The Jonesy is a passionate bloke and mate of mine who wants to do what is right by our people who have been forgotten in the regions when it comes to jobs.
He fired up last week and went on TV wanting to force beneficiaries into work with plenty of sticks to prod and push them into jobs.
It was his personal opinion. He knew that it wasn’t a view shared by the new Government, yet the media still went to town on it by suggesting it represented some sort of rift between NZ First and Labour.
Actually, believe it or not, we are of one mind when it comes to making the lives of our provincial and regional Kiwis better through real jobs with real dignity.
Shane and I have been through similar experiences in our lives and although we might come at things a little differently, we share the same vision which is that our people should be afforded a decent shot at life.
However, though it’s my view that we don’t need to threaten poor people to get them to work. I believe that if we offered real jobs with real wages most, if not all, would flock to the opportunity to plant a billion trees.
I believe we want to be a government who provides real opportunities and not threats to our poorest and most vulnerable.
Forcing a person to work who doesn’t want to work creates a resentful worker who does a bad job; offering jobs that pay real money with job security and genuine dignity in that work is a far more intelligent, and ultimately better, way to get those 76,000 Kiwi youth aged between 16 and 18 who aren’t in any kind of employment or tertiary training up off the couch and out into the workforce.
We know the desperation work without dignity generates. In the madness of the Rogernomics era, 44,000 Māori men were robbed of their well-paid union protected jobs and thrown onto the scrap heap of humiliating and crippling welfare. They had their personal pride and mana taken from them as providers and we saw the spike in the social carnage such brutal reforms created.
Let’s learn from the mistakes of our employment past and ensure that we are offering jobs with dignity that can build the self-esteem of our young men and women because if we do that, we won’t need to threaten them with anymore sanctions.
Let’s stop playing silly buggers with the ‘get tough on bludgers’ rhetoric and actually help our young people learn the satisfaction of a day’s honest work with a day’s honest pay and protections.
I’m Minister of Employment to make a real difference, not appease easy stereotypes and lazy journalism.
* Hon Willie Jackson is a Labour List MP and the Minister of Employment.
First published in the Manukau Courier
The tree planting idea is appealing. Well paid positions, in strategically situated regional tree nurseries & associated transport and planting will be a win-win.
Good for the environment, battling climate change, and giving skills to folk which could lead to careers in landscaping, gardening, plant nurseries, transport, farm work etc etc, and lessen the attraction of crime in order to survive.
And above all, as you rightly highlight Willie, it helps restore mana. Something the Rogernomics revolution mercilessly stripped away from so many.
Thanks Willie this was where National lost us all as on our East Coast when rail was closed down by national in 2012 lots of jobs and companies left our regions.
“we are of one mind when it comes to making the lives of our provincial and regional Kiwis better through real jobs with real dignity.”
I reside both in Gisborne and HB now with broken railway that now urgently needs fixing, to make our raods safe and bring comopanies and jobs back to us all.
T include this recent rail article (below) about the negative impacts to our community with the loss of our rail and highlighted the very heavy negative economic/social/health/ and environmental destruction that will occur if the likes of Ken Shirley and his trucking lobbyists along with National MPs suceed in keeping rail out of the freight bussiness.
While all we see is truck drivers complaining of “long hours and low paid jobs”!!!!!!
Rail will provide good permanent regional jobs for all local workers again as they had before rail was allowed to be run down for road freight to take the few jobs driving trucks.
Here is the Gisborne Herald press articles about our serious regional rail issues that must be included in restoration of rail in our regions, and this return of rail will reduce road freight negative impacts while improve the environment and the welllbeing and health of all our regional commmunities. Please share this article.
Subject: http://gisborneherald.co.nz/opinion/3121947-135/about-sharing-the-load
gisborneherald.co.nz
About sharing the load
Published: December 9, 2017 11:44AM
LETTER
Re: It’s time to value Gisborne’s railway, December 2 column.
Thank you, Peter.
Here are some facts to help quantify the benefits.
An Ernst and Young report for the NZ Transport Agency in 2016 — The Value of Rail in New Zealand — put that value at $1.5 billion. The report was not made public until recently.
A B-train (truck with two trailers) wears out the road 20,000 times more than a car, and we know that the local roading authorities are struggling to keep up with the maintenance on the road. I travel the Gisborne to Napier route often and am fed up with the constant wheel alignments necessary from the potholes and sunken bridges.
Then there are the externalities — the consequences of an economic activity experienced by unrelated third parties: the social and environmental cost of increasing heavy trucks and reducing rail use.
