2018 will see Unite Union campaigning to rewrite all new collective agreements to ensure that all workers benefit from the planned increase in the minimum wage to $20 an hour by April 1, 2021.
I have participated in, and written about, politics for close to 40 years, but in all that time I can honestly say I have never witnessed anything like Jacinda Ardern’s first media conference as Labour Leader.
I live in a very blue part of New Zealand but even there people have been coming up to me, people I know who vote blue, to say that they feel hopeful about this new Government. I am glad, I am proud but I am also very aware that over the next few years we must deliver for New Zealand and New Zealanders. That is our biggest challenge and we accept it.
If the Minister is ever to break out of the ‘Yes Minister’ straightjacket in mental health, he must turn to the community, to service users and to coalface mental health workers for his advice (and by that we don’t mean a raft of self-interested psychiatrists currently employed by DHBs around the country).
New Zealand’s first couple (is that what we call them?) have plans for a well deserved summer holiday, but I also think they need to re-invent a famous Labour Party tradition.
Self-assisted suicide – which is what we are really discussing here, not the far more sterilised ‘euthanasia’, will become a means to a neoliberal end in NZ.
If you are serious about changing welfare in NZ Carmel, then end the punitive debt and crushing punishment that is dealt out to those on Welfare. The bullshit need for the disabled to send in letters annually for disabilities that can’t be ‘cured’. The penalty interest rates put on welfare overpayments, the culture of fear that alienates and the staff who refuse to inform beneficiaries of what their actual rights and entitlements are.
The current Green Party are locked into middle class identity politics and middle class environmentalism while Labour are too frightened to use the power of the State to intervene well beyond the timid measures currently being proposed.
I never believed it would happen – I agree with Heather du-Plessis Allan?!?
Her latest column is right.
Kinda.
We have Police and Intelligence Agencies stepping well outside the law and not getting punished for it.