of researchers trying to talk to oak trees. But of course that’s a dryad; a dyad is a sociological term for the smallest possible group of people – a pair. This, and other research, shows linguistic style matching or interactive alignment; essentially that two people talking together start talking like each other.
In this scheme, two interlocutors simultaneously align their representations at different linguistic levels and do so by imitating each other’s choices of speech sounds, grammatical forms, words and meanings. For example, if Peter says to Mary with reference to their child, I handed John his lunch box today,’ Mary is more likely to respond with And I handed him his coat’ than with And I gave him his coat’ even though the two alternative responses have equivalent meaning.
This lines up with our understanding of how human interaction works. It’s like accents. If you hang around French people for some reason, you will start to sound French. It makes sense that it would happen to some extent for reading – and doomscrolling. Perhaps the medium really is the message, and it’s hacking (apart) our brains.
I’m not sure how to fix that, but here’s one idea.
Litany against phones
I rewatched Dune: Part 2, helped by my wife who requested frequent pauses to explain some arcane facet of Dune-lore. I’ve only read the first three books – the Dune sequence is occasionally and accurately referred to “Diminishing Returns: The Series” or “Stop With The First One” but I’ve read enough fan-wiki summaries to handle the questions. Dune is gloriously dense and weird, and the movies have done a good job of retaining the vast sense of scale and strangeness of the books while shedding some of Old Man Herbert’s unnecessary authorial foibles, like his virulent homophobia.
One of the better things from the books that it’s hard to render into film, though, is the mentally-recited Litany Against Fear, which is exactly what it sounds like.
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
Not only is it a neat bit of prose, it’s psychologically helpful – this is honestly a pretty good way to deal with anxiety for many: recognise the feeling, but don’t fight it, knowing that it will pass in time. I also like that it’s endlessly adaptable. Modern problems require modern solutions, so here is my version.
“I must not scroll. Smartphones are the mind-killer. TikTok is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will put down my smartphone. I will permit it to pass into a different room. And when it is gone I will turn the inner eye to something else. When the phone has gone, only time will remain.”
Todo
If there is something you need to get done and you feel goofy resorting to the Litany Against Phones, here’s an alternative:
Go back to the early 90s.
- Turn off your phone notifications except for calls and turn the ringer volume up
- Put your phone in a different room
- Plug it in. Tell yourself (about to show my age here) that it’s connected to the wall with a curly cord and you can’t disconnect it until you’ve done the thing you need to do.
- Do the thing. If the phone rings, and it probably won’t, you’ll hear it.
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Thanks for hanging about. For better or worse, there’s more where this came from.
— Josh
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this is a test to see if my posse setup is working
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Cat painting
This is a picture I painted of my cat Bianca, who died in 2023. I’d always wanted to try painting something photorealistic. Now I’ve done it and I never want to paint something photorealistic ever again. I wrote about the painting (and the cat) at some length, here. The painting took me about six years to finish, and the story is a weird mixture of how determined I can be to see something through while simultaneously not doing a goddamn thing to actually make progress. And yet, here she is.
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Cakeburger
Cakeburger is/was a webcomic I made that was sporadically updated at best. I think the reason for inconsistency was twofold: I never quite figured out what I wanted it to be and I’m just not that good at making comics. There are some good ones there, and I’m going to leave the site up for now because I still think “Cakeburger” is a great name, some of the comics still make me chuckle, and there are ideas I’d like to tackle one day, but for now it’s probably best to think of this project as on permanent hiatus.
Visit Cakeburger and read the ancient comics
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Bored Ape Painting Club
I’m not a developer and yet I keep running into things that need development, and yet I have no money to pay developers. It’s all very annoying. When I started work the wildly over-engineered Bird Hat Grift Club I found that rare thing, a dev who was happy to accept payment in painting form. So I painted a Bored Ape for him.
I haven’t made prints of this but if you want one for some reason, email me.
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Luxon saga
I painted a picture of the New Zealand Prime Minister and tried to sell it on TradeMe. A few days before the auction ended it got banned. This caused a mini-Streisand and the painting got a lot of attention. I censored it and listed it on TradeMe again. This time it sold successfully. Together, the new owners and I collaborated to do a live gallery unveiling where I also uncensored the painting, restoring its original glorious form.
I didn’t make prints of this because I didn’t feel the world needed more of this painting in it. In the unlikely event that you want one, email me.
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The Department of Biological Determinism
This is a short story set in the world of Harry Potter. Any questions sparked by that sentence, like “why?” and “no, seriously, after everything JKR has said and done… why?“ are, I’m afraid, best answered by reading the the fanfic. I know that the words “fanfic” and “Harry Potter” are enough to create a near-impenetrable resistance to clicking links or reading further, but seriously, if you like any of my work, just read:
The Department of Biological Determinism
(The story is hosted at Archive Of Our Own for not-getting-sued-into-oblivion reasons.)
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Bird Hat Grift Club
Probably the weirdest, most involved, and least impactful project I’ve made, and yet I’m still oddly proud of the Bird Hat Grift Club, an anti-NFT NFT parody project that aimed to sell no NFTs at all and mostly succeeded.
I’m linking to the web archive as the actual site seems to have vanished from the internet and I’m debating the merits of bringing it back. It is probably better off dead.
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Responsible AI Disclosure
My mate Walter Lim and I collaborated to create a draft framework based on Creative Commons for responsible AI disclosure. We reckon, if you’ve made something, it should be no skin off your nose to disclose how much AI was involved, right?
Right?
Comments
Join the conversation on Bluesky
You misunderstand the TPU. It is not the Taxpayers’ Union, it is the Taxpayer’s Union. It claims to be the former, but that’s not really true. They don’t represent the interests of Taxpayers (collective group), they represent the interests of Taxpayers (individuals)
So the fact that a benefit to some (individual) Taxpayers may result in a negative impact for (collective) Taxpayers is consistent with their aims. The exception to this is when they can claim to represent (collective) Taxpayers in attacking small value arts funding on ideological grounds.
God I’ve put the apostrophe in the wrong place everywhere haven’t I
You seem to have put it in the place they claim it belongs.
Love it when a typo accidentally tells the truth