The Ministry of Transport has put the social cost of each road death at $4.5 million, and a crash involving serious injuries at $473,600.
Living near a busy road increases the risk of premature death by 7 percent, increasing the risk of cancer, heart attack, stroke, dementia, childhood diabetes, asthma, allergies etc.
A diesel truck pollutes up to 1000 times more than a car.
One truck tyre sheds 10 times the amount of one car tyre.
Each truck tyre sheds 0.21 g/km of tyre compound (butadiene styrene); that is 5.46 g/km for a 26-wheel vehicle.
Road run-off accounts for 40-50 percent of urban metal contamination to aquatic ecosystems.
It’s not a matter of being anti trucks, it’s about sharing the load. Even the Road Transport Forum chief executive Ken Shirley, as well as local transport operators, are saying they can’t cope with the increasing freight task and may have to turn work away.
Janet Crispin.
Bob Hughes – 1 day ago
No contest
Rail as our main land transport method is the best long-term choice economically. It is also number one humanitarian, environmental, moral, and climate change choice as well.
Thank you Janet and Peter.
Delwyn Arthur – 20 hours ago
Good facts Janet – I wonder how many times they have to be repeated to be taken as seriously as they deserve.
December 11, 2017
gisborneherald.co.nz
http://gisborneherald.co.nz/opinion/3113574-135/its-time-to-value-gisbornes-railway
It’s time to value Gisborne’s railway
by Peter Wooding
Published: December 2, 2017 11:56AM
COLUMN
When debating the merits of restoring Gisborne’s connection to the rest of the New Zealand rail system, one is met with the argument that “it has always been uneconomic and always will be”.
This thinking has been promulgated so often it seems to have become ingrained in the public psyche. Even our District Council is shirking its responsibility for persuading central government to restore the resource we once had.
Surely there can be no argument that the railway was of benefit to the city. When it was available (before March 2012) it was used by local businesses because it was in their economic interest to do so. It was the government’s responsibility to provide the infrastructure, and the operator’s responsibility to provide the service.
Various recent efforts to compile a convincing business plan have been criticised for not including certain costs. The riposte is that the counter-argument does not include certain benefits.
Admittedly, some of these benefits are difficult to quantify.
Is this a case of knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing?
If Activate Tairawhiti was asked “What is the value to Gisborne of having a rail alternative to road transport (a) for established businesses, (b) in attracting new businesses, and (c) in establishing Gisborne as a desirable venue for tourism?” I suspect they would not know. Have they tried to put a value on it? Does this value appear anywhere on the district’s balance sheet?
I understand that the NZ Transport Agency has been tasked with developing an “Integrated Transport Policy” for this region. I also understand that, despite early sympathetic noises, they have stated that rail is “out of scope”.
How on earth can you have an integrated transport policy that does not include rail!?
The whole idea of integration is making best use of available resources. The 100km of railway line to Wairoa, running largely parallel to SH2 for most of the way, could be operational again for the sake of repairs to a few hundred metres of line in the Wharerata area. It may be that the cost of so doing would be rather more than the $5m touted; I accept that it could even be around the $20m mark one correspondent has claimed. But what is that in comparison with the billions spent on roading in other areas of the country?
On his recent visit to the area, Shane Jones said there is $1 billion going begging for regional development; all we have to do is ask. The case has been made over and over again — the true value will become evident when the line is again operational.
For goodness sake, cut through the continued railway approval procrastination/protraction (is an acronym necessary here?)
I urge Gisborne District Council, Activate Tairawhiti/ECT, Gisborne Chamber of Commerce and all other local agencies or individuals to put pressure on the new Government to give this matter their urgent attention. I urge the Minister of Transport, the Minister for Regional Development and the Minister for Tourism to delay no longer.
Just do it — you can make a difference!
With almost half the kids in poverty coming from working families, the minimum wage is no longer sufficient.
Therefore, it’s totally up to you and your colleagues to ensure that these new Government created jobs are real jobs with real wages – i.e. pay a living wage.
The on-flowing economic stimulus generated would help regenerate life back into many currently small and struggling towns.
With a billion dollar expenditure, Labour have an opportunity to share the love and make a real difference, restoring mana and dignity to people and their communities.
Let this be its legacy.
Yes, yes, yes! Go Willie!
Now contact economist Bill Mitchell at University of Newcastle about his Job Guarantee policy.
Start with youth.
Expand to anyone who wants a job who can’t find one.
Real wages, good conditions. This becomes the price floor for the rest of the labour market. Get people out of casualised bullshit burger flipping at the margin and into socially useful employment.
