Mike Treen spoke with acclaimed US/Palestinian author Dr Baroud who is currently on a speaking tour of New Zealand on why he is going on the Flotilla to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. (See link below)
The government has decided to increase the building of state housing from their extremely modest target of 1000 a year to the still very modest target of 1600 a year over the next four years.
Housing NZ is not being given any extra money to do this.
They will have to borrow on private financial markets at higher rates than the government can borrow money for.
The cost to the government will be more as a result.
Workers have been cheated for 15 years. But it seems that companies are only being required to go back six years to calculate repayments. Why?
WHAT: Auckland Writers’ Festival
WHEN: 15-20 May
WHERE: Aotea Centre
It has been over three years since we first wrote to the company questioning how they calculated annual leave and asking them to fix it. At first, they simply ignored or rejected our arguments out of hand. We then applied for an Employment Relations Authority hearing on the issue.
I explained a few weeks ago that the government had $36 billion in an investment account that could be taken and used to fund the desperate improvements we need in the health sector. They could do this without breaching their self-imposed fiscal responsibility rules.
Three years ago Unite wrote to all our big employers telling them that they had been miscalculating annual leave payments to their employees for years and they needed to fix it.
In the six years to 2017, there were 11,000 cases of migrant exploitation reported to the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE). Of these only 5700 were investigated and 15o prosecuted. The chances of getting caught and prosecuted for migrant exploitation are infinitesimally small. Exploitative and abusive employers just laugh all the way to the bank.
Despite stopping further sales, housing remains one area where the government remains committed to almost a completely market-based solution. For various reasons in this country, housing has become a speculative nightmare with prices beyond what working people can afford.
A group of Chinese students are demanding that the government help them after NZQA have closed their school and discovered that the owner has stolen most of their money.