We need to normalise staying home when you’re sick, rather than sharing it around. And this tosspot needs to stop trying to sacrifice people to the economy.
Pretty sure presenteeism is bad for the economy as well.
It’s better to have just one sick, underproductive employee at home than to bring them in to infect everyone so you have a whole workplace filled with sick underproductive employees.
I find this a weird thing to worry about. $300k across 6 years is $50k per year. They have over 10k staff so that’s $5 per staff member per year. It sounds like incredible value!
Heck, I’d certainly PAY $5 a year to have a slushy machine at my job. Especially during those hot summer days. That’d certainly improve MY job satisfaction.
Yeah but these articles are almost always planted by the Taxpayer’s Onion so they don’t care about the proportion of the spend, or how it might make working in such a place slightly more tolerable, its all just a BS shitpost to make people think the public service wastes lots of money.
I can promise anybody that corporates throw way more money around on stuff way stupider than $50k per year on some icey beverages.
Hell, some corporates provide financial backing to the morons at the TU so, yeah.
100% my first thought too. Cultivate the vibes of enormous public sector waste that doesn’t stand up to basic scrutiny, in terms of substance or scale.
Then people get shocked Pikachu face when the so called waste getting cut is actually school lunches, hospitals, customs officers and so on because this stuff is miniscule compared to the targets the govt has set, and the amount they want to give away in tax cuts.
I don't know an intra-departmental breakdown. That might take some digging.
In the interest.co.nz article I linked to earlier it has a figure of $1.7bn for the year 2017. Big increases in 2018 and 2020. Labour invested heavily in prisons!
In the US, we privatize the prisons so a corporation is incentivised against rehabilitation. Then when someone is granted parole, their family has to pay for monitoring. Isn’t it great? I’ll go cry in the corner.
Kohuora, Auckland South Corrections Facility opened in May 2015 and holds up to 960 sentenced male prisoners. Kohuora is operated by Serco under a 25 year agreement with the Department of Corrections.
Looking forward to public services being asked to do more, but not receive any more funding. Stretching them thinner, and making them shittier.
Looking forward to a “restoration of law and order” incarcerating more people, separating families and causing more crime. While not addressing the problems that caused the crime in the first place.
Looking forward to the RBNZ being told to lower interest rates and artificially inflating property prices; making it harder for young families to buy in the communities they live and work in, and increasing the cost of living for every day people as they’re strangled by landlords.
Looking forward to dying from heatstroke in 50 years time from global warming due to increased and prolonged reliance on fossil fuels.
Longer sentences do not function as a deterrent, that’s true. It does, however, mean offenders cannot commit violent crimes, and in general be a menace to society, from behind bars.
If you’re saying National will punish violent offenders more than they are, but keep the current incarceration levels, then I’d agree with that sentiment.
Of course there is the problem of completely understaffed prisons at the moment, but that is a problem regardless of the colour of the tie of the PM.
I agree most will. My only problem is it doesn’t solve the underlying problems, it just puts more burden on the taxpayer.
Ultimately, I agree violent and sexual crimes are being sentenced too lightly, but outside of this I would prefer to address the problems that cause crime (poverty, education, etc etc). We don’t need to be locking up kids, because it does more harm than good. I’m happy to lock up rapists though, for example.
The parent doesn’t get removed from their life. What happens is the kid grows up thinking the law is stupid and police are the enemy, because they have to see their parent once a week at a scheduled meeting instead of them being able to have the parent support them at their rugby game on Saturday.
They don’t hate the parent, they hate the justice system that locked them up for the childs entire childhood because of one stupid thing they did as a young adult that didn’t even hurt anyone except the insurance company (and they only hear one side of the story so you can’t argue back on that).
And that parent gets out of jail at 30, has no friends except from prison, and they can’t find a job because of their criminal record. They end up in a life of crime, in and out of prison, and their kid follows in their footsteps.
Contrast this to the parent that did the same crime, did some home-d but could keep their job and be therefore their kid. They realised it was dumb, the kid grew up away from the prison system, learnt that police are not the enemy, and neither the parent or child ended up in a lifetime of crime.
By the third generation, you have kids who have never known crime.
