The Government believe this is worthy of a press release…
Revenue Minister Todd McClay today announced that from 1 April next year, low-income working families who are eligible for the minimum family tax credit will receive an increase.
“The minimum family tax credit currently ensures that families who work the minimum number of hours and who are not receiving a benefit will have an after-tax income of $22,724 a year. This will rise to $22,776 a year from 1 April 2014,” says Mr McClay.
The minimum family tax credit provides a guaranteed minimum family income to families who are in work and ensures they are no worse off moving off a benefit and into paid employment.
The increase, which reflects small inflation rises, was approved by Order in Council on 21 October 2013.
I’m sorry what? Inflation for the past 12 months is 1.4%. This increase is 0.2% – a seventh of the inflation increase.
That makes the $52 ‘increase’ a real loss in value of $259, yet these sanctimonious pricks have the audacity after handing back billions in tax cuts to the richest NZers and privatizing energy assets to less than 2% of the population to crow as if they have been the most generous Government on record.
The low turnout and the low price set in the Meridian Energy float this week has confirmed the failure of the Government’s “Mixed Ownership Model” (Mom) on its own terms, as well as an exercise in national financial planning.
Just 62,000 investors signed up for the float, little more than half the 113,000 who invested in Mighty River Power in May and around a quarter of the 225,000 who invested in Contact Energy in 1999.
That is a dismal response and if the trajectory is continued for Genesis Energy then around 30,000 would sign up for the last of the energy floats.
The Government’s argument that it wanted to widen and deepen the ownership and the make-up of the stock market was the only good one for the asset sales programme.
But selling 49 per cent of the biggest electricity generator in the country to just 1.4 per cent of the population is not a democratisation of the stock market.
…the rich get bitchier, the poor get floored.
So what is happening with inequality in NZ?
-The gap between high and low incomes has widened faster in recent decades in NZ than in most other developed nations
-Across all adults. the top 1% owns three times as much wealth as the poorest 50%.
-NZ now has the widest income gaps since detailed records began in the early 1980s.
-The average household in the top 10% of NZ has nine times the income of one in the bottom 10%
-Between 170 000 – 270 000 children living in poverty (depending on the measures used)
-One of the world’s worst worst records of child health and well-being
-One major report on children’s welfare ranked NZ twenty-eighth out of 30 developed countries.
-There are more Pakeha in poverty then Maori, but poverty impacts Maori & Pacifica more acutely. 1 in every 10 Pakeha households live in poverty, 1 in every 5 Maori and Pacific households live in poverty.
-Maori had 95% of their land appropriated and alienated between 19th Century and 20th Century. (Compensation for the almost complete loss of an economic base in just over a century? A mere $1.4Billion in Treaty settlements. A steal at twice the price you might say. Not only have Maori been ripped off, but they are also forced to live in poverty with the reality of generations worth of being ripped off. Insult to injury, jowl by blistered jowl.)
-Women earn 13% less than men and are under represented in senior positions within almost every occupation. Many are forced to take low income part time work.
-Subsidies for Kiwisaver contributions and some Working for Families tax credits, are available only to those in paid work or, sometimes, in full-time paid work. A lower proportion of Women are in full time work so they are more likely to be excluded from these initiatives and more reliant on inadequate state benefits.
-Pacific Islanders are 3 times more likely to be unemployed than the general population’s rate, they also, like recent immigrants, struggle alongside Maori against structural discrimination.
-These groups represent the 800 000 NZers living below the poverty line.
-Against that number, 29 000 people own 16% of NZs wealth, and 13 000 NZers have incomes over $250 000.
-Wages and benefits are too low for people to live on, it isn’t an issue of budgeting, it’s an issue of income.
-Poverty erodes voice and citizenship which generates inequality.
-People’s ability to participate fully in their society and enjoy a sense of belonging is vital for a Democracy to flourish.
-While we all have a responsibility to contribute, we also have the right to benefit from the fruits of society. The road worker, receptionist and sales assistant all contribute to a functioning economy as much as the businessman and executive do.
In Auckland, these stats are not much better, it is a SuperCity of Poverty…
– 18% of Aucklanders claim they don’t have enough money. The national average is 14%.
– For the period 2008-10, Auckland region individual income inequality increased from 100% to 109%
– In the year 2011-12, 20% of Aucklanders didn’t visit the GP when they wanted to.
– In 2010 9% of Aucklanders lived in overcrowded housing
– In 2010 17% of Auckland’s children live in overcrowded housing.
– The unemployment rate for Auckland is 7.3%, double what it was five years ago.
– The unemployment rate for Auckland youth (15-24 year olds) is 19.8%,
– The unemployment rate for Maori youth is 26%
– The unemployment rate for Pacific youth is 31%
– 28,700 Auckland youth are not in employment, education, or training
– Auckland City Council has 1500 employees that are paid less than the living wage, 601 staff paid over $100K, 103 staff paid over $150K and 41 paid over $200K.
And what is the impact of this poverty on the children National are forcing the social cruelty of welfare cuts upon…
Childhood poverty and chronic stress may lead to problems regulating emotions as an adult, according to research published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
This rank hypocrisy of screwing the poor while subsidizing the rich reeks like an infected pus filled boil desperate for lancing. Roll on 2014 election.
Who ever wins in the next 2014 election , Has got a lot of work to do , to clean up ALL this mess….
I just hope that come the next election, the poor and disenfranchised will realise we outnumber the rich and greedy AND GET OUT TO VOTE. Last election Doug Garner et al carried out so many polls (all of them negative for Labour) that I feel the election was influenced by them. Now for all the many “polls” that got done at that time, I never ever was consulted in one. I have a landline yet was never polled. It makes me question their accuracy. Please please go out and vote next time.
