Cullen's latest idea

Some time ago we had a rental property which we’d bought in a moment of madness and regretted forever after. According to the wisdom of the person who advised us that buying the property was a good idea, we would not only earn a profit on the rent paid, but be able to claim against our taxes for a number of things, including depreciation, rates, insurance and the like.

For us it was never much of a deal. We came into the property market at the wrong time, and eventually sold at a loss. That’s the way it goes in some businesses.

But I see now that Michael Cullen, our esteemed Minister of Finance, is considering removing many of the tax breaks landlords receive. That would be scary for an awful lot of people who rely on that extra income at tax return time. It’ll be particularly scary for those who own only one or two rental properties. (The only way to make big money in the rental business is to own a number of properties, so that the losses in rent are compensated for by the gains.) And I suspect there’ll be a sudden rash of rental property sales on the market, which will possibly reduce the value of housing, and will also decrease the number of rental properties available.

No doubt Mr Cullen in his wisdom knows what he’s doing, but I for one am glad I’m well and truly out of the rental market.

Tightening the Belt - severely!

In an article in the Otago Daily Times this morning Murray Grimwood says that for our survival as a species we’ll have to live within some tight parameters. He lists five particular things:

replacement population only;
total re-use of resources;
total elimination of pollution;
self-sufficient housing (linked together in energy terms like the Internet);
a halt to physical ‘growth.’

He adds that as a result of following these things we will work less and walk more, weigh less and live more, impact less, conserve more.
My problem with these points isn’t that they’re unrealistic, but rather that a huge percentage of the population, in the Western world anyway, isn’t interested in recycling, living conservatively or considering how they use the resources they have.
I’m fairly recycling-focused, but even I find it hard to think of living within restricted parameters.
And I’m not sure that I agree, if we were to go ‘conservative’ in our progress, (if that’s not an oxymoron), that we would work less. Rather we would work harder at better things, things that involve domestic manual labour for men and women, things we could do with our hands, creative things. And we’d definitely walk more.
My mother remembers walking to Blackhead Beach when she was a child, with her parents. This would be an all day trip, there and back, up hill and down dale, and no doubt they’d be carrying picnic baskets and all the beach paraphernalia.
The other factor is how to make total re-use of resources. Perhaps with oil running out we’ll have a huge amount less plastic to deal with. That would help immensely. It’s one of the least reusable material on the planet.

I can't show you a photo of Blackhead Beach on this blog, because of copyright restrictions, but if you click here, you'll see several professionally-taken ones.