But that is so, so many election cycles away, and polititions are calling for blood on people who seem different to us, so people vote for it. Meanwhile business is booming in the for-profit prison, and yet crime rates haven’t gone down because statistically “hard on crime” approaches only have short term impacts on crime.
It would be nice if he had any evidence whatsoever to back it up, but nobody in this thread seems to have any evidence behind them.
The closest anyone has come is some very tenuous evidence that long prison sentences don’t serve as a deterrent, which ignores the fact that it does keep offenders away from the general public for as long as possible.
Once again, you conveniently ignore the fact that, while prison may not have a dramatic effect on recidivism rates, something that evidence from other commenters contradicts, there is the little fact that offenders can’t commit these acts from behind bars.
At worst, it puts the damage they do to society on pause for a while.
The evidence does not contradict it, but regardless.
I agreed with this point elsewhere. Locking a violent criminal up removes them from society, absolutely.
What I’m arguing against is the idea that perceived harsher punishments will affect the crime rate. I think, on balance of available data, that there is no clear evidence that it will. It will cost taxpayers more money for no tangible benefit.
Sorry, but even most children would see this as absolute nonsense, especially if this was a violent crime.
Children take things at face value. Adults can use data to show that imprisoning more people doesn’t lead to lower crime rates except in the short term.
You’ve also changed the goal posts. Most crime is not violent crime.
You’re reeeally giving this hypothetical person the benefit of the doubt by assuming they’d be present in the child’s life in a positive way.
I’m sorry, but you are assuming bad faith. Not everyone who breaks the law is a bad person. They only need to be a better role model out of prison than they would be in prison, and with that we get generational change. It takes time, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing.
It’s also important to note that women’s brains don’t finish developing until around their early 20s, and men their late 20s. Young people are dumb, and it’s not their fault. Someone who was an idiot at 20 can be a positive role model at 25, but not if they are in prison.
If they learn the first time, sure. How many chances do you think people deserve?
More than National and Act are willing to give them. They tried sending youths to boot camps last time they were power. The only thing it did was buy them votes, it did nothing for crime so it got shut down. Now they tested to see if the same thing works twice, apparently it does, so now we have to run a boot camp for another couple of years until we see it’s still not working.
We are operating a US style prison system, and until Labour took over we had an imprisonment rate almost as high, one of the highest in the developed world. I would much prefer a Scandinavian style system, where we accept people make mistakes and we try to give them the support to reintegrate in society. They do this for violent criminals including murderers, but I’d be happy if we at least started somewhere, and keeping non-violent criminals out of prison would be a great start.
And don’t even get me started on victims rights. Most criminals, and especially most violent criminals, are themselves victims, and no one seems interested in their rights.
Reducing crime requires small improvements over generations, not throwing more people in prison.
Not only does throwing more people in prison for longer not reduce crime, it doesn’t even reduce violent crime. It literally does nothing more than cost the tax payer money, and satisfy a medieval sense of vengeance.
There is no data that shows violent crime increased because of lower incarceration rates. That’s the whole point.
There are a whole host of other factors that cause increases in crime, and even if harsher punishments lowered crime slightly, the most effective measures is addressing the underlying causes of crime in the first place. Mental health, poverty and inequality all have by far the biggest impact in crime rates. Locking up more people won’t change that.
It’s really interesting. I somewhat recently read a book about raising children, where a researcher talked about studies they did with kids. Kids understand a lot, at a young age (I think they did the studies on kids around ages 3-5). Kids will humour you, instinctively pretending they believe you, because it’s still helping them learn about the world. I know that kids are often smarter than adults 🙂
But it’s really obvious that putting people in prison for crimes will reduce the crime rate. It’s so obvious, it’s almost impossible to believe it’s not true. Neither kids nor adults are good at spotting counterintuitive things like that. The only reason we know it’s true is because of the vast data collection done these days (Probably best not to get me started on the involuntary data collection/data sovereignty).
I posted a new Zealand article that was easier to read, the study the article drew it’s conclusions from was this study by the U.S. Department of Justice.