Your job guarantee becomes an automatic stabiliser in recessions without the huge human cost of unemployment on the dole. The job guarantee wage anchors inflation much better than the Nairu.
Do it!
All paying work has dignity.
I don’t care if you’re pulling out weeds or packing groceries at the supermarket. At the end of the working day you can feel you have contributed something toward society and got paid for it.
Conversely, if you’re able-bodied and sitting on a couch taking a benefit you have no dignity. No Mana. No self worth. You’re just an overgrown child. There lies hopelessness and depression.
So whilst we all want to create jobs in the regions which add as much value as possible, for someone who has previously been a long term couch-sitter, just forming the habit of getting out bed in the morning and going to work is a great and positive step forward.
And if you have no track record of work, you have to settle with starting at the bottom. The dirty job on night shift if need be. It’s the first rung on the ladder.
“All paying work has dignity.”
Tell that to the Chinese girls sleeping on piles of half-finished Gap jeans during their 5 minute break, as shown in the documentary China Blue. If I pay you $1 to lick the soles of my feet, does that suddenly make it dignified?
“At the end of the working day you can feel you have contributed something toward society and got paid for it.”
Not always. Many, many paid jobs actually cause damage to society or the environment, or both. Coal mining, for example, and other jobs that help corporations speed up climate change. Beneficiaries contribute more by doing nothing than the people who do those jobs.
“Conversely, if you’re able-bodied and sitting on a couch taking a benefit you have no dignity.”
This caricature does not represent most beneficiaries. For a start, there are the thousands on the Invalids and Sickness benefits who are not well enough for paid work. Then there are beneficiaries who are parents, doing one of the most important jobs in society. Then there are those who volunteer when they can’t find suitable paid work, doing unpaid work that is just as essential to a functioning society as paid work. Even those who fit the couch potato caricature only do so for a short time, then they get bored and find work, whether paid or unpaid.
Since beneficiaries are not the couch potatoes you misrepresent them as, the rest of your argument is revealed as the ignorant, self-righteous bigotry it is.
Andrew they don’t pack groceries at supermarkets anymore New World does but this person is also the checkout operator. Shelf stackers who put stock on the shelves many of these roles are filled by using cheap foreign labour.
Minimum wage labour anyway. It makes no difference.
If you’re still on the couch: That’s you. No skills and no job history, so you’re worth no more than that immigrant.
Get over it and get that job!
Gonna have to give up on that outdated protestant work ethic sometime if we want a policy other than ‘let the working poor and unemployed sleep in cars’; minimum wage is inefficient, but the only politically viable one at the moment due to it operating via money from employer rather than government.
You should really invest in your own education Andrew because the one you’ve got sucks.
No ones going to listen to some one who whinges all the time.
Hey Willie, Also get rid of the 90 day fire at will policy which employers have chosen to abuse in the past. I had a situation where i was called one friday while working part time and told to not come back Monday and was told that it was staff fit. Its nuts and employers were operating and maybe are still operate in poor faith with employees. I think this policy needs removing.
“In the madness of the Rogernomics era, 44,000 Māori men were robbed of their well-paid union protected jobs and thrown onto the scrap heap of humiliating and crippling welfare.”
I’m calling on this.
And the rest of ‘our people’? Have they no mana? Are they not included?
And this is what you choose to take offence to? Shakes head.
Good on you, Willie.
I would have happily spent a couple of years cutting pine to pay for my education rather than spend 6 years working to pay off my student loan.
Now tertiary education is free – or a right – again, people who take up these jobs – on the minimum wage at least, it’s got to be, mate – will be better able to plan and decide their own futures.
Having said that, I’d add the caveat that people should not be forced to work jobs if they are somehow not mentally or physically up to it.
Then again, I have a chronic disease that at one point had me bedridden. And it was an intense physical and dietary program that helped me overcome that chronic condition to the point that I can now benchpress twice my own weight.
I am hopeful that a kinder welfare system will give beneficiaries the support they require to help build themselves up physically and mentally. But support needs to be offered. The recent controversy over tinned tomatoes and chickpeas (which I eat regularly) is a case in point. That was slightly misreported, but I still believe that part of welfare should be to help beneficiaries to budget, cook, and get fit. A free public gym would be ideal. Why has no one ever suggested that? And people to help the poor learn to cook healthily and cheaply, as well. I believe that Ordinary people are capable of achieving great things but I also believe that a little guidance wouldn’t go amiss. A little belief in people and encouragement can go a long way. Such efforts would certainly have much better outcomes than simply starving the poor and telling them they are weaklings.
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