In case you missed it , at the very bottom of a recent RNZ item on what’s happening in the housing market was this small paragraph:
“Community housing providers are putting the brakes on building desperately needed homes because there’s no guarantee of government funding after June next year.The government pays rent subsidies to community housing providers, which they rely on to operate.
But the funding is soon to dry up, leaving providers in the lurch, delaying construction on consented land that’s ready to build.”
That EVERYONE has a right to be adequately housed is embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which we not only signed as a country but actually helped to draft in 1948
Our then Prime Minister Peter Fraser (pictured) was instrumental in writing Article 25 which reads
” Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.”
Yes times have changed especially in the use of gender language when writing , BUT it not only speaks to values we once held to be true and actively pursued as a nation it challenges us to be better than we currently are.
What we are seeing with the wealth funded policies of the present right wing coalition government by their zealous promotion of the economics of selfishness is the undermining of the duty of care and responsibility we all have to all our fellow citizens
It doesn’t have to be this way.
The Labour Party needs to completely abandon neoliberalism as a failed economic strategy and return to its roots when Peter Fraser and Michael Joseph Savage led their party and believed that government should control the economy and not just be a bystander approving and encouraging the machinations of big business.
Because what matters in the end is he tangata he tangata he tangata . The people, the people, the people.
A We society. Not a Me society
Bryan Bruce is one of New Zealand’s most important and respected documentary makers.
Personnal responsibly is what National promote.To do that you need to to look after yourself not rely on the government unless you have health or mental reasons outside your control.
Get a job ,feed your children ,get them to school, stop smoking and abusing drugs or alcohol,give to society and try to improve your neighborhood.
how dare anyone be fired from a job because their employer decided to cut staff and invest in (generally useless) technology instead
National and their ilk promote every man for himself its divisive Trev I don’t know what planet you are on, but did you miss out on fruit and milk in schools in your home country.
Frozen milk in the winter curdled milk in summer no fruit though.
So why am I paying taxes Trev when I’m getting fuck all.
There are schools and hospitals for you and your family., there are roads and airports to help travel,there will be a pension when you get old and help if you lose your job and all is paid for by tax
You say the Labour Party needs to completely abandon neoliberalism as a failed economic strategy.
That won’t happen, Bryan.
Therefore, it is the left that need to abandon the Labour Party.
I can never understand when people say we need to abandon neoliberalism why they don’t outline an alternative.
Google says neoliberalism is defined by its belief in free markets.
What replaces free markets? What does Bryan mean when he says that governments should control the economy and not big business?
Bryan Bruce says we need to move back to the days of Michael Joseph Savage but we can’t.
Nobody wants to go back to the tariffs and subsidies of that era.
“it’s belief” – lol. liberalism believes in freedom. the neo part just adds “new freedom” aka to do whatever I want aka gangsterism.
Michael S
You recite that like a chant or a prayer. Here is another one from the Church of England which all of Labour should recite on their knees daily for ever and then we might forgive them for betraying their avowed calling of backing the workers and ordinary people.
Almighty and most merciful Father, We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep, We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts, We have offended against thy holy laws,
We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us. And grant, O most merciful Father, for his sake; That we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life.
Morning Prayer General Confession
The Order for Morning Prayer daily throughout the year
The Church of England
https://www.churchofengland.org › printable › print
Buy some secondhand Catherine Cookson books from the many on Trademe and read about the hard times that poor people lived and the pressures they put upon each other in their ways that crossed the spectrum from good to bad. They were under the thumb of the careless wealthy or titled and often couldn’t read or write which made for hard times. But the need to think about and critique what one learns, and when it is appropriate to spend time learning about things of no immediate use is now not considered.