I can’t access this article to investigate further, but I will point out is from the 1980, which is over 40 years ago. I will also point out that their main concern was concerned with “the rational image of man in utilitarian thought, the philosophical framework in which modern deterrence theory is grounded.” which does not sound very data driven.
This is definitely an interesting article. After reading further, it appears to show a statistically significant relationship between longer prison sentences and reduced recidivism. This effect is really only shown above 5 years, and specifically above 10 years. I did not see in this study where they tracked increased punishment for the same crime. Simply put, they showed that criminals who commit serious crimes and are incarcerated from 5 to more than 10 years will recommit fewer crimes than criminals incarcerated for less time. This doesn’t suggest increasing punishments for lesser crimes, unless you want to lock ram raiders up for over 10 years.
This study does not imply at all that increased punishments lead to lower crime. It is talking about considerations and assumptions made when making studies to inform policy, and suggesting that (to paraphrase) it’s more complicated than one single thing.
“In line with previous research, we find that detection plays a consistent role in reducing acquisitive crime, but that severity of sanctions is ambiguous.”
They do not claim any certainly over decreased crime rates, and in fact say that the data is “ambiguous”.
In the US, harsher punishments began in the 70s during Nixon’s “harsh on crime” mentality. Actual crime rates didn’t begin to drop until the 90s clearly showing at best the most tenuous link between these two things.
Of course there will be the odd study that shows a slight drop in crime, but overwhelmingly they do not. By far the biggest effect is post-prison rehabilitation.
I posted a new Zealand article that was easier to read, the study the article drew it’s conclusions from was this study by the U.S. Department of Justice.
This isn’t a study. It’s a press release. There are some citations down the bottom. Which one(s) do you believe support your premise?
Why do you think a 40 year old study on human behaviour is suddenly invalid? Have humans evolved so spectacularly over 40 years that we no longer respond to negative and positive stimuli the same way? That’s a while claim requiring some wild evidence.
It doesn’t explicitly show that locking ram-raiders up for longer reduces recidivism or propensity to offend. I provided it to refute the your claim that “the evidence shows harsher prison sentences does little to reduce crime rates.” It does do that.
My argument is precisely that it is more complicated than one single thing. I am not arguing that severity is the only proven effective deterrence method. In fact, certainty of conviction is even more effective! You argued that severity does little to deter crime. I am providing evidence that it does. You can read the full study here if interested. From the conclusion:
After having algebraically and empirically explored the loglinear model, I reach an important conclusion: the functional effects or weights of the probabilities of arrest and conviction, and the severity of punishment do not really vary as much as deterrence scholars would lead us to believe. Potential criminals mentally combine the three deterrence components, regardless of whether they are risk neutral, averse, or acceptant. If the weights really do not vary, then, according to Becker’s risk solutions, criminals are really risk neutral. This being the case, it is entirely plausible to doubt if it is necessary to tax deterrence theory with the consideration of the psychological element of risk where policymaking is concerned.
They found a correlation with severity and burglary only in this study. That does not mean a correlation for other crimes is absent. Remember: an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Even if the correlation were only present for burglary, I would be very happy with fewer burglaries.
I refer you to page 178. The rate of incarceration only began to meaningfully increase in the 80s. It is well established that criminal policies rarely immediately affect social change. This often takes many years or decades, which is what we see in the data. I grant that sociological studies on criminology are very difficult to attenuate noise, but we don’t and cannot have controlled studies. In this case the methodology looks good, and it’s extremely well cited. Indeed, this is a far higher level of rigour than I am used to seeing in criminological research. If you wish to throw out this study on the premise you argue, we may as well throw out the entire school of sociology and criminology.
Of course there will be the odd study that shows a slight drop in crime, but overwhelmingly they do not. By far the biggest effect is post-prison rehabilitation.
In short, the research on rehabilitation treatment reviewed here provides an encouraging indication of the relatively large effects that might be attainable in actual practice, but cannot be interpreted as evidence that current practice has such effects or, indeed, that it has any positive effects at all.
The research is encouraging, and I hope we see more of it. However it is hardly conclusive, and it certainly doesn’t indicate we should ignore sentence severity as a necessary and critical component of deterrence.
