Spoonful of leak makes tax medicine go down
If you want a controversial new tax, have it leaked to the media.
This takes the headlines and the tax then becomes not so controversial. Chris Hipkins was very indignant that Labour’s policy on a capital gains tax had been leaked, but he wasn’t going to pursue the matter, which makes you think that the leak was intended to be released to soften the blow.
To have a capital gains tax on residential investment property and nothing else looks like stage one, with more to follow. When GST was introduced it started off with 10%, then it was 12.5% and now it is 15%.
Capital gains tax would be extended to shares in the second round, as it would create a lot of income and be easy to manage. To say that the income from the proposed capital gains tax would be put to three free doctor visits a year for everyone is very appealing, but no doctor in private practice could accommodate it.
Some may remember, a few elections back, Labour campaigned on $6 visits to the doctor, but this was not honoured, as they said when in government it was too expensive to implement.
To campaign on introducing another tax is risky, even if most of us are not the designated target. Once a tax is in, it never goes away.
Put another log on
Recent ongoing power outages must have many people wishing they were not depending on electricity alone in their homes.
Log burners connected to a hot water system might take up more room than a heatpump but many people now in freezing houses must have given them more than a passing thought.
Remember the old coal range? Many still around especially in older and country homes, some more modern green /cream enamel ones doing what they have always done — heating water, warming rooms and hot drinks, a large kettle always on back corner, roasts and casseroles quietly cooking away in the oven, the best hot scones ever, pots of veges, lids rattling on the elements, toast made over the embers in the firebox, clothes airing and warming on the top rack, shoes lined up on the hearth on their toes drying or warming, hot water bottles waiting to be filled to warm beds.
Our ancestors heated their heavy irons on the top — the list goes on and on. They need fuel to keep going of course, need cleaning out, would look out of place in a modern kitchen but would have been the most used item in thousands of homes for many generations.
Don’t follow the herd
Dr Eketone (Opinion ODT 20.10.25) asserts that "New Zealand’s failure to recognise Palestine as a sovereign state is particularly embarrassing when 157 of the 193 UN countries have already done so." He then goes on to make a comparison with New Zealand when it was recognised as an independent nation.
Just because other nations have recognised Palestine doesn’t make it right. Recognising Palestine will just make Hamas worse
Just because Dr Eketone is a university academic doesn’t make him a wise man in these affairs.
It is foolish to compare New Zealand being recognised as independent. There were no terrorists in New Zealand then.
Well done the coalition government, don’t go with the mob.
Support for stoats, possums in wild too maybe?
How disappointing that, in 2025, someone like Tony Robson (Letters, 27.10.25) actually supports goats in the wild in this day and age.
Goats are incredibly destructive of our native wildlife.
They eat trees up to as high as they can possibly reach on their back feet.
Does Tony support stoats and possums in the wild as well?
Most of the people in New Zealand would like to see our plants and birds and wildlife actually increase, not be eaten and destroyed by some introduced pests.
Five feet high and rising
Further to your file photo (ODT 22.10.25) regarding Lake Wānaka flooding. It was definitely not 2019, but November 1999, with kayaks in that part of town. The then-recently opened New World, one street back from the lakefront, had water inside. Much of the shelf stock had to be destroyed because labels floated off the tins.
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