Of all the policies to burn, why the Christ wasn’t repealing the Children’s Commissioner OT oversight one of them?
I like Chippy’s Bread and Butter politics.
It’s about delivery of service over ideology.
Labour had become bogged down in believing bureaucratic changes in the background was a means of delivering outcomes rather than actually raising taxes and paying for more social infrastructure!
Chippy has to understand that 2023 is a debate over State Capacity.
National and ACT want to amputate the State while Labour, Greens and Māori Party want to build State capacity!
The 30 year neoliberal experiment cut the NZ State to the bone and the political project for each National and ACT Government is to strangle off revenue to the State so the State can’t redistribute it. That way citizens don’t become ‘reliant’ on providing subsidy to every day living, because once people get used to having services that work, they demand it politically.
This story about Hospital capacity spells out we don’t just need more drs and more nurses, we need more hospitals!
It’s good to see ideology like gold plated holiday scams for Wellington White Collar workers, free speech culture wars we can’t win and allowing 3 Waters to become an existential race war get jettisoned in favour of lifting the minimum wage and giving NZ on Air and RNZ more money to produce more NZ content.
Delivery over ideology.
It’s called Bread and Butter politics because most woke middle class activists are gluten free vegans and will run a mile from actual bread or butter.
Great.
Now we’ve dumped the middle class virtue signals let’s get to the real issue, Left Universalism!
- Free Public Transport.
- Free Lunches and Breakfasts in all schools.
- Free Dental.
- GST off Food and essentials like toothpaste, toilet paper, condoms and period products.
- Declare a cost of living emergency and announce the Government backing a third player into the Supermarket Duopoly as outlined by the Commerce Commission to permanently break the price gouging duopoly.
- Rent freeze until February 2024.
- Seize half the Golf Courses under the public works act and build high density social housing and housing available as rent to own for 1st time home buyers. No property speculators would be allowed to buy.
- Upgrade the Military spending to 3% GDP to include more patrol boats, more space defence, more civil defence capacity and a new drone Air Force.
- Force trucks onto rail using punitive penalties.
- Implement the Welfare Expert Advisory welfare recommendations alongside the CPAG working for families tax credit reforms.
- Move tax bracket and provide first $5000 tax free.
- Fund new services via a Financial Transaction Tax, new top tax rate on people earning over $250 000, Bank windfall tax, Land tax, Inheritance tax and a sugar tax.
If it’s Bread and Butter politics, then it’s left economics and if it’s left economics then it is the taxing of the few to benefit the many.
What is more fitting than taxing the richest to feed every kid in every NZ school?
Watching some of the virtue signalling nonsense being dumped was great but it made me wonder why one of the dumbest and most corrosive decisions made by this Government wasn’t also dumped?
Why the hell wasn’t the decision to end the Children’s Commissioner’s oversight of children abused in state care dumped?
Every single party in Parliament opposed ending the oversight, yet Carmel Sepuloni went ahead with it anyway.
The defence that the Ministry told Carmel to use was that the Children’s Commissioner was only a temporary oversight until a new oversight was built.
Now that is true, the original Frankenstein monster National carved out of the old CYFs into Oranga Tamariki only had this Children’s Commissioner oversight as a temporary measure, but one would have thought in light of the Royal Commission inquiry into historic abuse in State Care that the lesson learnt was more oversight is necessary, not less!
This new oversight is this box ticking board inside the Education Review Office who have suddenly burst upon the scene with a press release interview stating how well they are watching over Oranga Tamariki AT THE SAME TIME as I have been highlighting the stupidity of appointing them to this position.
Coincidence?
Why dump all this stupid policy and not include the most dangerous one?
Chippy has burnt the silly away, now let’s get down to brass tacks here, the poor are suffering while the rich are insulated. Let’s start working on universal left policy that brings everyone up.
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The protection of the reputation of the new deputy PM must come before that of the children who come under the protection of OT .
On the button Trevor.
She was the most useless minister who didn’t implement even one of the recommendations of the working group that looked into benefits.