Why do you think a 40 year old study on human behaviour is suddenly invalid? Have humans evolved so spectacularly over 40 years that we no longer respond to negative and positive stimuli the same way? That’s a while claim requiring some wild evidence.
People haven’t changed, of course, but society has changed a lot since the early 80s. Any data from such a study is limited to the 80s and earlier. This doesn’t entirely invalidate any findings (whatever they are, since we can’t read the actual article), but it means we should weigh more recent studies more highly.
It doesn’t explicitly show that locking ram-raiders up for longer reduces recidivism or propensity to offend. I provided it to refute the your claim that “the evidence shows harsher prison sentences does little to reduce crime rates.” It does do that.
Firstly, I will acknowledge that I should have been more careful with my statement. Thank you for keeping me intellectually honest. I should have said “studies do not support the finding that increasing sentences leads to reduced crime rates”, which is a slightly different statement.
That being said, the study does not support this. It shows that criminals who are imprisoned longer are less likely to re-offend, it does not show that increasing prison sentences reduces crime. These are not the same things. For example, longer prison sentences tend to be for violent crimes, but it is a known effect that violent crime offenders have lower recidivism following incarceration than non-violent offenders.
My argument is precisely that it is more complicated than one single thing. I am not arguing that severity is the only proven effective deterrence method. In fact, certainty of conviction is even more effective! You argued that severity does little to deter crime. I am providing evidence that it does. You can read the full study here if interested. From the conclusion:
The article does not support your assertions. In fact, your statement that ‘certainty of conviction is even more effective than fear of punishment’ is precisely what the article questions. Its conclusion is, to paraphrase, that criminals do not weigh risk of being caught and severity of punishment if they are caught differently, but rather they are all equally weighted, and that policy should not weigh one factor above the other. Crucially, it says nothing about the actual importance of these factors to criminals. Equal weighting can still be 0. In the end, all it says is that criminals are complicated, and that many things factor into their propensity to commit crime. I agree with this, but it does not support the idea that harsher punishments will reduce crime rates.
They found a correlation with severity and burglary only in this study. That does not mean a correlation for other crimes is absent. Remember: an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Even if the correlation were only present for burglary, I would be very happy with fewer burglaries.
Absence of evidence is exactly what I’m arguing. There is an absence of good evidence that increasing punishments will lower crime. There is concrete evidence, however, that post-incarceration interventions lower recidivism. Also, you cannot take part of the data and ignore the rest, which is exactly why they conclude that there is not enough of an effect to draw a conclusion based on their findings. In other words, their findings do not show a statistically significant effect that increasing punishments lowers crime rate.
I refer you to page 178. The rate of incarceration only began to meaningfully increase in the 80s. It is well established that criminal policies rarely immediately affect social change. This often takes many years or decades, which is what we see in the data. I grant that sociological studies on criminology are very difficult to attenuate noise, but we don’t and cannot have controlled studies. In this case the methodology looks good, and it’s extremely well cited. Indeed, this is a far higher level of rigour than I am used to seeing in criminological research. If you wish to throw out this study on the premise you argue, we may as well throw out the entire school of sociology and criminology.
There is a lot going on in this article, and it would far to long to analyze everything in-depth right now. So, instead, I will provide two more recent studies which contradict certain aspects of the findings here. I could do more but I need to work.
This 2019 study found that, contrary to the article being discussed, legalizing abortion had a large effect in reducing over all crime.
This report found only a 5% effect of increased incarceration in the drop in violent crime from 1990 to 2000, and after that no effect at all. Additional to this, the exact same drop in violent crime in Canada was observed over the same time period, with no increase in incarceration rate, casting doubt into the effect it played in a global trend.
The research is encouraging, and I hope we see more of it. However it is hardly conclusive, and it certainly doesn’t indicate we should ignore sentence severity as a necessary and critical component of deterrence.
Overall, there is not, in my opinion and the opinion of the Department of Corrections, the evidence that increasing the severity of punishments reduces crime, and that the greatest effect is addressing the causes of crime in the first place.
Homie, watching you get shut down by actual evidence has been brilliant to watch.
