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Support for NZ First the big mover in March, into a balance-of-power position. Labour/Greens only rise +0.5% according to Roy Morgan Research

Support for NZ First the big mover in March, into a balance-of-power position. Labour/Greens only rise +0.5% according to Roy Morgan Research

Content supplied by Roy Morgan Research

During March support for National fell 2.5% to 46% - the lowest since September 2015, now only 4% ahead of a potential Labour/Greens alliance 42% (up 0.5%).

If a New Zealand Election were held now the latest NZ Roy Morgan Poll shows NZ First 9% (up 3%) would hold the balance of power and be in a position to determine who would form the next New Zealand Government.

Support for the National partners showed little change with the Maori Party, unchanged at 1%, Act NZ was 1% (up 0.5%) and United Future was 0% (unchanged).

Of the three Parliamentary Opposition parties - Labour’s support is now at 28% (up 1%), Greens 14% (down 0.5%) and NZ First has jumped 3% to 9% - its highest level of support in over a decade since August 2005.

Of the parties outside Parliament the Conservative Party of NZ is 0.5% (down 0.5%), the Mana Party is 0.5% (unchanged) and support for Independent/ Others is 0% (down 1%).

The NZ Roy Morgan Government Confidence Rating has increased to 132pts (up 4pts) in March. A clear majority of NZ electors 61% (up 4.5%) say NZ is ‘heading in the right direction’ compared to 29% (up 0.5%) that say NZ is ‘heading in the wrong direction’. NZ Government Confidence is much higher than in Australia.

Gary Morgan, Executive Chairman, Roy Morgan Research, says:

“Today’s Roy Morgan New Zealand Poll shows the lead for National 46% (down 2.5% since February) at its smallest over a potential Labour/ Greens alliance 42% (up 0.5%) since September 2015. As the results tighten, this brings the centrist party, NZ First 9% (up 3%) into the equation as potential ‘king-makers’ able to determine who would form New Zealand’s next Government and be Prime Minister after the next New Zealand Election – due late next year.

“New Zealand First Leader Winston Peter’s strong stand on the New Zealand Flag Referendum – being voted on this month – that only New Zealand citizens should have the right to vote, rather than both citizens and permanent residents, appears to have won the party significant support. NZ First was last in Government under Prime Minister Helen Clark between 2005-08.

“Despite the drop in support for National, New Zealand Roy Morgan Government Confidence increased to 132pts (up 4pts) in March and is now a very large 30pts higher than Roy Morgan Australian Government Confidence – which is at a lowly 102pts in mid-March.”

Electors were asked: “If a New Zealand Election were held today which party would receive your party vote?” 

This latest New Zealand Roy Morgan Poll on voting intention was conducted by telephone – both landline and mobile telephone, with a NZ wide cross-section of 861 electors in March 2016.

Of all electors surveyed 8% (up 1%) didn’t name a party.

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31 Comments

National won't go down until house prices drop.

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National are going to continue to lose votes until they are firmer on immigration rules. Need to focus on quality(ie. Clean money), not quantity.

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I doubt it. We've known what's been happening with immigration for a while now and still National were at 48%+, no one cares as long as house prices keep rising.

It really is that simple.

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I'm not sure it is that simple anymore.

As the percentage of the electorate that are home owners fall then these will eat away at the National vote.

On top of that I am a typical through and through National voter who has been part of the golden generation who have been able to sit back and and see there property assets go ever skywards. I have several property assets and very modest gearing however I am seriously questioning what is going on and what are we doing to help the younger generation.

Last years introduction of IRD nos. etc is a step in the right direction but other restrictions need to be put in place for Foreign Buyers imo. A wealth tax on foreign purchasers whether an annual wealth charge or maybe a 10% stamp duty charge might be easier to apply. I would also like to see a further clamp down on Money laundering as so far they have only just scratched the surface.

I never thought I would get to the day where I said I might vote Labour.

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The mob rules.....

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http://www.newshub.co.nz/politics/key-migration-numbers-badge-of-honour…

Spin spin spin. I'm suprised his head doesn't fall off.

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To immigration I would add the environment. The trashing it's getting from national policy's is becoming a major issue with many.

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This is hardly good for our international standing:

New Zealand Foreign Trusts: Chickens Coming Home to Roost

Posted on March 18, 2016 by Richard Smith

Back in 2012, Fairfax journalist Tim Hunter (“Chalkie”) caught a whiff of something unsavoury about New Zealand Foreign Trusts:

There are several key features of a foreign trust, one of them being that it pays no tax on overseas income. On its own that’s a useful attribute, but when combined with another it becomes turbocharged, because foreign trusts don’t have to tell anyone what they own, how much money they make, or who benefits from anything they pay out.

