Christopher Luxon, New Zealand Prime Minister 2023

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#3498656 30-May-2026 14:25

quickymart:

Ah you're right, I checked back a week ago to the 23rd but didn't see anything about it.

I agree with your comment that maybe the rules should be if you own a property in the Wellington area (like Upston does) you shouldn't get the full allowance, but maybe just enough to cover living costs (power, water, rates, etc). There's no mortgage on the property, so it's not like she needs to pay for that.

Which is why paying people in their jobs based on their personal circumstances is a crappy way of doing things.

If you did that then MPs would sell their flats and invest the money elsewhere.

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#3498895 31-May-2026 10:45

RNZ summarises the EV friendly FBT change:

"A $60,000 EV attracting full fringe-benefit tax would now pay $1800 less a year than it previously had, while an equivalent petrol or diesel car would pay $1680 more. That's significant, when you look at it from a total cost-of-business perspective, which is how fleet managers look at it," Corson said"

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#3499301 2-Jun-2026 09:19

gzt: Green Party budget perspective:

"So, where is New Zealanders’ money going? Well, last year, the 100 odd households on the NBR’s rich list increased their wealth by almost 8 billion dollars. In just one year. Supermarkets are making $1m a day in excess profit. Power companies’ net profits were $557 million in the second half of last year. Banks raked in profits of almost $7b in 2025. That’s $1,248 in profit for Australian banks for every single New Zealander. Our economy is worth $445 billion dollars. It’s bigger than it’s ever been"

https://www.greens.org.nz/chloe_swarbrick_budget_speech_2026

Edit: That made me look at their policy page: 2.5% wealth tax over $2m + a minimum income guarantee presumably replacing benefits.

A million day sounds really bad. I mean it's 365m per year, and 366 in leap year!. Then you remember there are 5m people in NZ and it's 20 cents per person per day or ~$75 per year. That means if groceries were costing $75 per person per year less, profit levels would be acceptable.

Would I trust the govt (any govt) to solve a problem that costs me $75 per person per year, without spending $75 per person per year on it? Nope.

The Greens' carbon policy would dramatically increase the price of food. Very little food is made and distributed without diesel.

Mike

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#3499304 2-Jun-2026 09:26

MikeAqua:

The Greens' carbon policy would dramatically increase the price of food. very little food is made and distributed without diesel.

The Green's horse policy would dramatically increase the price of food. Very little food is made and distributed without horses.

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#3499309 2-Jun-2026 09:30

quickymart:

I agree with your comment that maybe the rules should be if you own a property in the Wellington area (like Upston does) you shouldn't get the full allowance, but maybe just enough to cover living costs (power, water, rates, etc). There's no mortgage on the property, so it's not like she needs to pay for that.

I support housing allowances for electorate MPs who don't represent Wellington electorates. They have to set up a household in Welly as well as in their electorate. It's irrelevant whether they rent, own with mortgage or are freehold. It's an allowance. It recognises that MP's are using their income or capital to have housing in Welly. If you started looking at who owned what, then you'd incentivise MPS to rent, and it would cost them a lot less than $50k per year to rent.

List MPs and Wellington electorate MPs ... nope. They don't need a housing allowance.

More housing allowance for ministers, than backbenchers ... maybe. Ministers presumably spend more time in Welly, so may need more than a bolthole.

Mike

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#3499361 2-Jun-2026 09:44

SaltyNZ:

The Green's horse policy would dramatically increase the price of food. Very little food is made and distributed without horses.

The vehicles that replaced horses were very quickly logistically superior to horses (which is why people bought them instead of horses). Back in the day, supply chains were much more intraregional.

Electric trucks are not logistically superior to diesel trucks, and these days supply chains are often longer. They aren't even useful for medium or long haul. Ideal for light intra-urban use.

Most freight trains are diesel. Coastal shipping is diesel (and may be inappropriate for perishable food).

There isn't a current scenario in which a high carbon tax doesn't add to the cost of food.

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#3499364 2-Jun-2026 09:50

Uh why would you not have an allowance for list MPs? A list MP must be in parliament to work and vote like any other MP.

MikeAqua

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#3499366 2-Jun-2026 09:57

gzt: RNZ summarises the EV friendly FBT change:

"A $60,000 EV attracting full fringe-benefit tax would now pay $1800 less a year than it previously had, while an equivalent petrol or diesel car would pay $1680 more. That's significant, when you look at it from a total cost-of-business perspective, which is how fleet managers look at it," Corson said"

You also need to look at the difference in purchase or lease price - assuming an EV costs more than a comparable petrol or diesel vehicle.

If someone can replace a diesel ute with an EV hatchback and still get the job done ... sure, they'll save some money. But most company issued utes, are utes for reason. I've worked for company with a fleet of dozens of 'tool of trade' utes. You could have possibly replaced one or two with a van. For the most part, the ute was the suitable vehicle.