If I am presented with compelling evidence, I will change my view. So far, nothing he has supplied has in any meaningful way supported the assertion that longer prison sentences lowers crime rates.
Fact is, violent crime is up under Labour, whatever the underlying cause may be, and the current approach isn’t working.
You are absolutely right, violent crime has risen recently. But instead of just blaming the incumbent, perhaps we should be lookings the broader picture as to why this has happened? Do we know a ‘tough on crime’ policy would not have seen the same rise in crime? No, we do not. However, many of the things Labour has been implementing have proven effects in lowering crime and recidivism.
That simply isn’t true, but you can think whatever you want. Just because I don’t agree with your conclusions does not mean I am dogmatic about it.
I remain unconvinced. Many experts remain unconvinced. The justice department remains unconvinced. Many other governments remain unconvinced. That is enough for me.
I apologise that I haven’t provided a follow-up. They keep me very busy at work. I will try to check back in over the weekend to respond in kind. I would like to thank you for staying respectful and data-driven, even when I was not always equally respectful.
No worries mate, I understand. I’m happy to file this under ‘agree to disagree’ also, as I’m sure we all have better things to do with our time than argue on the internet!
To be fair, you are the first one I’ve had discussions of this sort with online who cites any kind of evidence at all, other than feelings. A breath of fresh air.
making it harder for young families to buy in the communities they live and work in
Yay let’s all spend $100 a week commuting to work and back.
Looking forward to dying from heatstroke in 50 years time from global warming due to increased and prolonged reliance on fossil fuels.
National will do everything they can to sabotage cheap petrol. The Marsden Point Refinery will never function again, and National supports the Russia Sanctions Act, making sure we never buy petrol from the #2 producer in the world, meanwhile #1 producer (Saudi Arabia) increases the price. India and China will continue using diesel and oil as usual and here in NZ the yuppie elite will drive their Teslas, and using fossil fuels will be a dirty poor people thing. It’ll mostly be poor people like me who can’t buy a new $15,000 EV with 70 battery health who will be driving petrol cars 5 years from now.
I’ll be demonised for my carbon sins.
Luxon says climate change is a fact and it’s caused by us, so it’s only a matter of time before a fanatical nutjob proposes a ban on natural gas. There is nobody advocating for continued use of fossil fuel, they all want it gone, just a matter of how long.
China will continue to use the Power Of Siberia pipeline and use quantities of gas that we cannot imagine, but kiwis will be told that having a bbq is bad, and driving an LPG forklift is bad. In Christchurch we had very strong winds yesterday and within a few hours of the government alert system pinging our phones, Redditors were speculating that the Nor West wind is proof of climate change.
If people can afford the latest technologies that’s great, but I’m poor and I want to continue using fossil fuels especially when my rent is so high. What if it’s the weekend and 1 of the other 11 tenants is using the only washing machine and dryer? How do I wash my laundry if I don’t have a petrol car to drive to the laundromat? I can’t believe the greenies are going on about housing trusts and not taking about ridiculous zoning and regulations that prevent us from having a world class city. I can’t cook where I live, I can’t do my laundry. The washing machine is constantly breaking and playing up. It’ll just lock a person’s clothes and not open for 3 days. It’s a disaster. So until I have my own apartment with a bike shed and laundry, I’m probably going to need fossil fuels.
Lol Jeff I’m a greenie and I talk about ridiculous zoning and regulations all the time. You aren’t alone or crazy for wanting to fight this fight.
You shouldn’t need a car to live in a city. That’s a symptom of decades of woeful city planning modelled on America, where car company lobbyists call the shots. Endless car-dependent urban sprawl is locking young people out of stable housing options close to where they work. “Intensification” in the world of our new CEO Mr Luxon and his landlord mates means cramming more beds into already over-crowded flats and boarding houses and building 2-story seven-figure 80m2 luxury shoeboxes, rather than building the 10-story buildings with stacks of self-contained apartments that a proper central-city needs to have.
