Subsidy

It has been revealed that the Wellington City Council has basically bribed Singapore Airlines to fly to Wellington Airport.

The ratepayers are going to have to pay $800,000 per annum for 10 years…and the deal was all done in secret.

The leaking of details of a multi-million dollar subsidy for Singapore Airlines flights into Wellington has “undermined” Wellington City Council’s relationship with the airline, leaked emails claim.

In the days after Singapore Airlines and Wellington International Airport announced a new service linking the capital to Canberra and Singapore, documents emerged showing the council had agreed to subsidise the service.   Read more »

Well even red Mike has worked out that trains cost too much money.

Despite being a staunch advocate for them Mike Lee is choking on his cornflakes over the exorbitant subsidy to run Auckland’s rail network.

Aucklanders facing a new transport rate are paying far too much to subsidise the city’s trains, says councillor Mike Lee, a long-time champion of rail.

Mr Lee, the council’s infrastructure chairman, has calculated that Auckland trains are costing ratepayers and the Government four times more to run than those in Wellington for each kilometre travelled by passengers.

He has worked out from figures published for each rail operation that the subsidy paid for every “passenger kilometre” travelled on Auckland trains last financial year was 65c, compared with just 16c in the capital.

Mr Lee, one of two council appointees to Auckland Transport’s board, says the proportion of rail operating costs covered by fares in Auckland declined to 22 per cent last year, compared with 24 per cent in 2012-13, and 50 per cent in Wellington.

“Government expectations are that farebox ratios should be 50 per cent, but Auckland has been moving in the opposite direction,” he said in a memo to Mayor Len Brown and fellow councillors as they debated a budget which includes a new targeted transport rate of $114 per household.

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Since the opposition is asleep at the wheel the job of holding a spendthrift government to account falls upon the shoulders of the Taxpayers’ Union.

They are holding Steven Joyce to account for his expanded corporate welfare programme.

Responding to Economic Development Minister Steven Joyce’s defence of corporate welfare, Jim Rose, the author of Monopoly Money, a Taxpayers Union report on corporate welfare since 2008, says:

“Mr Joyce defends over $3 billion in subsidies to KiwiRail and Solid Energy under his watch by saying that they are state owned. Bailouts are not the role of ministers as shareholders. Since 1986, state-owned enterprises have had a statutory duty to operate as a successful business and to be as profitable and efficient as comparable businesses not owned by the Crown. The whole idea of the State Owned Enterprises Act 1986 was to bring an end to bailouts and permanent deficits.”

“Instead of putting a failed business in the hands of receivers, Mr Joyce defends throwing good money after bad by blaming the previous government for buying KiwiRail. That was three elections ago. Elections are supposed to count for something. $3 billion in taxpayers’ money cannot be handed out in subsidies with ministers bobbing and weaving about responsibility for the amount and wisdom involved. The Treasury Benches come with a full ministerial responsibility for every single dollar of taxpayers’ money spent under your watch.”    Read more »

Labour usually think they can win power by giving away more of other peoples money.

They try to out bid National to win votes. Usually chucking mountains of cash and any bludgers who simply puts their hand out.

This election they have come up with a slightly different approach.

They are making irrigators pay for their own schemes rather than making the rest of us pay for them like the socialists in the National Party want us to do.

“There are also changes proposed to the funding of new irrigation schemes. Labour proposes withdrawing taxpayer support for new schemes and will instead recycle the funds raised by the charge on freshwater into that support.

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The Internet Mana party is taking their extreme left socialism quite seriously, using a bunch of subsidised bludger musicians for their much vaunted “Party Party” campaign to mobilise youth.

The Taxpayers’s Union is onto them:

Political parties often engage musicians to drum up support during the election season. It’s the time of year when party hacks attempt to swell their numbers by using musicians as Trojan Horses for their political ideals. We all remember The Feelers’ song used in National Party adverts last election.

But what happens when taxpayer funds are propping up these artists?    Read more »

What is it with teacher unions and people involved in education?

They constantly have their hands out and when more money, in this case $857 million extra, is spent in their area of the economy they are whining like unpaid hookers that it wasn’t enough.

Early Childhood Council chief executive Peter Reynolds attacked the subsidy increases as a deliberate deception that will push-up charges for parents and reduce quality.

Salaries were a big cost to centres, and the subsidy related to that had increased by less than 1 per cent, Mr Reynolds said, which was below inflation and “another funding cut in drag”.

Ms Parata rejected that, and said ECE care was 33 per cent more affordable as a proportion of household income than 2007. Government spending on the sector had almost doubled since 2007/08.

“Parents can see from the Budget that the Government has allocated over $155 million [extra ECE funding]. That is a significant chunk of change over the next four years.”  Read more »

Mike Hosking sees right through Labour’s wood policy…another that they will no doubt claim is a “game changer”.

In what the Labour Party will hope is some sort of turning point in their poll run, they’ve started talking wood. They’re pro-wood. They’re getting into and involved in the wood industry.

The potential upside of this is it differentiates them from the Government. It gives them a point of difference. What they’re up to is incentivising the industry – there will be tax breaks for it.

Now the immediate problem I had with the idea is that it originated from their manufacturing inquiry they held a couple of years ago. That was the cross party ‘crisis’ inquiry where Labour, the Greens and NZ First wandered around the country listening to people complain about manufacturing. The big problem being that while they were all in a room together wringing their hands and moaning, manufacturing was going gang busters. Manufacturing has been expanding for the past 18 months in a row and across all sectors. Manufacturing levels are at record highs.

The single best thing Labour could do is declare that the wood industry in crisis and hold an investigation into it.  Read more »

The latest polls in Australia deliver bad news for the unions and for Labour.

It is clear that Australians don’t like bludging car making ratbags.

”The government has started taking some big decisions, some hard decisions, that people notice,” notably to refuse public subsidies to SPC Ardmona and the car manufacturers. ”There’s just more of a consistency to what they are doing and saying and that’s coming from the Treasurer, which he pithily summarised as ‘the end of the age of entitlement’.”

A poll by Essential Media last week found that only 36 per cent of voters approved of continuing government subsidies to the car sector, with 47 per cent opposed.

So it may be that Joe Hockey is the one winning kudos for the government.  Read more »

We think our politicians are troughers, well get a load of the UK politicians and how they want to extend the trough.

MPs have called for prices of alcohol to be slashed at Commons bars.

Despite prices for alcohol being kept cheaper than a nearby Wetherspoons pub at the four Palace of Westminster bars, MPs have suggested prices should be linked to pubs outside of central London to make them cheaper.

At the moment prices are linked, and kept lower, than a nearby Wetherspoons in Victoria Street, with pints of John Smith’s bitter costing £2.60 and Becks lager £3.20 – cheaper than many London pubs.  Read more »

You would think that people around the world had looked at the pending financial doom of western democracies mired in locked in welfare wouldn’t you?

Not India, they are hell bent on driving down the same dusty road of welfare:

The Indian government is handing out cash to the poor as part of a phased rollout of a scheme designed to replace some 30 welfare programmes. Initially 200,000 people in 20 districts will receive the money, but the government plans to cover the whole country by the end of 2013.

“Nothing less than magical, and a game changer for governance” is how India is selling the ambitious scheme in which an estimated 90 million households stand to receive around $58bn in cash.

Those living below the poverty line will receive between $542 and $723 a year.

Welfare isn’t magical…it created shackles worse than slavery.

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