Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well- warmed, and well-fed.
Herman Melville
TDB has been warning since Luxon became leader that he was planning to privatise welfare.
He was already singing Bill English’s Social Investment model which spawned Oranga Tamariki when he became leader, he then went to a UK Right Wing Think Tank who specialise in privatising social services to gave a speech and now right when NZ has one of the lowest unemployment rates ever, Luxon targets the weakest group to bully and just puts the boot in.
He is selling the crack of the whip by constantly repeating the use of sanctions to cut welfare.
He’s whining up resentment of young people on welfare despite not being aware the numbers he’s attacking include ill, sick and disabled youth.
He’s threatening welfare sanctions on the disabled, the ill and the sick.
That’s the kind of needless spite masquerading as tough love that get National Party supporters sexually aroused.
They love this shit. The more punitive, the better.
It doesn’t matter if it’s counter productive, in fact the MORE counter productive, the more excited National Party voters get.
Remember the State House Meth scam?
National used false science to breach Housing NZs own regulations to throw State Tenants out on the street. In the middle of a housing crisis, National created a homelessness crisis by throwing hundreds of State Tenants onto the streets for false Meth harm contamination readings.
No one got sacked, no one was punished, fuck it, Paula Bennett who was the Minister responsible gets to play charades on fucking TVNZ now!
For National supporters, when it comes to social policy, all that matters is that someone they hate suffers, regardless of the cost and regardless of the counter productivity of it all.
We-make-people-we-hate-suffer-no-matter-the-cost is actually right wing dogma.
Here’s how it works.
National will take $50million from MSD, give it to 3rd party contractors who will get a bonus by removing people off the list.
The 2 ways those young people get off the list is if they get a job OR they are sanctioned off the list.
You can all see the game being played here.
Taxpayer money to 3rd party contractors who get paid when they find them a job or they are cut off welfare.
National want to drive sick people back to work, that’s how this country will lead into the future???
This sort of bullshit shouldn’t be allowed to fly when there is so much academic research that this draconian welfare approach doesn’t work!
Pretending that bashing young people on welfare is the solution to rebuilding from covid or is a way to combat poverty or inequality or the housing crisis is just such inane bullshit!
Using the excitement of the crack of the whip to smuggle through a vast privatisation of welfare agenda is going to spook the centre all the way back to Jacinda.
National trying to out ACT ACT on welfare privatisation is just too extreme for the electorate.
I think this is a terrible strategic blunder for National, they aren’t seeing how this is a demographic battle they can’t win while giving all those young people a reason to vote against National in 2023.
This was a dumb move by Luxon.
Increasingly having independent opinion in a mainstream media environment which mostly echo one another has become more important than ever, so if you value having an independent voice – please donate here.
If you can’t contribute but want to help, please always feel free to share our blogs on social media
If you are a young person, you should already have enough reasons not to vote for National (unless you already have over $5000000 in assets, then they probably are the party for you), you shouldn’t need the promise of an extra kicking to remind you not to.
Pretty bewildering for those who agree with Melville, or know his truth having lived both sides of what he says for any length of time. We’ve got LINO and this crap to choose from. Your fundamentally divisive agenda to choose from. Time for something new.
Privatising welfare? Be that the case, health is definitely going the same way. Prisons definitely and probably child services. Luxons logic, it’s your job to take care of you!
If only Labour weren’t so useless, National wouldn’t stand a shit show!
they tried it with prisons, and it was an absolute failure.
X-ray. Health has been going the same way for a while now. We’re still fairly ok in emergencies, or car smash-ups, but some specific services have been abolished, or no longer exist, or have been flogged off to the now-obsolete PHO’s. Don’t forget that that Saint Bill English wanted to introduce an overnight stay of $50 a night in public hospitals. That would have broken the parents of kiddies with bronchiolitis admitted every winter; the RSV virus has also been overloading neonatal and paediatric wards. The temperature’s beneath zero in my little hallway tonight, and I imagine it’s rather worse for folk sleeping in cars and under bridges. Hard to heat a car or a riverbank. Hard to heat a home with rapacious electricity costs.
