Big business just wants to cut any government expenditure that isn’t going to directly subsidise their profit making activities. This has led to a slashing of the number of people receiving a benefit as a percentage of the working age population from 13% to 8 % when unemployment only fell on average from 8 to 6%.
Why would your readers outside The King Country want to read about The Lines Companys dodgey pricing? Because the government wants to extend the Peak Load Pricing Model to all lines companys throughout NZ.
Let’s see then…23 years from now …2040AD… 8 General Elections gone, boomers but a memory and all the whiles amidst an endless series of social, political and environmental disasters… a terrible tidal wave… a flood…wars… plagues… famines… hell…even cats and dogs living together in peace and harmony!
Jacinda appeals directly to the generation who don’t vote and she has built a huge social media presence. Andrew Little is not so shallow and needy that he has any problem sharing the lime light to reach out to electorates Labour have lost.
I am developing more and more dislike of our personality politics and the kind of class-conscious elitism that comes in the guise of most, if not all, “isms” that drive our traditional political parties in New Zealand.
The grim reality that policy is built for baby boomers and the rich is blindingly obvious to 18 year olds who have a cynical view of politics. The difficulty in getting them to engage is that they are actually right, the system is built by those who profit from it and numerically that’s baby boomers.
With shorter life spans, it is unethical to allow Maori, Pacifica, working class and unhealthier generations to wait two more years to get to Super so National can bribe the electorate with tax cuts that benefit the rich.
English has clearly fumbled Superannuation and rather be seen as being too weak to change things, he’s decided to go all in and signal a rise in eligibility to 67.
What English has in fact created are neoliberal welfare state agencies that are more aggressive than a Police Dog on meth. The beneficiaries are terrified of talking to any government agency now because that information goes to everyone and suddenly the beneficiary who is asking for help from Housing NZ are then facing a bill from WINZ for a relationship they didn’t disclose.
In one of the more curious admissions by the Ministry of Health’s Mental Health mogul John Crawshaw, when discussing the ‘consultation’, he stated “Ninety-nine per cent of the time they get it right, but occasionally there will be outcomes” in reference to the 167,000 annual mental health ‘treatments’ by Govt-funded services.
By my calculator’s reckoning, that means they are admitting to about 1,700 mistakes annually.
How many of the 570 deaths from suicide annually in New Zealand are amongst those ‘mistakes’?