There are exceptions to this veil of secrecy, but we’ll come back to that. And before aspiring Kiwi tax dodgers start reaching for their accountant’s phone number Chalkie should point out that foreign trusts can’t be used by anyone living in New Zealand.

However, it may already be apparent that if, say, you had a lot of money and if, say, you wanted to hide it from certain tax authorities, a New Zealand foreign trust could be just the ticket.
This turns out to be an unintended consequence of an attempt to stop New Zealanders avoiding tax by hiding their assets and income in overseas trusts. Taxing trusts according to the domicile of the settlor, rather than the trustee, was the chosen solution. This was neat and radical, but it created a gigantic loophole:

Originally, foreigners settling a New Zealand foreign trust could do so in perfect secrecy, because a trust is technically just a private arrangement. Not only was there no register of trusts, there was no requirement to tell the government or the IRD about it as long as it had no New Zealand income.

An overseas taxman was therefore stuffed if he wanted to probe a citizen’s New Zealand trust interests. Even if he asked our IRD for information, IRD simply didn’t have it and had no power to get it.
After a while, the Aussies noticed:

The Australian Taxation Office found this particularly annoying because it suspected lots of Aussies were using NZ trusts to avoid tax.

That changed when new disclosure rules came into force in 2006, but only a bit.

Thereafter, trusts had to tell the IRD the name of the trust, the name of the trustee, and whether the settlor was Australian.

Trustees also had to keep financial details such as the trust’s income and distributions, as well as the name of the settlor and the beneficiaries, and hand over the information to IRD on demand.
This reform was not a stroke of genius. The New Zealand authorities of the day contrived to look both craven and truculent at the same time. They folded to the Aussies, but were happy for the rest of the world to continue to take a hike:

The Australian ones had it tough, because the IRD now routinely passes their details on to the ATO [Australian Taxation Office]. But the rest are relatively undisturbed because the IRD won’t ask for financial details unless they are first sought by an overseas taxman, and the overseas taxman has to ask for information about a trust by name, which means they first have to know it exists.

Awkward.

One tax consultant assessed the situation thus: “As the names of the settlors and beneficiaries are not disclosed, there is no risk of disclosure to other governments under current legislation.”
Quite a lot of shadowy people like this set-up very much indeed. According to New Zealand’s Inland Revenue Department, roughly 7,500 foreign trusts had been registered with the IRD between 2006 and 2012, and were still extant in 2012. Just 126 of them had declared Australian settlors. Some of the trusts were said to hold billions of dollars. By early 2016, at those registration rates, the total number of trusts would be around 11,000. Back to “Chalkie”:

Of course, New Zealand could help by giving other authorities the same privileges as Australia, but for some reason we choose not to.

Chalkie can’t help wondering why New Zealand maintains a regime so obviously advantageous to tax dodgers and criminals. We’re not only not part of the solution, we’re a big part of the problem.
One answer to Chalkie’s question is this: there is now quite a collection of well-connected smart lawyers servicing this clientele. It’s a business worth around NZD 20Mn per annum, according to NZ’s International Funds Services Development Group; or even NZD 50Mn, according to the NZ Herald, in their November 2012 exposé. It can afford a little bit of expenditure on lobbying.

One of these smart lawyers, a fellow called Geoffrey Cone, of Cone Marshall, shows up in the NZ Herald the week after the exposé, to tell the world there’s nothing to see here after all. Handing a platform to a lawyer specialising in offshore trust work hasn’t always gone well for the NZ Herald, but the Herald only found out about the risks much later.

Here’s how Cone characterizes the daft 2006 non-reform reform that threw a crumb in the direction of the Australians and waved a middle finger at the rest of the world:

New rules in this area were introduced by Michael Cullen in 2006 after extensive consultation. Under this rigorous regime, a New Zealand resident trustee of a foreign trust is required by the IRD to submit a Foreign Trust Disclosure form (IR607) and to keep financial and other records for New Zealand tax purposes.

These include the trust deed, details of settlements and distributions (including the recipient’s name and address), details of the trust’s assets and liabilities, and money that the trustee receives and spends.

In most countries a person settling a trust must report the settlement of funds to their own revenue authorities, central banks and other authorities. This, coupled with the information settlors must report in their own countries, will give revenue authorities enough information to request details of a particular trust or transaction.
Here’s a funny thing: that doesn’t seem to coincide with the actual experience of actual overseas revenue authorities. By 2014, Cone’s claim that all is well looks threadbare:

The Inland Revenue Department is taking aim at the use of New Zealand trusts by foreigners to shield their income and assets from tax in their own countries following pressure from its overseas counterparts, the Business Herald understands.