All a bit more bullshit from Aloha Loafer Luxon.
He wouldn’t know what a decent days work is.
STP Really, Luxon has never done a days work in his life. So Starting with Unilever in Wellington in 1993 and WORKING his way up through the company until becoming President of the company in Canada in 2011 doesn’t count as work. And we haven’t even started with Air NZ. You talk like a true tool. What have you done?.
Yes a dumb move by a dumb wanna be PM. Having worked in the area of Hauora (who are currently already doing this mahi and have done so for a very long time) and NZ has already been there and done that under National this is a giant step back into the past. Also Luxons’ use of words shows he’s not suitable to be our PM s when he say things like powering up, it sounds like he is talking about an airplane not people. And he refers to those on welfare as there will be,’ no free ride’ someone needs to clip his wings or ground his plane so to speak.
Maybe he can get MSD to do some ‘training’ for Ramraid-Smash & Grab crash course! 6 weeks of training!
Get a learners licence, perks, ciggies, alcohol and a tour of the local cop shop. A visit from OT and then back behind the wheel!
Being a sole trader, self employed contractor, even IRD will give them some help with their GST and how to run a business and pay the correct amount of tax!
Aloha Te Puke is onto something here!
I think we are the easiest country in the OECD to start a business in so let’s all become contractors – people get together and buy out the government? Or contract to do the gummint’s work for the people, themselves and not pay some foreign gouger.
As for ram raids etc. People forget that to bring off a successful crime takes planning, training, sneakiness, commitment – it’s work – and we’re seeing successful crimes. We just need to turn the young guys into entrepreneurs, away from the dark side. Perhaps take note of Master Yoda – ‘No! Try not. Do or do not. There is no try.’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kRAE_2BPB0
These crims have proved they can do illegal work, now they must turn from the dark side and do legal work for their own sake and for the sake of the country. We can’t become a nation like in 14th century London can we?
London in the later Middle Ages…As often as citizens observed church-mandated fasts and repented their sins, they hired prostitutes, cut purses, bribed wardmoots (small courts), and threw corpses into sewers.
https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/sin-city-thievery-prostitution-and-murder-in-medieval-london/
What are medieval crimes?
People not working hard, cheating on one’s spouses, and being drunk and disorderly were also considered to be punishable medieval crimes. Murder was also a very common crime in medieval times, high treason, heresy, and witchcraft were also the types of crimes that had strict punishments.
Crime & Punishment – Medieval Chronicles
It appears that making too many things illegal and having a death sentence frequently used, only encourages covert crime as well as bold in-your-face crime. Enabling people to get work enabling living conditions to enjoy, personal relationships of a committed and positive character is likely to result in a thriving society respectful of the golden rules that good society would aspire to.
If we compare NZ young criminals’ work to Brierley’s raids on law-abiding businesses, it is an interesting comparison eh! Moving away from crime and fraud (negative) to useful trades (positive) is what we need not reversion to poverty, anarchy and everyone for himself. But that’s where we are going, and more abandonment by the collective state to one run for a privileged cabal will take us back towards 14th century England with added scientific advances bringing forth rockets into space, and interference with the human brain and physical being from experiments allied to those during the Nazi era.
Our humanity is already being undermined; this will continue and grow beyond common imagining. Nazism and Cambodia’s decimation of that country’s people, they happened and if we don’t watch out, they will just be precursors. Actually it is important that we have less science and up philosophy and the study of humans, not forgetting ourselves.
Alexander Pope 1688-1744: ‘The proper study of Mankind is Man.’
(After Shakespeare, Pope is the second-most quoted author in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, some of his verses having entered common parlance (e.g. “damning with faint praise” or “to err is human; to forgive, divine”).