Good question. I was asking myself why the ERO chappie issuing the apologia was a lawyer chappie who previously worked for the MSD. I’d have thought educationalists would be the obvious sort of persons to be guiding education, the theorists and philosophers, and experienced hands-on teaching practitioners, both today’s and yesterday’s.
Of course the Commissioner for Children should be retained, and Oranga Tamariki should also be staffed by experienced educational and medical professionals rather than rely on over-paid ‘consultants’ who may not have in-depth track records of anything very much at all. Labour’s determination to axe the Commissioner for Children does not stand up to close scrutiny. It is a disgrace.
+100
Yet another demographic group Labour is managing to alienate – especially as many of OT/CYFS victims are coming of age, and their former caregivers have also been doing it tough and who have been expected to grovel just to get some basic support.
Snot Rock soince. We may need another round of highly paid, and generally unqualified EY/Deloitte type consultants though to clip the ticket and attempt to tell them (Labour) the bleeding bloody obvious in this space going forward
Bread and Butter sounds much better than flip flop, what a gentle run Mr Hipkins is getting from the media team of $55 million.
Most of these policies aren’t even being scrapped they are being kept warm for reintroduction after the election if the electorate proves to have the memory of a goldfish and votes Labour back in.
This rebranding is incredibly cynical.
Typical right wing bullshit, damned if you do damned if you don’t.
Other way around and it would be brilliant. Fuck these opinions are tiresome.
Don’t be too hard kccc – ‘memory like goldfish’ so voting Labour back. On looking again at our position I think NZ left has tried to do something, ineptly, and painted the floor but ended up stuck in a corner, and who knows when the paint will dry and we can get out without messing things up very messily? Can someone send in a drone with some chips and water for us here – the drones we are?
Martyn has it backwards. ‘Raising taxes and paying for more social infrastructure’ IS ideological — it’s the opposite of neoliberalism.
Without dumping neoliberalism, any ‘delivery of service’ will end up coming from a transnational Wall Street firm — and citizens will pay through the nose for the privatised services!
The Culture War nonsense ultimately makes no difference to economic policy — which is why Wall Street was happily funding both sides, while putting the knife into any actual alternatives (Bernie, Trump, Jeremy Corbyn).
As interesting as Martyn’s policy suggestions may be, there’s a fat chance of them all being promised by this government.
Such mild ideas are probably too left-wing even for the Left Faction of Labour these days, which seems to be in a state of collapse since Cunliffe and Dalȝiel were forced out.
On the Child Welfare issue, ‘Chippy’ could simply send the Ministry’s responsibilities back to the Social Welfare Department, as it was in the past (after it was taken off the Education Department). He could promise to reappoint a new ‘watchdog’ commission in his next term.
The Extremist Hate Speech Centre run by seemingly squeamish sociologists at VUW ?
Keep bringing this up Martyn reinforcing Susan St John and her compatriots who are trying to round off our description from merely ‘man’ to humane and ethical and kindly.
Grey Warbler. Hear ! hear ! Keep warbling too.
Plus – de-criminalise. Please. Please just get it done.
There’s no sense in the right cutting public sector jobs if they’re going to keep benefits because it means that everyone else loses. More lost time in hospitals, more less money for the health budget, more of less of everything
And there is no sense in cutting benefits, because they’ll lose votes. Theoretically crime would increase and that would cost the taxpayer more
Why the Christ wasn’t repealing the Children’s Commissioner OT oversight one of them?
Because middle class punters don’t care.
Andrew. Unfortunately, you’re probably right. Keeping themselves in power, is far more important to this tawdry bunch, than doing the job they were elected to do. But when it’s at-risk vulnerable children being sidelined, and their biggest betrayer, hard-hearted Carmel, being promoted, it is sickening.
We all know the prison stats, and the circumstances leading to people ending up in goal – but hey, it’s more big bucks for Serco or whoever else these cynical opportunistic politicians bring in to run the prison services.
55 Shoting in Hawks Bay in the last 12 months is this what you call under control