IRD says it intends reporting to Revenue Minister Todd McClay on that issue before the end of the year and will release consultation documents in mid-2015.
Back to Cone:

The majority of New Zealand service providers are lawyers and accountants and many are also qualified members of the international Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners (STEP). They usually work with counterparts who have the same responsibilities and skills in the countries where the clients live.

Respected New Zealand trust lawyers and accountants operating foreign trusts on behalf of international clients help enhance New Zealand’s reputation in the OECD and amongst international taxation experts.

We don’t compete with tax havens, but instead with jurisdictions such as Singapore, Britain and the US, all of which have a transparent tax system and apply similar taxation principles in relation to their foreign trusts.
Undermining this message, just a little, the next STEP Latam conference will be taking place in tax haven and perennial opacity bad boy Panama, in September 2016. A representative of Cone Marshall is on the attendee list.

Undermining the message a little more, here are the 181 Panamanian bearer share companies for which Cone and Marshall have been acting as nominee directors.

Undermining the message even more, here’s a diagram from Transparency International (Slovakia) in which New Zealand companies created by Cone show up, concealing the involvement of one Juraj Široký in a tottering Slovakian company called Váhostav.

Here’s more from The Slovak Spectator on Juraj Široký. He has an interesting past:

WHEN Juraj Široký left the Czechoslovak embassy in Washington two decades ago, following his posting as secret agent and second secretary, he didn’t forget about his colleagues in the communist intelligence service.

After the 1989 revolution he continued to do business with them, first within an infamous asset-stripping operation known as the Harvard funds, and later within Slovak chemicals groups Chemolak and Plastika.

Today, Široký’s “spy circle” has contacts with people at the top of the Economy Ministry under the Fico government, including minister Ľubomír Jahnátek from the ruling Smer party. Companies under Široký’s wing last year won two tenders from the ministry together worth Sk120 million (€4 million).

Under the Fico government, Široký’s firms have won several multi-million-euro contracts to build highways and renovate Bratislava Castle. He got his start in business in the Czech Republic as the partner of Viktor Kožený, dubbed the ‘Pirate of Prague’, who is currently on trial in the Czech Republic for looting billions of Czech crowns from the Harvard investment funds in the mid-1990s…Kožený is currently in the Bahamas, beyond the reach of the Czech courts.

Široký did not respond to questions about his past from The Slovak Spectator. Economy Ministry officials denied that the businessman, who is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures behind the Smer party, had any influence over public contracts.
One can’t help noticing a couple of other things in passing.

First, one of the NZ companies, Torrelaguna Limited, which has a trio of Costa Rican stooge directors, still hasn’t got around to appointing the mandatory NZ resident director, a legal requirement that came into force in May 2015. The additional 180 day grace period that gave companies ample time to appoint an NZ resident expired months ago. This company should be struck off. It might be worth a look at the other 1,000 companies in Cone Marshall’s NZ portfolio to see how many more there are like that.

Second, Torrelaguna’s shareholders are five Costa Ricans, each owning 20% of the company. Transparency International’s research suggests that this isn’t a particularly accurate depiction of Torrelaguna’s ownership and control but how on earth can one check, in general? Getting Ultimate Beneficial Ownership disclosure right is going to be hard, in New Zealand and elsewhere.

Here’s how it’s going with Juraj Široký’s Váhostav, just now:

An investigator of the National [Criminal] Agency (NAKA) filed charges against three persons from the management of the construction company Váhostav-SK on March 14. They are suspected of committing a crime of giving preference to a creditor. By their doing they might have caused damages of almost €7 million, the SITA newswire reported.
New Zealand is helping out:

Last December Denisa Baloghová, spokesperson of the Police Presidium informed that the investigator had interrogated more than 20 witnesses and carried out several other proceedings to find out the facts of the case. At that time she said that the police also asked several countries for legal assistance, including asking colleagues from Costa Rica, New Zealand, or Cyprus …
All of this non-foreign-trust-related Váhostav and Cone control-hiding skulduggery does make one curious about exactly why it was that Mr Cone was so keen to rubbish the idea that New Zealand foreign trusts were of any concern to transparency advocates. Might he be active in the formation of control-hiding New Zealand offshore trusts, perchance?

Whatever: we think that Mr Cone was mistaken in his assessment that there’s nothing to see. Right now there’s a government corruption scandal underway in Malta, and overseas press coverage is pointing the finger at Panama and at NZ foreign trusts…

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"If a New Zealand Election were held now the latest NZ Roy Morgan Poll shows NZ First 9% (up 3%) would hold the balance of power and be in a position to determine who would form the next New Zealand Government."

Seems some people care....

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I wonder which way Auckland house prices would go if that were to happen? 18 months...