Complete and utter drivel Greywarbler.
Why, because Greywarbler has the intellect to type more than 5 words
Unlike your verbal diarrhea.
Contradiction in terms there.
Perfect (the top link)
Historyextra.com values my privacy so I just have to used my imagination as to what a techno-medieval state would actually be like…hang on, there’s a matching description here: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/6/24/gaza-blockade-15-years
luxon, ( And seymour! )is, in my humble opinion, a narcissistic sociopath, or perhaps even a psychopath. He’s a gleaming example of who must never, ever, be allowed to be anywhere near having power over we, the general population. Particularly those of us most at risk.
He alarms me when he displays, to me at least, all the extremely unfortunate nuances of a white Christian fundamentalist bible basher from Alabama.
Trust me. You really don’t want luxon, or God forbid david seymour, anywhere near the powerless victims of nearly 40 years neoliberal psychopathy.
Read this. Sometimes RNZ hits the nail on the head. 21 March 2022
“Many CEOs across the globe are psychopaths well-adjusted to the capitalist system, focused on profit and lacking empathy for ordinary people, says clinical psychologist Dr Ramani Durvasula.
Narcissism with Dr Ramani Durvasula”
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/afternoons/audio/2018835057/narcissism-with-dr-ramani-durvasula
RNZ. 31 July 2022
Dr Sam Vaknin – the global narcissist database.
“Israeli writer and professor of psychology, Dr Sam Vaknin, tells Sunday Morning he has developed a type of therapy that may help lessen a patient’s need to shore up a grandiose ‘false self’, a core trait of the disorder. But the pathological personality itself he says is “immutable”.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/sunday/audio/2018851537/dr-sam-vaknin-the-global-narcissist-database
The ‘war on the poor’ has not ceased in 40 years–Roger Douglas traitorous 1984 lot swung a wrecking ball through NZ on behalf of capital and then blamed the thousands of sacked manufacturing and infrastructure workers for their own plight while never retraining or looking after any of the discarded.
Helen Clark had her “Jobs Jolt” where beneficiaries were cut off if they moved back to provincial or hapu areas from a city, Ruth Richardson had the MOAB benefit slash–which officials warned her reduced payments to below what was needed for adequate nutrition! but she bloody went ahead anyway, and those cuts have never been proportionally reinstated to this day. So Bomber is correct–natzos really enjoy putting the slipper into dirty filthy bennies.
MSD/WINZ has ruined thousands of working class peoples credit ratings and established huge debts for emergency housing and grants for food and dental–the least we can do in this country surely is feed everyone, but no, not as far as MSD is concerned.
Paula Bennett was mentored by arch neo lib Paula Rebstock, (a women into small Govt. but happy to take $3000 per diem from the NZ taxpayer for consultancy and inquiries), and sent to the USA to study the draconian Wisconsin Model, and she certainly got the message of how to punitively treat NZ beneficiaries.
So Baldrick needs to be slapped down immediately for joining in this trail of shit and punishment on NZ’s vulnerable. The only problem is much of the Labour Caucus probably supports him!
I think they all go to the same “church”, ahem..
Amen!
if he wants to cut people receiving govt money, pay the low paid decently his mates have received massive indirect state subsidies to top up low wage earners income allowing them to continue to pay peanuts…in effect getting the taxpayers to pay their wage bill for them..that’s where the expenditure goes not on the minority of drunken couch potatoes…but on helping under employed/ low paid working kiwis…but try hammering that into the head of any nat….especially a shareholder who profits from this stealing of YOUR tax money to subsidise low pay kiwi business.
