Political analysis and commentary shaping the progressive debate in Aotearoa New Zealand, focused on power, policy, and accountability.
One of the clear threads is the move to a greater reliance on the complex stigmatizing regime of supplementary hard to access add-on means-tested assistance. Core benefits are not enough to live on and low wages are far too low.
IT’S OFFICIAL – there is now no prospect of this government living up to its promises of introducing “transformational” change. Thanks to Grant Robertson, the Labour-NZ First-Green Government will, with one exception, be fundamentally indistinguishable from the Clark-Cullen ministry of 1999-2008.
The frigates Te Mana and Te Kaha are a huge drain on the taxpayer. They cost hundreds of millions of dollars a year in running costs and regular upgrades. The current electronics upgrade is now priced at a whopping $639 million.
Good news! The Labour-led Government will introduce legislation to “legalise medicinal cannabis”, this side of Christmas. Bad news! Based on early hints about the content of the reform, patients are fearful about whether the changes will go far enough and whether they will have to continue to resort to criminal activity.
There’s been quite a lot of mainstream media attention on the Bitcoin phenomenon recently. And while any amount of prognostication about whether its runaway increases in value represent a bubble can be found pretty much wherever one cares to look, there’s one aspect of the present Bitcoin boom that I think’s been somewhat under-discussed.
It is with great concern that the manipulation of rosters to deny staff alternative holidays at Restaurant Brands has been confirmed to be so widespread that it must have been company policy at a senior level.
IMAGINE THE REACTION if Finance Minister, Grant Robertson, announced a broad-ranging, government-sponsored seminar on progressive economics chaired by Yanis Varoufakis. Vilified and demonized by EU bankers and politicians for his heterodox economic ideas, Varoufakis resigned as Greece’s Finance Minister rather than impose yet another of the European Central Bank’s crushing economic diktats on his impoverished homeland.
The exposure of the theft of alternative holidays – otherwise known as lieu days – by the Wendy’s corporation has opened up a pandora’s box of holiday theft allegations across this and other industries.
Last week Trade Minister David Parker said “it’s not fair that we subjugate ourselves to the interests of the one per cent” and promised to tame the “excesses of globalised capital”.
One of the most commonly parroted cliches from the rightwing of politics; “throwing money at the problem” – usually with the add-on; ” – doesn’t solve anything”. Except, of course, when it comes to tax-cuts. Then it’s not so much “throwing money” at middle class and affluent voters – as labelling it a “reward”