Here’s how I would fix it:
relax resource consent requirements for 10-story buildings around key urban areas such as malls and inside the four aves; also relax rules on three-storey intensification projects to build self-contained semi-detached townhouses
encourage mixed-use buildings — ground floor is retail/food (there’s your laundromat), next one or two floors are commercial office space (there’s your job) and the next three to seven stories are self-contained one-or-two bedroom residential apartments (there’s your home with your own kitchen)
start doubling rates annually on undeveloped land in the central city - including gravel pit parking lots - to get some movement on finally transforming these into places for people to live and work in this city
deeper local government investment in social housing with targeted rates on unaffordable housing projects - ie if the project does not make some honest effort to provide ongoing affordable housing they get slapped with a special rate that goes towards funding social housing for those in need
adopt 15-minute city principles (no, they aren’t a globalist conspiracy) so that getting into a car is not a rewuired part of your daily routine - you can just walk/bike to the doctor, school, movies, pub, maccas, supermarket, library, etc. That also means improving cycling infrastructure and public transport availability.
Some of these are things our Green-aligned city councillors have been pushing consistently for years, and recently they’ve been having increasing success. You are welcome to come join us in this fight, we need your help.
Also, yearning for more fossil fuel investment right now is a bit like building a horse barn in 1912. Even leaving aside the environmental impact (which is massive, and real, and something we all should all be working to fix), green options are already becoming cheaper to implement, and they hugely reduce our dependence on the international oil market which is famously a controlled cartel market and not in our favour as a tiny island nation with low productivity.
Would I criticise a Māori person for being fucking livid that yet another government is doing something they know for sure will make Māori lives worse (and shorter)? Also no.
The thing that stood out to me is the $12B in borrowing. Here’s our budget, where we need to borrow an additional $12B and push out the return to surplus to way past when Labour’s 2023 budget forecast it.
Also here is $15B in tax cuts. We are paying for it with cost cutting, the $12B in borrowing is for something else.
This isn’t tone policing. This is calling out hyperbole. Tone policing is when someone disregards an argument because it’s expressed with emotion.
If she’d said “this really gets on my tits” and was being criticized for language instead of having her anger acknowledged, that’d have been tone policing.
Using hysterical is a bit misogynistic though, considering the history of the word and who it’s been applied to.
This is insanity. Its like someone insisting and begging the fucking dirt to quench their thirst. They swear to it, praise it, and give it everything in hopes that one day it will quench their thirst. Then, they start forcing you to give to the dirt so that maybe it will miraculously transform into some bearer of hydration. We know the dirt will not help, why do our leaders keep trying to bottle it?
I’m quite shocked at how willing Nicola Willis has been to say the quiet part out loud, i.e. “we’re only doing this because it will pay for our tax cuts”. In other words, they want to collect more tobacco tax from vulnerable people to pay for tax cuts for wealthier people. There were other ways to frame this, e.g. we don’t think this is the right way to cut back on smoking, there are better ways to do it, etc. etc.
I think this is already quite a bit miscalculation by National. This will not be a popular policy… it’s something nearly everyone can relate to and understand, and other than a few extremist libertarian nutters, no one thinks it’s a good idea to loosen up smoking laws. It’ll be one of the few things people still remember coming out of the coalition agreements in a couple of weeks time. They needed to think more carefully about how they sold it.
What’s so stupid about this is sick kids do worse at school. Sending your kid to school sick gets other kids sick, which makes them do worse. Then they bring it home, and now parents are under performing at work as well. Keeping your kid home when they are sick objectively improves outcomes for everyone.
The (government’s) point is that one employee taking a sick day is stealing a day from their employer. Just like public holidays and annual leave. /S
Preventing the spread of sickness by isolating when one is sick (you’d think that we all still remember 2020) reduces the total number of sick days that all employers pay for.
It’s basically an anti-employee dog whistle at this point.
I’m from a completely different continent, but still feel pretty confident in answering “because National is a bunch of corrupt demagogues who are against everything good and in favor of everything bad”.
The real estate industry as a whole donated heavily to both National and Act. Not just landlords, but also estate agents etc. They desperately want more activity in the property market even if it means house prices start going up again.
even if it means house prices start going up again
They definitely want house prices to start going up again.
National campaigned on several measures that have a known effect of raising house prices e.g. narrowing the RBNZ mandate, moving the bright line test, reintroducing tax incentives.
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