Cost of living in New Zealand

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586 posts

Ultimate Geek
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#3323719 23-Dec-2024 16:38

tweake:

official figures you need to take with a grain of salt. they count what they see and only see what they want to see. nothing new there.

Got any examples to back that up? Statistics in NZ is normally pretty accurate IMO.

johno1234

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#3323720 23-Dec-2024 16:47

Rikkitic:

The main place I have noticed it is cat food. That has easily tripled in price since things started exploding. Not only unit price but also hidden rises like weird package sizes. They all are doing it too. It has become nearly impossible to find 4 kg packages, which were fairly standard until the greedfest started. They used to cost around $16 for Whiskas. It is more than twice that now for 3 kg, which seems to be the new standard size and the cheap Countdown brand has completely disappeared. Manufacturers have also been playing cute with cheese, though that seems to be settling down somewhat again. With 700 gram packages or whatever they are now it is well worth using your phone to work out actual prices per kilo to get a standard comparison.

Tell me about it! Told by vet that our cat should be on 'early renal support' cat food. 3.5kg bag is about $70 and lasts about 35 days.

Rikkitic

Awrrr
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#3323727 23-Dec-2024 17:01

Wombat1:

tweake:

official figures you need to take with a grain of salt. they count what they see and only see what they want to see. nothing new there.

Got any examples to back that up? Statistics in NZ is normally pretty accurate IMO.

Lies, damned lies, and statistics. You can prove anything according to how you twist the numbers.

The link between deprivation and crime, both direct and indirect, is pretty solid. Sometimes it is actually about food. Sometimes just frustrated aspiration. Take some barely literate kids with lousy role models, dangle some shiny cars and other baubles in front of them tell them they can never hope to acquire these through working at McDonalds or any other legitimate endeavour, and don't be surprised if they seek other means.

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tweake

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#3323730 23-Dec-2024 17:09

Wombat1:

Got any examples to back that up? Statistics in NZ is normally pretty accurate IMO.

like the infamous "nz doesn't have a domestic violence problem (nz police)"

if you don't look you can't count.

Wombat1

586 posts

Ultimate Geek
Inactive user

#3323738 23-Dec-2024 17:40

tweake:

Wombat1:

Got any examples to back that up? Statistics in NZ is normally pretty accurate IMO.

like the infamous "nz doesn't have a domestic violence problem (nz police)"

if you don't look you can't count.

its well known that New Zealand has one of the highest rates of domestic violence among developed countries, those statistics are widely available.

Wombat1

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Ultimate Geek
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#3323745 23-Dec-2024 17:54

Rikkitic:

The link between deprivation and crime, both direct and indirect, is pretty solid. Sometimes it is actually about food. Sometimes just frustrated aspiration. Take some barely literate kids with lousy role models, dangle some shiny cars and other baubles in front of them tell them they can never hope to acquire these through working at McDonalds or any other legitimate endeavour, and don't be surprised if they seek other means.

Interesting you mentioned "frustrated aspiration" because that’s not about not having enough food is it? It suggests that unmet desires, not just lack of money, could be the real reason behind crime.

While being poor can make life harder, it doesn't mean everyone will turn to crime. Things like personal choice, educaton, community support, and the values we learn all shape our behaviour. So, blaming crime only on being broke? That’s too simple.

tweake

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#3323748 23-Dec-2024 18:07

Wombat1:

its well known that New Zealand has one of the highest rates of domestic violence among developed countries, those statistics are widely available.

yes. i guess you don't know that story.

25-30 ish years ago police ignored domestic violence calls, so people didn't bother reporting any, so police didn't bother looking, so they didn't do anything about domestic violence. it took a lot of work from woman's groups and political muscle to make police look, and when they actually looked they found nz has some of the worlds highest rates of domestic violence and now afaik its their highest workload.

don't look, so they don't do anything, so they stay on budget. hence take police stats with a grain of rice. this isn't the only case, just the most notable one.

btw i think police have been grossly under funded for a long time and a lot of todays problems arise from that.

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tweake

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#3323749 23-Dec-2024 18:10

Wombat1:

Interesting you mentioned "frustrated aspiration" because that’s not about not having enough food is it? It suggests that unmet desires, not just lack of money, could be the real reason behind crime.

While being poor can make life harder, it doesn't mean everyone will turn to crime. Things like personal choice, educaton, community support, and the values we learn all shape our behaviour. So, blaming crime only on being broke? That’s too simple.

correct. but add in other society pressures, you turn poor into poverty. not all poor people turn to crime, but the rates do go up. there is a lot of factors to it. eg unstable homes are a big factor in it, as well as the society around them.

Rikkitic

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#3324189 24-Dec-2024 13:55

The reasons people turn to crime are not as simple as the lock em up brigade would like to think, and neither are the solutions.

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Handsomedan

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#3324200 24-Dec-2024 14:22

Rikkitic:

The reasons people turn to crime are not as simple as the lock em up brigade would like to think, and neither are the solutions.

