Morning roundup

The morning's worthies:

• Treasury are the heroes in this story, where Daalder paints them as villains. Treasury tried to stop the dumbest of the climate spend. GIDI, which either pays companies to invest in tech they were already going to buy, or subsidises them to invest in cost-ineffective ways of mitigating emissions, is such a rort. 


• Justin Giovannetti left New Zealand because of our housing policy disaster. He tells Canadians about the problems.


• Dileepa Fonseca suggests council rates should be apportioned only over land value, rather than land plus capital. I agree - at least for urban councils. For rural ones that don't use user-fees for services provided in towns, there will always be temptation for the townies to screw over the farmers by loading them with costs for services they rarely use. 


• Auckland Council bans people from building infill housing in places where people want to live through special character designations. Allowing infill housing where people want to live is the single most cost-effective thing that councils can do to reduce demand for carbon emissions. Meanwhile, Auckland Transport puts up aspirational plans of how many people they'll force out of cars. If you run a comprehensive price on carbon, you don't need this micromanaging BS. But those who know they are your betters want to dictate how you live. Just letting prices work within an ETS with a binding cap isn't good enough for them. Instead, NZTA is advertising for a Principal Advisor on reducing vehicle kilometres travelled. That just shouldn't be a goal. NZTA should be making sure that road users pay the costs of their road use rather than try to stop it. Maybe the advisor will suggest even worse maintenance on the roads, so the threat of broken axles will discourage driving. 


• Meanwhile, Minister Wood thinks breaking the public transport contracting model is needed to push up wages for bus drivers, among other worthy-sounding outcomes. It's all nonsense. Greater Wellington set a contracting model with trivial penalties for cancelled services and then was shocked! and aghast! that the bus companies ran lean staffing models, eating the fees for cancelled services rather than paying enough for staff to ensure reliable services. Council could have contracted for different outcomes, if it had been willing to pay for them. It'll be interesting to see what they do when they no longer have a scapegoat I suppose. 


• The Auditor General warns about some implications of the proposed 3 Waters Reforms.