A tradie isn't replacing their van or ute with a leaf anytime soon. Council/health board hatchbacks, sure. That would make perfect sense and local and central govt should have done so already.

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#3499439 2-Jun-2026 10:36

MikeAqua:

SaltyNZ:

The Green's horse policy would dramatically increase the price of food. Very little food is made and distributed without horses.

The vehicles that replaced horses were very quickly logistically superior to horses (which is why people bought them instead of horses). Back in the day, supply chains were much more intraregional.

Electric trucks are not logistically superior to diesel trucks, and these days supply chains are often longer. They aren't even useful for medium or long haul. Ideal for light intra-urban use.

Most freight trains are diesel. Coastal shipping is diesel (and may be inappropriate for perishable food).

There isn't a current scenario in which a high carbon tax doesn't add to the cost of food.

This is not quite true. For a long time you had the same logistic issues of fuel availability as there may be a perception of EV charging availability. In fact it seems that it took about 25 years or so to go from having to buy petrol in drums at the grocery store to having a nation-wide chain of stations where you could conveniently fill up. Arguably the rollout of public fast charging stations for electric vehicles has been a lot quicker than that, if more annoying as you need a different app for every network. Ultra-high-speed chargers do exist but I agree they will take a little longer to appear outside of terminals where long haul lines come and go.

There are already long haul electric trucks on the market, even in NZ. Medium and short haul too. But really, you're right, we wouldn't be using long haul electric trucks. We'd be using long haul electric trains which is a technology over a hundred years old already.

Even coastal shipping is already being replaced with electric. AT's new ferry is largely NZ designed and built and they estimate they could get from Auckland to Whangarei at a slow cruise when it isn't even really built for that. It isn't as mature a technology as for land vehicles but there are a growing number in service around the world already, e.g. COSCO operates 700 TEU electric cargo ships. They have batteries in containers that are swapped out at the same time the cargo is.

Nobody is suggesting that - POOF! - all diesel vehicles magically disappear over night. Merely that we have a thumb on the scale. And I think when you get down to the details you would find that the proposal would take funds collected from the carbon tax and put them back into grants to electrify, just as it was before the current government repealed it.

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#3499445 2-Jun-2026 10:41

gzt: Uh why would you not have an allowance for list MPs? A list MP must be in parliament to work and vote like any other MP.

Because they can live in Wellington full-time. They don't have an electorate to go regularly go back to. They can move like anyone else who gets a new job in different town. It would be reasonable to pay a one-off relocation allowance.

Mike

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#3499464 2-Jun-2026 11:50

MikeAqua:

Because they can live in Wellington full-time. They don't have an electorate to go regularly go back to. They can move like anyone else who gets a new job in different town. It would be reasonable to pay a one-off relocation allowance.

All this would do is give a disproportionate lens on national issues through a Wellington perspective. When it came to Auckland issues, historically this has meant 'it doesn't affect us so we don't care'.

We should be devolving more of our central government to parts of the country they are responsible for administering, not concentrating more of more of it in a bubble that seems determined to be insulated from the problems the rest of the country is dealing with.

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MikeAqua

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#3499466 2-Jun-2026 12:00

SaltyNZ:

This is not quite true. For a long time you had the same logistic issues of fuel availability as there may be a perception of EV charging availability. In fact it seems that it took about 25 years or so to go from having to buy petrol in drums at the grocery store to having a nation-wide chain of stations where you could conveniently fill up. Arguably the rollout of public fast charging stations for electric vehicles has been a lot quicker than that, if more annoying as you need a different app for every network. Ultra-high-speed chargers do exist but I agree they will take a little longer to appear outside of terminals where long haul lines come and go.

There are already long haul electric trucks on the market, even in NZ. Medium and short haul too. But really, you're right, we wouldn't be using long haul electric trucks. We'd be using long haul electric trains which is a technology over a hundred years old already.

Even coastal shipping is already being replaced with electric. AT's new ferry is largely NZ designed and built and they estimate they could get from Auckland to Whangarei at a slow cruise when it isn't even really built for that. It isn't as mature a technology as for land vehicles but there are a growing number in service around the world already, e.g. COSCO operates 700 TEU electric cargo ships. They have batteries in containers that are swapped out at the same time the cargo is.

Nobody is suggesting that - POOF! - all diesel vehicles magically disappear over night. Merely that we have a thumb on the scale. And I think when you get down to the details you would find that the proposal would take funds collected from the carbon tax and put them back into grants to electrify, just as it was before the current government repealed it.