As the victim of a couple of crimes in very recent times and knowing the mental, physical and financial pressure that put me and my family under, I am frankly over the bleeding heart "they have a tragic back-story and need to be loved" BS.

I am firmly in team "Lock Them Up".

I know plenty of people that come from poor and impoverished backgrounds that don't commit crime and aren't a burden on society. This is not an old boomer telling people to pull themselves up by the bootstraps.

I am simply a person that's fed up with hearing how hard criminals have it. Do the crime, do the time. I have no sympathy and I am fast running out of empathy.

Anyway - cost of living is skyrocketing. Think I might go down to the supermarket and steal some meat.

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ezbee

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#3324205 24-Dec-2024 14:42

Poverty and crime.
It's more a case of misery loves company, so multiple problems add up and poverty exacerbates all.

Mental Health, well its hard to be positive mentally when the light at the end of the tunnel is more debt.
The way out turns out to be a Giga Job that does not pay the rent and makes little difference.

This can create a feedback loop into marriage, personal relationships and bringing up children who push boundaries by design. Breakups due to fights over money.

Gangs are very flashy with wealth, to attract prospects with a promise of advancement not available to them any other way. It shows the 'Gang System' works, so get with the program and you too can have gold chains , gold plated Harley etc.

Reducing poverty does not 'eliminate' crime, but reduction is welcome, and perhaps the cost benefit
vs more victims, prisons, parole officers and police?

Reducing poverty would ease things for Mental Health facilities as well.
Treatments more effective as a more stable situation helps people change their lives, plus not having gone so deeply down the spiral, or entered it.

Education spending likely yields better results with fewer children growing up in unstable households where its difficult to focus on learning and you bring those problems to school.

Population Demographic Collapse also likely to be eased if its more economic to have children, preschool them, have stable living conditions, so less poverty helps here.

mudguard

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#3324229 24-Dec-2024 15:09

kingdragonfly:
mudguard:

How do your costs compare with the kWh used each year? We have used the air con to cool more already this summer than last year.

Good question. I use two heat pumps almost constantly.

The graph pretty closely follows the outside temperature.

I know I'm still in the "low power usage" bracket by just a tiny bit.

I use a tankless gas water heater, which honestly I'd like to get rid of get a hot water peat pump. I get killed on the daily rate on gas.

We are on mains gas as well. So with our daily electric and gas charge we are charged $82.50 per month even if we weren't there. So I don't go out of my way to actually save power. We're in Auckland and put heat pumps in mainly for the cooling aspect to be honest. But we are a two person household and I travel Monday to Friday so the power isn't a huge issue.

Rikkitic

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#3324234 24-Dec-2024 15:15

I have the fullest sympathy for anyone who has been a victim of crime. I have to. That sympathy does not extend to the criminal. My point is purely a practical one. Lock em up doesn't work. It has been tried here and elsewhere since the beginning of time and it simply doesn't work. So what do you want to do? Unless ram raiding teenagers can be executed, there has to be another solution. The other solution is not the quick fix gratification of retribution. That has been tried many times in many ways and it simply doesn't work. To get rid of crime you have to get rid of the things that lead to crime. It is a gradual, long term resource intensive process, which the lock em up crowd lacks patience for. So keep locking them up, keep sending them back through the prison system to teach them how to be better criminals, keep shivering in terror in gated compounds at night, keep doing the same thing over and over and expecting for some unfathomable reason that it will eventually work.

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Tinkerisk

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#3324235 24-Dec-2024 15:28

We actually once had an older petty criminal in town who was very friendly. He didn't do anything bad except steal sweets from the supermarket with the intention of getting caught. Why did he do that?

In the summer he lived outdoors, always clean and tidy. But in winter he needed a warm flat. He took advantage of the ‘system’ by committing many small offences so that a judge HAD to sentence him for the frequency. He always insisted on the maximum sentence. As he couldn't/wouldn't pay the fine, he got his warm flat for 3 months in winter (where the prison guards were already waiting for him to play chess). He did this until the end of his life. 😊

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tweake

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#3324238 24-Dec-2024 15:43

the thing that grinds my gears somewhat is having, more importantly lack of, a stable home. which is our single greatest cost of living.

with nz's culture of using housing to make wealth at the expense of others, which not only generates an unstable home for themselves, but also pushes people down into worse housing situations. being bounced from house to house does not make a good environment to grow up in, or even live in as an adult. nothing breeds problems more than lots of people in poverty all squeezed in together.

with all the gains of mass manufacturing to make cheaper goods, instead of having lots more disposable money, its simply taken up by housing. house prices are directly proportional to peoples income, amount of debt and what its cost to live on. hence the very large amount of "advice" around telling people to skimp on everything just so they can hand over even more money to someone else for housing.

then of course all the complaints of the after effects. people don't mind causing the problem but they sure as don't want to clean up the mess they created.

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