Don’t vote, can’t moan. Unless of course you’re Russel Brand and think voting is just wasting time on the way to the revolution…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLYcn3PuTTk
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/truthdigger_of_the_week_russell_brand_20131026
NO!! Don’t vote; moan like … billy-ho! By this I mean, whether you vote or not does not impact upon your perfect right and duty to moan like bejeezuz at the thieving idiots running this country.
The fact is that no one who appears on the ballot paper is worth voting for (though nearly all are worth voting against!). You perform your civic duty and turn up to the polling place, and what are you served up, for pity’s sake?
Alexis de Tocqueville allegedly made the remark: ‘In a democracy you get the governments you deserve.’ Who the goddam hell deserved this National Government? No one. Not the fat cattists who benefit from it, much less anyone else. The poor misguided and bewildered creatures who ticked the Tory boxes didn’t deserve this Nation Party mal-administration.
We do not get the Governments we deserve because we don’t get the candidates we deserve. I’ve said elsewhere in this milieu: we do not have a democracy. We have an elective oligarchy. The moment democracy threatens to do the slightest good, the moment it pays due diligence, the moment it looks as though it will act with due consideration to all its constituency; right then it gets hijacked and abolished. Look what happened to ECan.
The fat cattists have the guns, the laws and the jails. Fight against that if you can (especially as this lot seem to be building a prisons industry on the U.S. model).
Telling people if they don’t vote they can’t complain is about as effective a method of manufacturing silence – and by inference (if you are a fat cattist), manufacturing consent – as anything else Noam Chomsky talked about. The Nats must love this: it’s not them doing the ‘manufacturing.
The low vote turnout was getting towards as screamingly loud a dissent that this country’s people could possibly have uttered. Even the Government has been sufficiently moved to exhibit a mild concern, though theirs is conceivably due to the possible doubt cast upon the moral legitimacy of their tenure of office.
Speaking for myself, I have voted in every general election since 1972, and in most (not all) local body elections. Only once did I feel that it did a sod of good. And that was in 1972. I did once express my protest and anger on a ballot paper, in words to the effect of the second sentence in the second paragraph of this posting. I did not – and do not -count that as a non-vote. Maybe we all ought to join the voiceless throngs who vent their protest in a silent bellow (ballot) of disgust.
@Ion
If you had gone on to view the interview that I linked you may have realized I was being factious.
I agree that we should all be moaning out loud , I just enjoyed watching Russel’s brand of protest!
Wow, an extra dollar a day for minimum family tax credit, crack open the champagne bottle, dear prospective recipient, “sparkling” times lie ahead. Oh, damn, that fancy bottle of Bollinger costs a fair bit more than that, I just realised. Gasp, I have to work yet more hours, I suppose.
Thanks for the figures, Martyn, yes, it is good to be reminded.
Unashamedly we are sold lies and more lies, fed insults and treated like crap every day, and I am sick off it, as I am forced to survive on nothing much more than “crumbs” every day and week.
And Paula Bennett is cracking the whip, to scare the sick and disabled into work, as from early next year they will bring in new kinds of “assessments” for work capacity, that will leave very few unable to claim they cannot do any work.
Also do not forget, what lies behind all this, and where much of these “reforms” were thought out, and come from:
http://accforum.org/forums/index.php?/topic/15188-medical-and-work-capability-assessments-based-on-the-bps-model-aimed-at-disentiteling-affected-from-welfare-benefits-and-acc-compo/
And also, how hand picked “foot soldiers” from the medical and other areas were used to “design” the mean and cunning schemes to get more of the “crumb eaters” forced off benefits:
http://accforum.org/forums/index.php?/topic/15264-welfare-reform-the-health-and-disability-panel-msd-the-truth-behind-the-agenda/
This is important, as it completes the picture on what this rotten government is all about, and how they lash out at the poor, weak and unfortunate, even the sick and disabled now, while they offer “corporate welfare” and perks to their business mates and “sweeteners” for the small 1 per cent of Kiwis that jump onto their train and buy some shares in former SOEs.
Shame on this lot, shame on them! And dear people, read up and inform yourselves, those that just glance at this blog and others, and that have not learned enough yet.
We are all in this together, whether you like it or not!
Correction:
“Wow, an extra dollar a day for minimum family tax credit, crack open the champagne bottle”
Of course it is NOT an extra dollar a day, it is an extra dollar a week, as Martyn rightly commented!
And:
“…as from early next year they will bring in new kinds of “assessments” for work capacity, that will leave very few unable to claim they cannot do any work.”
Of course that is meant to say, it will leave very few ABLE to claim that they cannot do any work!
Sorry, this happens when in a rush.
ekshully, what i was going to say before my naturally tendency towards sympathy for the ‘cnuts’ kicked in, was that members of the ‘sanctimonium’ usually have some pretty serious shit in their own lives they’re rather we didn’t know of. I guess they thought the best form of their defense is attack.
….. risky business this stance of being a judgmental prick aye.
It’s another trait of members of the sanctimonium though I ‘spose.
(Whose now clamouring to get into Key’s top drawer. Both they (AND John K) should be worried in equal amounts)
Good blog. The govt press releases I read are usually ridiculous, full of misleading use of stats and spinning bad news as good. The worst part is that most of the time, the mainstream media report these press releases uncritically without doing their job as journalists, asking the hard questions (or even the obvious questions), I suppose because that would be ‘biased.’ Thank God for blogs.
it gets worse
The number on the minimum family tax credit is only about 3000. Each of these gets another $52 a year so that is another $156,000 of government spending.
It cost me $58 to take my 6 years grandson to the doctor on Saturday and another $20 for medicine.
if you are a diabetic costs are even worse if you got to take diabetic meds and other pills on top.
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