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care? Not so sure.

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The odd thing is young people don't appear to be attracted to nationalism. They have all been brought up in the Marxist learning institutions and brain washed since birth and are led to believe that the "system" is nationalist. Yet the "system" is pro equality, gay rights, open borders, pro abortion and so on. When they go and march against what they perceive to be fascists they are actually acting as tools of the current fascist system that brooks no dissent and even, in Europe, imprisons people for thought crimes.

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Absolute rubbish on marxist. If you actually look at both Labour and National party membership they have both declined equally for many years, if we did indeed have brainwashing a) labour would be in power far more and party membership would be sustained. Further Labour's vote has collapsed, the Alliance no longer exists. The Internet party consisting of the hard core left got something like 1%, hardly indicators of brain washing.

What we do see is better education in the generations and that seems to be producing an independent thinking middle block. What is pretty clear is this swing voter has increased in numbers so more and more people are not blindly voting left or right, whether that is an improvement I am not sure.

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I considered the Internet party to be far right. Kim Dotcom owns a signed edition of Mein Kampf. I was tempted to vote for them if only for the promise of hoverboards. Parties like National and the Republicans in the US are far more Marxist now then they have ever been and learning institutions and their professors are thoroughly infected. All true nationalism is thoroughly suppressed.

What we do see is better education in the generations and that seems to be producing an independent thinking middle block.

That made me laugh out loud! I guess you are a product of this Steven, again LOL.

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More and more people are just not voting - how many of these are natural Labour voters worried about home ownership, employment and immigration?
Australia has compulsory voting but I can't see National pushing it. They probably rely on the non voters and that is why results like this article can be taken with a pinch of salt. Its easy to say something when somebody calls but it seems like its too hard to get down to the polling station for a lot of apathetic kiwis who then probably whine all through the next 3 years.

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More and more people are just not voting

This is the independent thinking middle block that Steven was writing about. They actually agree with every position the UN has,from gay marriage to open borders and everything in between so why vote? There really is no need to.

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Wouldn't surprise me that Winston would be picking up some of the rural vote. Winning Northland has given him some genuine bona to positions NZ first as the clear alternative .As the rural downturn really starts to bite he has the potential to pick up more of a disaffected vote given the Nats seeming ambivalence .

Has been interesting reading recent commentary on this site about immigration around Auckland housing affordability in particular. Given I perceive this site to represent a fairly broad political spectrum I think the Nats have misread how deep the concern is. Of course Winston has been banging this drum for decades so no surprise at all to see them rise in the polls.

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All the SJWs won't be able to admit it but Winston really is forward thinking.

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Winston rural vote is getting stronger as northland can point out, how many promises did national break straight after the byelection. its also strange how as his party gets more support how the other parties try to adopt his policies yet rubbish them to start with
nationals biggest problem is they have not nurtured their support partners and pretty much try to go it alone.
how much is JK trying to kill of NZ first early on going to come back and bite him

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They foolishly let him win an electorate seat..... his centre based Nationalism appeals to the elderly and there are more each year. He is gaining rural respect. Little has been a complete failure in comparison, his message is too left for the swing voters needed to get into power... How long until some in Labour break away to form their own centre party. When is Mr Jones due back from his fishing trip?

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Will be interesting to watch How JK starts to position himself if this polling trend continues. He has been openly hostile and derogatory to Winston on many occasions. They won't be wanting to concede the rural vote but in trying to marginalise Winston he risks his coalition prospects with NZ first.

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NZ First is getting the votes of disillusioned Labour voters.

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But Labour has risen and National dropped. Would be interesting to know the regional results.

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Look to the USA and Great Britain, with the likes of Sanders and Trump gaining traction. People want change, tired of the same old same old, and Winston probably represents the closest thing to anything fresh that we have. Ironic given He has been around longer than most.

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I do like Winston - would never vote for him, but in terms of entertainment value he is pure gold.

I want Trump to win - just to see how long it takes America to wake up from the nightmare they have created or someone tries to assassinate him.....

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I want to see Trump win because then I will know that America has awoken from the nightmare they have created.

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which politician is this
white
rich
self made
makes stuff up
tells lies
denies he said it
has the media eating out of his hand
flip flops on policy
most of the rest of the world see him as a joke

Trump or Key

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I want to see Trump win so I can confirm my impression of every American I have met.

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Why would a voter go for NZ First as a tactic to down Key when Winnie will logically support National because Key will do anything to keep hold of power even swallowing a dead rat.

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Now that I would like to see!!! Siberian hamster anyone....

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not likely, WP will never forgive him for trying to wipe him out, in saving that would not put it past JK to offer him something unreal to stay in power

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