To get an accurate perspective, compare petrol in the early days to fodder for horses. I would guess you need about an acre per horse in a warmish climate. If the horse is living in a stable, you could probably grow sufficient food on less apace, but then you need more horses to transport it. A stage-coach (in the pics I've seen) have four horses. But they used eight teams per day. So that's 32 acres of land to keep a stage-coach that carried maybe a dozen people running.

Obviously, those early cars and trucks were a PITA, compared to what we have now. But horses were worse. That's why people got off horses and into trucks and cars.

I don't see charging as an issue for freight vehicles. You'd just have charging infrastructure at depots etc. The issue will be range. Especially on NZ roads with variable grade etc.

Heavy electric vehicles in NZ the market or in real-world use? It's been a little under two years since I had to deal with freight, but none of the operators I worked with saw a future in long haul electric.

Electric rail would be great, but we don't have the network. Outside of the Auckland to Welly, freight is all oil powered. Rail is shrinking in NZ (except for the $5.5b CRL).

Coastal shipping .... I read a couple of articles on those ships. They're a good idea. Presumably if your battery pack catches on fire you can just push it overboard. But .... 700 TEU is small. Most second tier container ships are 2,000 TEU. The big ones are over 4,000 TEU. Some short run stuff is certainly possible, like Tauranga to Auckland. But rail would actually be better for that as you note, and there is a rail line. I wonder if our forebears were smart enough to leave room for cabling in the Kaimai tunnel?

A passenger ferry is doing very light work. 200 people weigh maybe 16 tonnes. That's about 0.5 TEU. A truck can move 2 TEU. Not a meaningful comparison.

The greens are suggesting (safely, from the opposition benches), that we should have high carbon taxes on fuels, now. So ... while the electric rail network is being built and locomotives are being bought ... consumers are going to pay through the nose for food. Fuel is around a third of the costs of running a heavy vehicle. If you pick up a packet of food off the supermarket shelf, it's probably used oil-based fuel at half a dozen steps in its production and transport.

There's a valid policy question about when you use punitive taxes to motivate technology uptake. When the technology is being developed? Or when it's actually a proven replacement with meaningful uptake, so you're punishing slow adopters.

Mike

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#3499467 2-Jun-2026 12:02

GV27:

MikeAqua:

Because they can live in Wellington full-time. They don't have an electorate to go regularly go back to. They can move like anyone else who gets a new job in different town. It would be reasonable to pay a one-off relocation allowance.

All this would do is give a disproportionate lens on national issues through a Wellington perspective. When it came to Auckland issues, historically this has meant 'it doesn't affect us so we don't care'.

We should be devolving more of our central government to parts of the country they are responsible for administering, not concentrating more of more of it in a bubble that seems determined to be insulated from the problems the rest of the country is dealing with.

It would be an unpopular opinion in the current political climate but there is a decent argument to say that we should have more MPs rather than fewer. More MPs means those MPs can wear fewer hats and do a better job with the ones they wear. It would free up more of their time to help their constituents directly rather than having to serve on a thousand committees etc.

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#3499468 2-Jun-2026 12:12

GV27:

All this would do is give a disproportionate lens on national issues through a Wellington perspective. When it came to Auckland issues, historically this has meant 'it doesn't affect us so we don't care'.

We should be devolving more of our central government to parts of the country they are responsible for administering, not concentrating more of more of it in a bubble that seems determined to be insulated from the problems the rest of the country is dealing with.

I'd be interested to know how many list MPs do relocate to Welly. It would make life easier.

I agree with your second point on govt departments. I understand that's what happens in Aus. Unfortunately, that ship sailed for NZ whenever depts started being managed more politically and less operationally/technically. We do have a few ministries with regional locations. MPI is an example I'm familiar with. MBIE has a few, but probably only in the main centres.

If you're a senior leader in a govt dept (tiers 1 - 3 in a large ministry), you're probably meeting with a minister at least once a week, in person. We'd need a big rethink of how things are run. Certainly, it should be possible with today's tech.

Mike

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#3499473 2-Jun-2026 12:32

MikeAqua:

Heavy electric vehicles in NZ the market or in real-world use? It's been a little under two years since I had to deal with freight, but none of the operators I worked with saw a future in long haul electric.

I don't have a technical background so can't comment on the calculations, but as a matter of principle, things are usually impossible until they are not. I remember the British Astronomer Royal dismissing the possibility of space travel because the calculations demonstrated that no rocket could carry enough fuel to achieve orbit. That was true until some genius came up with the idea of multi-stage rockets!

That story is probably apocryphal but it demonstrates a worthwhile principle. Why could coastal ships not combine wind and electricity? I saw a clever idea once that used windmills to drive propellers so ships could sail into the wind. Of course all this has to be paid for and requires infrastructure, but so did the integration of petrol power. Don't be too quick to say something is impractical. Maybe it just requires a different perspective.

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