Announce protest actions, general chit chat or give your opinion on issues we haven’t covered for the day.
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It’s absolutely pointless overhauling the welfare system/increasing benefits unless there is a corresponding overhaul of housing and rents. Much more urgent impetus on state housing – driven by the state, not property developers, is needed. This government also wimped out on CGT, so residential property speculation remains as an attractive “investment” option. Much of the benefit increases will just go into landlords’ pockets. All the talk about poverty and wellbeing is just that – talk. A rent freeze for a couple of years would be a good place to start in the mean time.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/travel/news/121615657/coronavirus-no-fresh-air-20k-fines–aussie-quarantine-hotels-strict-rules
Australia in isolation because of Covid-19 for 14 days is being in prison. How they revert to their beginnings at the first possible opportunity is noticeable.
But here we have to strive to get some balance and real care and not just sweet media words is an ongoing problem as in all crises. Not having adequate checks at the border makes it more likely for it to insinuate into our population. We are getting so much praise and attention overseas, let’s ensure it is justified and continuing.
Every level of NZ enterprise will be wiped out at some stage when it suits some overseas entity or overseas funded entity to over-ride our rules, or undercut our industries. Now the NZ Potato industry has noted that there is an attempt to grab this, our own food industry and break it.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/417578/foreign-potato-dumping-ban-urged-as-cheap-spuds-threaten-jobs
Potatoes New Zealand chief executive Chris Claridge believed heavily subsidised European producers were eyeing up world markets to dump surplus product.
Answer – First, let us Buy NZ products. Second, lift our wages every six months, to allow the money to circulate and stimulate and fund business expansion. Third – Keep low-skilled immigrants out – license agents to ensure the ones we want get the okay. Look after the ones already encouraged to come here – it would be a shitty thing to continue the bad behaviour our governments have been long doing with Immigration. Keep our arrangements with the Pacific Islands which have been helpful to us and all participating countries.
We marched against signing that bloody open-door trade agreement. Anyone with a working brain could see that there would be imbalance from more heavily populated and better- funded countries, compared to us at about 4 million. Now we are up to 5 million and have quite a corrupt system because of the cheap labour, and lack of control and regulation and being nice to business.
From The Telegraph. Musing on past practices and faulty wisdoms::
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/allison-pearson-learnt-great-pause/
How many of us had any idea that we were so heavily dependent on drugs from India, or that Indian pharmaceutical companies source 70 per cent of their ingredients from Chinese factories? I certainly didn’t. Clearly, it was utter madness not to be making our own because, if the worst ever happened, we’d be desperately scrabbling around to get our hands on vital supplies.
Well, the worst did happen. And the UK was at the mercy of long-distance supply chains whose links blew apart when Wuhan, a city we’d never even heard of, unleashed a pandemic on the world. As a direct consequence, because we were in a competition to obtain PPE from Asia, there were valiant British medics in ICUs and dedicated drivers on buses and staff in care homes who got terribly sick, and even died. It was a brutal wake-up call. Turns out there was a high price to be paid for becoming dependent on cheap foreign stuff. Who knew?
The conventional wisdom that the United Kingdom, her once proud manufacturing base sadly eroded, could survive on services alone was left looking unforgivably foolish. During lockdown, we learnt to make things again. There was the most remarkable renaissance in native ingenuity, whether it was my friend Caroline, who started baking bread for her whole Essex village, or the Mercedes Formula 1 team fast-tracking a breathing device for corona patients. Brilliant researchers at Oxford University beat the rest of Europe to start trials on volunteers of a Covid-19 vaccine. Everywhere you looked, Britons were doing it for themselves.
In NZ we have been on a let’s make money from services and dairy and tourism haven’t we? Not able to make our own soap for a while, Dunedin factory closed down and we got it from Australia. It’s something to do with Ricardo an economist who had the thought it would be more efficient if countries concentrated on trading in goods that arose from their natural resources or something. Of course that didn’t take into account the people who lived in each country who did and made something else for their living. We were externalities. It seems like thinking from the playpen by someone too unknowing about real life to be trusted to feed the cat. Ricardo didn’t institute the practices that we have now though. If he knew what had been done in his name I wonder about his reaction?
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