Council seeks elusive Airbnb hosts
Auckland Council initially estimated 3800 Airbnb properties would be required to pay the bed tax.
But as of December only 1278, or about a third, had been discovered.
Auckland Council principal adviser financial policy Aaron Matich said the 2500-odd remaining had yet to be discovered.
‘‘The council is still looking for online accommodation providers and when found they will be charged according to the policy,’’ Matich said.
The council had encountered some difficulties implementing the policy and would look to review its implementation, he said.
At this stage, its primary way of identifying online accommodation providers was through online listings, he said.
‘‘Once identified, our default position is to charge full business rates to online accommodation providers, until the ratepayer provides the information we have requested which clarifies the number of nights the property is being let for,’’ Matich said.
Auckland Council estimated Airbnb listings made up about 10 per cent of Auckland’s accommodation market.
The policy change did not generate any additional revenue, rather it had the impact of reducing rates charged to traditional providers.
Online accommodation providers were estimated to only provide about $870,000 or 6 per cent of the $13.7 million expected to be generated from the APTR every year.
Council was forecasting its APTR revenue to be on budget for the 2019 financial year.
Accommodation providers are charged depending on the number of nights booked per year.
At the lower end a provider who had 29 to 135 booked nights a year paid general rates as 75 per cent residential and 25 per cent business as well as 25 per cent of APTR (if in zone A or B).
At the other end a provider who had more than 180 nights booked was rated 100 per cent as a business and paid the full APTR (if in zone A or B).
Unpaid internships are on the rise, but there’s a strong argument for a government crackdown on them, and for parents to refuse to fund them.
A report from the International Labour Organisation (ILO) late last year made some pretty grim reading.
Unpaid internships are marketed by companies as a way young people can build job skills and improve their chances of getting a real job.
But among the ILO’s concerning findings was that there had been a massive rise in internships.
That could, of course, be an indication that the world’s businesses have become more socially responsible, and have decided to do more to help young people starting out in their careers, but I doubt it.
Any time there is a big shift in economic practice, it’s driven by money. Free labour is very profitable labour. ‘‘It seems clear that internships have become common in developed countries,’’ the ILO said.
‘‘A 2013 survey of people aged 18–35 in 27 EU countries found that 46 per cent overall had undertaken at least one paid or unpaid traineeship, though the figure was well over 70 per cent in some countries.
‘‘A 2016 Australian survey revealed that nearly 60 per cent of those aged 18–29 had undertaken at least one type of unpaid work experience in the past five years.’’
Despite the ‘‘great deal of positive literature’’ about internships, there was also a substantial body of research that identified potential problems.
The four issues the ILO highlighted were: 1. Tales are rife of internships that do not provide any real education or training, or that require productive work without adequate supervision or preparation. 2. There is a dearth of reliable evidence that internships lead to better job prospects. 3. Poor people can’t afford to do internships, as their families can’t fund them. 4. The availability of interns as a source of cheap labour creates a disincentive for companies to pay for work.
Unpaid internships involve someone else footing the bill, which generally means the parents.
When internships are part of a tertiary course, and are genuinely about education, and not providing free labour for an employer, I am all for them.
As the Labour Inspectorate advises (though I couldn’t find any cases where it has investigated abuses), employers offering internships should be careful to ‘‘avoid getting an economic benefit from the work done by the volunteer’’, and ‘‘avoid having the volunteer do work which is integral to the business, such as work that an employee would ordinarily do’’.
It seems to me that there’s been a strange kind of pretence in New Zealand, though, that if an employer calls unpaid work ‘‘internship’’ it is somehow legal, if