It may be that higher learning could be enjoyable as a pastime as going to the pub, even combined; basic learning and skills and into real working life needs to be the aim now. Not endless discussions on why teachers can’t wave a magic wand, or a cane, and can’t turn out clones all with the knees clean, and if girls whether we should see knees or not etc ad infinitum. And the craze amongst education development for changing classrooms to match theory about ways of learning. Meantime the children have been sidelined to be divided into battery or free-range chickens. When they get out in the world they may have their heads chopped off by the immensely powerful denizens that run the world as in Chicken Run!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhwtuwcsU9s Chicken Pie
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BIai7KDd8g Ginger’s speech
But we are sinking towards Cookson’s Jarrow mixed with Dickens’ Bleak House! WTF in the so-smart 21st century. Have we not been applying our minds effectively but ineffectually instead. Or Georgette Heyer; Young sons of wealthy lords, if not themselves, were indulged in gambling. The debts to that were regarded as top criteria and the bills owing to their tailors, wine merchants and other traders were lowest consideration. Heyer writes about life at the upper level of society and how servants might be lucky to have an afternoon off once a month and lived sometimes, in cold garrets where they rose at 5am and with no bathroom facilities, having to carry their and the masters’ ‘slops’ down to the midden etc. But that was better than being in the Workhouse.
Catherine Cookson wrote about what life was like there and struggled to achieve a good life all her days, till over 90 years. But her struggle was overcome early in one way as she pushed her way up, but could never overcome her sudden bleeding disease, where a nosebleed might involve a stay in hospital. We now should read about her methods and mind, and her sterling, supportive husband Thomas. We can use them as examples, they won through and left a huge legacy behind, her with over 70 books, and him in his teaching with young men who remembered Cookie (favourably) all their lives, and also for the support, love and encouragement he gave her to overcome depression and write her books which sold by the millions.
Dame Catherine Cookson wrote almost 100 books – which sold more than 123 million copies – and her novels were translated into at least 20 languages.11 Hun 2018
Wor Catherine: Fact and Fiction
The Word, National Centre for the Written Word
https://theworduk.org › exhibitions › past-exhibitions–
More about Catherine C.
…Considered by one historian as the missing link between Dickens and Irvine Welsh, by her critics as refined Mills and Boon, Cookson’s literature is rooted in her dark early life, born in South Shields in 1906, and brought up in the slums of East Jarrow. In 1930, J B Priestley thought the town ‘looked as if it had entered a perpetual penniless bleak Sabbath’.
Cookson wrote about the great, polluted mud flat at Jarrow Slake known as The Gut, the ‘slime-dripping’ arches of Tyne Dock, the cranes of Palmers Shipyard, the built-up riverside of Temple Town and Holborn and its prostitutes, and the collieries of Harton and Whitburn. In her own words, Cookson was ‘a child of the Tyne’ but she escaped to Hastings in 1929.
https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-interview-with-catherine-cookson-1968-online
We can see in our Act and National the same kind of disinterest in fair treatment of people they have decided are null and void? out of their own brains and societal pretensions, with the backing of ephemeral money. (Winnie is just playing a Trickster’s Own-Game. I’ll put up what social anthropologists have gathered about trickster behaviour another time). Yet our world and all in and around it comes back to he tangata – we the powerful are set to take all and leave nothing, like an epic horror film which has been created from the brainfarts of clever
people with imagination and verve for some human activity but not embracing all that could be.
And finally – is it perhaps dangerous for some to divorce ourselves from the rest of our kind in learning towers, and gaze on the others in disassociated dissonance?
Social anthropology is the study of patterns of behaviour in human societies and cultures. It is the dominant constituent of anthropology throughout the United Kingdom and much of Europe, where it is distinguished from cultural anthropology……
Social anthropology – Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Social_anthropology
Please chew a bit on this even if you do spit it out later. We have to make changes and we need to think carefully in a balanced way about what. Nick Clegg writes about the doing down of the Lib Dems in UK in 2010 but I think that concerned politicians keep trying to get back on track when it seems obvious that climate change will not give us time to work through new ways of doing the old. As Rutherford said ‘We haven’t much money so we have to think’. The quote may not be 100% but the meaning is spot on.
The hospitals are useless and run down if you want to see a specialist you have to be really really pushy and exaggerate but your white Trev so you have no fucken idea as usual.
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