Is it just me or does this government blame everything on Labour? As we head into another election year, somehow things happening now are still Labour’s fault.
There’s an argument to be made that actions tthe government have taken over the last couple of years may have directly increased the need for people to use this service
Great write up of the potential, thanks! I think the ambiguity is part of my concern. You are right, this has the potential to be a good thing, but most of the detail is yet to come and the devil is in the detail.
I agree that planning for population growth has not been a strong point, and I’m curious to see if something actually comes of this plan.
I’m curious what the impact of this is. I feel like something is slipping through and I’m not quite sure what it is.
It would be election suicide though.
When Labour last went from Opposition to in power, Jacinda became leader 2 months before the election. It depends on how unpopular Luxon (and Hipkins) are leading into the election, I guess.
My bets are on scrubbing of republican names.
I also think the rumours of Trump blowing Bill are what made Trump want to release them all of a sudden, and so we will see something that shows he didn’t do it or it wasn’t Bill, etc (whether faked or not).
I have for a long time been a fan of replacing benefits with a UBI. The idea is that everyone is about as well off as they were before (not a cash injection, you adjust tax rates to balance it out), but they don’t have to do the stupid things WINZ make them do.
This way you save money by downsizing WINZ, you provide a smaller core team that can support the people who want to be there. This gives people the dignity that Qiulae is talking about, without the cash injection that would get hoovered up like you’re talking about.
You could, over time, reduce the age of eligibility to age 0 or even earlier (paid to the parents) to make one system that supports families as well.
Obviously the devil is in the detail, but I think this TOP (or rather Opportunity) plan has some basis in reality so long as there is a multi-pronged approach.
Sorry it seems family homes aren’t excluded.
Won’t work. The rent seekers in the economy will instantly suck up any extra income anybody has. Better to actually provide essentials directly to citizens, start with utilities.
They will already be paying more tax from the land tax. The idea being to make people feel being a land lord is no longer an easy ride and get them to invest in something else, removing speculation and artificial supply limits (during market booms, houses often sit empty. Also, this makes holiday homes harder to justify).
If they actually get this in place then it’s the first step towards the biggest wellbeing enhancement the country will ever see: the gutting of the inhumanity that is WINZ. If we just hand the money to people instead of making them dance for us, that will surely have positive lasting impacts.
Ah, when Jack asked about exceptions for family home etc and she said yes I took this literally instead of interpreting it as him asking about nuace in applying the rules and her implying yes there will be some exceptions.
Interesting, so key things are:
No announcement of exact rates for anything or details. At the start it’s mentioned they have been criticised in the past for focusing too much on policy and not enough on how if affects people, so they are going to be changing this with their new strategy.
NASA and SCUBA are two acronyms that show acronyms clearly don’t have to be pronounced like their source words as a rule.
My kids don’t have kiwisaver accounts, and the reason is simple. There is very little benefit in paying into kiwisaver accounts for them when we could put that same money into a similar investment account under our name and then decide later what we want to do with it (hell, there’s virtually no benefit in paying extra into kiwisaver as an adult once you are paying the minimum to get the few coins Willis found under the couch cushions, you get the same benefits in a PIE fund without it being locked away).
This proposal actually gives incentive for people to contribute to kiwisaver instead of some other investment fund. I think that’s what’s missing in the current approach.
The money is going to go into the KiwiSaver account anyway,
What were you referring to by this? The kick start contribution was ended quite some time ago, were you referring to parent contributions?
Allocating $30 million over four years to increase the services available to communities hardest hit by meth, within the Vote Health mental health and addiction budget.
Oh yay, their idea of mental health and addiction support is to take money already allocated to this purpose and spend it in the communities that would benefit the most. Ok but where was this money going before? And why does this government have a habit of announcing spending where the money was already ringfenced to spending on that thing?
Yes of course they want them to be moved elsewhere, but those people elsewhere aren’t going to be happy with them there either. We can’t solve problems by making them someone else’s problem. We need to solve to root cause of the problem.
“We’ve tried cutting funding to the department building homes, we’ve kicked everyone off the emergency housing list, we’ve ensured efforts to pay women as much as men have been stopped, and we have made an incredible number of people jobless both directly and indirectly; that’s basically everything we can think of to cure homelessness and we’re all out of ideas”
(paraphrased)
Interesting article, thanks for posting! I have to say, with the joke about House always thinking it’s lupus when it’s not, I had assumed it was super rare. But this says 1 in 900 in NZ, which is thousands of people just in NZ.
It comes after FENZ made an offer in June (5.1 percent over three years), which was declined.
NZPFU said members had not had a pay increase since July 2023.
Holy shit, so the offer is actually for a 5.1% pay increase from 2023 to 2028? That’s 1% per year, and inflation is already up over 4% since mid-2023.
It’s there, if you follow the trail down the Upper Hutt links:
Just reading up on his Wikipedia page, someone in Upper Hutt is quick off the trigger with the results 😆
This bit was interesting:
Guppy diverted money from Three Waters funding to pay for floodlights for the rugby club which he is president of. He was accused of a “conflict of interest”.[16]
No, but it’s a pretty clear message to the people of New Zealand 🙁
You linked with a time stamp at the end lol, the video started played from the end.
Can I argue (perhaps as devil’s advocate) that a popularity contest isn’t the problem?
The Prime Minister’s job isn’t (or perhaps shouldn’t be) to make hard decisions (unlike perhaps the US president), it’s to lead their party and the country. Their job is to show up to meetings with the heads of other countries and make us sound good and look good on the world stage. Exactly the kind of person they are saying makes a bad leader. The prime minister has a cabinet and access to experts for making decisions as a government.
Plato’s idea of having a group of scholars lead the country is dumb. Sooner or later that will become a form of dictatorship, and in all likelihood that group will get dumber over time.
Perhaps the problem is there’s no requirement to have expert advice on decisions, or perhaps the lack of transparency in that advice (though there are obviously reasons some things may need to be kept secret). Perhaps we need to require qualifications and experience for certain advisors to the government, some sort of requirements for evidence supporting the advice, and some level of scrutiny over the advice and whether the government followed it. A government that never follows advice must surely (🥺) lose popularity, and a government that follows expert advice over half the time must surely perform better than existing governments…