Finance Minister Grant Robertson’s claim that any new pay offer to nurses “would have to be made using funds already allocated, as there’s no more” is nonsense, according to new Social Credit Party Leader, Chris Leitch.
Mr Robertson’s understanding of how the money system works is patently paper thin, and he’s relying on what advisers in Treasury, who have been sourced from the private banking industry, are telling him.
Just like his predecessor Bill English, he puts paying $4,500,000,000 dollars every year unnecessarily to the private banks the government has borrowed from, ahead of decent pay for doctors and nurses and decent health care for Kiwis.
He could solve the nurses strike overnight if he understood anything about Labour Party history, and took a leaf out of Michael Joseph Savage’s book.
Labour’s first Prime Minister used the Reserve Bank to create the credit necessary to rebuild the nation.
5,000 houses were built by 1939, and 30,000 by 1949, financed by Reserve Bank credit.
The European Central Bank is creating credit at the rate of $35 billion Euros per month, through its quantitative easing programme, without any sign of inflation, so there’s no reason the Reserve Bank here couldn’t fund our government in a similar way.
That would give him $4.5 billion dollars every year to spend on New Zealanders instead.
Putting bankers ahead of doctors and nurses shows that Labour’s economic policies are no different from National’s.
New Zealand adopted the MMP system of voting when the Social Credit Party was unable to ever have more than 2 members at a time in Parliament despite polling in the 20%’s . This showed up the failings of the first past the post system. However in choosing the MMP system we appear to have picked the wrong alternative system.
Under several different names Social Credit has never, since its peak, managed to get more than a handful of votes because voters see a vote for them as a wasted vote.
This is a flaw with the MMP. It will never support more than 3 parties because any more parties increases the risk of wasting votes. It is obvious from the present alignment of parties that after 2020 there will be at most three parties and perhaps only two, which brings us back to a first past the post system, which I am sure Labour and National would love, though they deny it.
The Single Transferrable Vote, used in Australia, has far more parties than here. I think Social Credit could prosper under STV because their economic policies are right and a vote under STV is never wasted.
Simplicity, but made cloudy and confusing politicians who do as they are directed.
Bankers can “print” money but the government is not allowed to.
The public and kept ignorant.
The solution to the housing crisis offered by Chris Leitch is clearly correct (because it has been tried and worked). No other option exists to create the required number of state houses without going heavily into debt, which will compromise all the other policies the coalition government proposes.
So why is Chris Leitch’s suggestion met with a stony silence?
Comments are closed.