A few minutes ago I read about a Chief Executive of Te Pukenga, the failing polytechnic collective, getting paid $700k for peddling his failed business model and running the polytechs into the ground. And young people starting out in life are the problem here? This is the game, people with no power or responsibility or experience or finances are blamed for everything, whereas these entitled chumps in power suits fail time and again and are lauded for their hard work and courage. These executive ‘chiefs’ and their enablers are the kernel of the problem, they are a waste of taxpayer money and worse they try to justify their existence with their ridiculous bureaucratic pantomime while thieving public resources right out in the open, giving the plum jobs and access to their own kind and projecting any incompetence or wrongdoing onto others.
That reminds me Ethan of the failed computer set ups around the country, millions spent and the manager of it all is too big to fail apparently. Anyway the ones I’ve read of may get the bums rush but with a pocketful of readies. I remember one from Dunedin and the word Swan and $6 million? I’ll check on google and see what I come up with…
https://www.odt.co.nz/news/dunedin/it-costs-fell-after-swann-sacking
8/8/2022 https://www.odt.co.nz/tag/michael-swann – Michael Swann has left prison today a free man, albeit one with a $6 million pecuniary order.
Another facet that you refer to is ‘failed business model’. I feel that some people come with a business model which they sell as a great idea, and they get the job because they have the expertise to instal some new procedure or practice used or trialled overseas.
Then there is that cocksure woman Joane Harrison’ from the UK who diddled a number of central and local government entities here and got jailed for a short time, and brought the Auditor-General into disrepute, then went back to UK and changed her name and I think is back in the spa pool of management again.
While working as a manager for the Ministry of Transport, Harrison defrauded it of more than $700,000 and was sentenced to three years and seven months’ jail in early 2017.18/10/2021
Police lose case to stop fraudster Joanne Harrison keeping …
https://www.stuff.co.nz › national › crime › police-lose-ca…\
Auditor-General resigns over fraud investigation | RNZ News
https://www.rnz.co.nz › news › political › auditor-general..
3/08/2017 — Auditor-General Martin Matthews has resigned due to a critical report into his handling of a major fraud case when he led the Transport Ministry .
‘Harrison’s’ past frauds: https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/stuff-circuit/300034751/she-made-our-lives-hell-transport-ministry-fraudster-joanne-harrisons-former-inlaw-says-exposure-long-overdue
Big money spent but not big, good outcomes – just the opposite. So plenty of room to play in if you know how and you’re in management or consultancy.
Agree Ethan Woke,
Yet another example of this failed Ardern Labour Government.
when these guys all drink the same 20 year old scotch, in the same bars, and know all the “right” people, there is only failing up as an option to life.
Agreed standalone, yet another example of the right wing Key neoliberalism National party having promoted corporate shareholder corruption.
Don’t you mean Lange neoliberalism?
Ethan Woke. Some years ago I worked as a consultant evaluating a specific polytech’s courses. Time after time we found that employers, eg Conservation Dept, deemed certain courses as not meeting their requirements, they wanted higher level tertiary qualifications. Polytech students going into debt via student loans don’t know thus, and whether university courses are now of sufficiently high level I don’t know. Obviously some must be, but globally universities seem to be struggling with their own raison d’etre. What particularly irked me was older mature students, unemployed or semi-employed, trying to upskill at their own expense, and while acquiring valuable knowledge, not necessarily improving their employment prospects.
Check this out. Russell Brand talks to Matt Taibbi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Taibbi about governmental lies, mis-information and dis-information. For example, it’s the poor and those barely surviving on fuck all on meager benefits as the cost of basic survival sky rockets who are the problem. Not, the now nine Kiwi-As billionaires and the four foreign owned banks who take $6 Billion and more out of our economy in Net Profits annually.
Every time you see a politician talk, you now know! A lobbyist has got to them first.
Dislike the reference to the remarkable idiot Russell Brand. Goes hunting clicks in the Fascist Right waste. I’ve just named a very lively cat who comes around here Mohammed Al-Tabby.
This wasn’t a dumb move by Luxon. Well, it was dumb because it is patently dumb but out isn’t dumb in that it will get the dumb Nat supporters and right wingers all excited.
All it will need now to get them really orgasmic is to have other dumb person, like Mark Mitchell, to say they’re going to build more prisons to fill with people on welfare who aren’t disabled.
Right wingers all excited…read below.
” This was a dumb move by Luxon ”
Not hard to reach that conclusion Bomber but remember Luxon is a spokesperson for the nasties caucus who will support this approach and the same people who believe Ruth Richardson is a saint to neo liberal economics.
When they start saying stuff like the ” dignity” of work over welfare they forget the economic realities of their idea of dignity which is simply moving people off welfare into a job that pays starvation wages and long hours to make up the wages that should be survivable on 40-45 hours a week.
For most of us ” dignity ” is a privilege taken away first by Roger and Ruth then continued ever since.
” For most of us ” dignity ” is a privilege taken away first by Roger and Ruth then continued ever since ”
Apologies I am fighting the effects of Covid and dignity is a right not a privilege.
We should have a maximum of 3 years for anyone within the age range of 16 to 65 that is able to collect any form of welfare.
If they use up the 3 years limit, hopefully they can get help from family, friends or starve (Let them eat cake)
The same 3 year limit should also apply to anyone living in social housing. This state shouldn’t provide accommodation to live in for life! The government won’t need to build any new homes.
zelda unsuccessful troll of the week….hi there gaby.
That’s one side.
Now –
on the other side?
Decent training? Fair work and pay? Affordable homes? Local and national economics that are more future than past?
This is a three way partnership. Time to speak the other parts for a rapidly changing environment.
Can’t? Be hush until you can.
@Zealda
Why stop at 65. If they haven’t saved up enough in kiwisaver, let the wrinklies eat cake as well.
What could possibly go wrong with tough loving Luxon think, except that desperation will call for desperate measures, and consequent increasing crime, and the need for more billion dollar jails, and the 100k per prisoner per year to pay for it…oh I see now. New Somalia here we come.
I can see this country ending up having violence and a revolution. If what national proposes does not foment a violent public backlash, then nothing will. The guillotine on the steps of the beehive for national and its supporters anyone ?
Bring it on, unscrewed wooden bed legs at 3 paces! Let’s do it the National party way!
That’s simply dreadful.
With Luxon at the helm I can vote National as they can only be an improvement on our current leaders who are taking us nowhere except down . That said I am not impressed by the way he has pushed his young people work scheme as his number one cause. It is important and certainly needs attention but I would have like to hear National were going to move heaven and earth to take 180000 children out of poverty and save the coutry from another 10 years of gang growth / ram raids / teenage pregnancy / drug abuse and a continuous stream of prison growth with its cost and waste of human potential. If I thought this would happen under Labour I would hold my nose and vote for them in but I feel I could not believe any promises they made now .
a very very sad policy
Yes another Labour Government mess.
You mean Te Pukenga? Yes very sad. Like many many Labour policies.
The benefit rules Luxon is complaining about havent changed since the Nats were last in power. Says a lot about the Nats, but even more about Labour.
Luxon’s the fall guy. He’s been paid to be. I’m not sweating. This shit just doesn’t fly with the young voters of age and coming of age. Have you heard NATs latest candidate in Tauranga committed greivious bodily harm, at age 16 to a 13 year old boy? Uffindel. Article us on Stuff. Bullies, the lot of them. They’ll fall off
The Lex Luthor of lies, the Marquis of Avarice, put the boot in, chainsaw Chris Luxon, loves punching down on the more vulnerable, be they the bottomfeeders on minimum wage, or unemployed youth, but now Tauranga anti violence and law and order MP Sam Uffindell, has a literal track record of punching down on the vulnerable, when it turns out he was expelled from school for doing exactly that, beating up a smaller child with wooden club… nice one Sam! Who will the next National candidate be… the beast of Blenheim, or one of the broomstick boys perhaps?
ps – Red have got the cred, while Blue is in the poo.
Comments are closed.