Written By: - Date published: 9:45 am, June 29th, 2012 - 40 comments
We’re getting used to the Nats running bash the beneficiary /poor /Maori /unemployed /criminal /etc distractions but it’s getting pretty bad when Bill English gets in on the act. Weirdly his idea of drug-testing beneficiaries seems to have been picked up from a Daily Show piece on how it failed in Florida – costing money, not saving it, and proving beneficiaries use drugs less than the rest of the population.
Written By: - Date published: 1:54 pm, June 26th, 2012 - 6 comments
John Key must think the New Zealand public have the memory of a goldfish. He’s put forward bold plans before, but they usually end in failure. Closing the income gap with Australia, creating more jobs, reducing the number of people fleeing to a better life in Australia. And now the promise to get back into budget surplus, which he’s already backtracking on.
Written By: - Date published: 12:57 pm, June 26th, 2012 - 2 comments
That’s the Guardian headline. Supposedly designed to give the Tories “political momentum”, it is late and over budget. The Treasury is resigned to the programme costing money rather than providing savings. The LibDems won’t have a bar of it. Critics describe it as “pitch-rolling”, preparing the ground for further “reforms”. More like spin-bowling here.
Written By: - Date published: 7:15 am, June 26th, 2012 - 73 comments
“More than 20,000 unemployed people will be moved off the benefit within five years if the Government manages to meet its newly announced targets.”
Yes, but a target isn’t a plan.
Written By: - Date published: 9:37 pm, June 25th, 2012 - 39 comments
There – “Cameron announces Tory plan to slash benefits.” Here – “The Government wants Work and Income to cut the number of long-term beneficiaries on a working-age benefit, John Key has just announced.” Tories normally do this when they are in trouble.
Written By: - Date published: 7:09 am, June 12th, 2012 - 191 comments
On Superannuation Key is in a very strange position indeed, where keeping his word is doing him more harm than breaking it. It’s a disaster for the country.
Written By: - Date published: 10:51 am, June 11th, 2012 - 22 comments
When Righties say we can’t afford to support solo mums, what do they think we can afford instead?
Written By: - Date published: 3:58 pm, June 6th, 2012 - 192 comments
Last year John Key said that the poor and those on benefits had made lifestyle choices. If they budgeted properly, they’d be fine. Things aren’t fine, and they’re getting worse, which is why a 40-yr-old DPB Mum in Christchurch – facing an $80/week rent increase, because Key hasn’t done anything about Christchurch’s housing shortage – has had to resort to the lifestyle “choice” of prostitution.
Written By: - Date published: 9:59 am, June 3rd, 2012 - 236 comments
The Nats have a thoroughly unhealthy obsession with the politics of reproduction. They’re talking about “stopping ‘unfit’ parents reproducing”, but Paula Bennet let slip the real agenda months ago.
Written By: - Date published: 6:43 am, May 14th, 2012 - 68 comments
I chuckled to read Fran O’Shillivan on Sunday: “John Key has made a strategic decision to burn some political capital and front-foot major Government decisions” – yeah, all those major decisions: $1m for contraception, ‘tackling cyber-bullying’, a petty pokies for convention centre deal, even their centrepiece policy – asset sales – won’t benefit the economy a jot.
Written By: - Date published: 3:37 pm, May 12th, 2012 - 12 comments
In a shock new announcement the Prime Minister has confirmed recipients of corporate welfare will be forced to vaccinate their children.
Written By: - Date published: 2:48 pm, May 12th, 2012 - 341 comments
It is the Nats’ belief that those on a benefit have fewer human rights than the rest of us. They can simply be told what to do. So now we have a compulsory vaccination debate.
Written By: - Date published: 10:10 am, May 9th, 2012 - 77 comments
Everyone’s leaped on the Nats’ contraceptives for benies bid to distract from banks.com. Guess I’ll jump in too. Capitalist morality goes: the world/God rewards the good, which is why capitalists are rich – so, the poor, like beneficiaries, must be morally bad – the world would be better without bad people. Eugenics has been and remains a logical endpoint of capitalist morality.
Written By: - Date published: 8:38 pm, May 8th, 2012 - 83 comments
At first glance it seems strange to have Sue Bradford, a former Green MP, against what is a very ‘green’ policy – free contraception. But she has a point when she talks about beneficiaries feeling forced into sterility they don’t want. Meanwhile, what’s with the right’s obsession with targeting women having babies while on a benefit?
Written By: - Date published: 1:48 pm, May 8th, 2012 - 96 comments
The Government is planning to offer free long-term contraception for beneficiaries and their daughters. At one level its a sensible idea. But it comes with too much baggage attached. The Nats have already made such a mess of it that they can’t make this proposal with any credibility.
Written By: - Date published: 9:35 am, May 8th, 2012 - 11 comments
The Nats’ welfare cuts will cost $500m over 4 years. Supposedly save a billion. Net saving: $125m a year. 1% of benefit costs. 1/8th of the cost of extra beneficiaries under National. Won’t really save even that little. No jobs. Unemployment rising. National’s problem is it tries to save costs of the welfare safety net by cutting holes in the net. The real solution is to stop people falling in. Best welfare policy is a jobs policy.
Written By: - Date published: 7:25 am, April 17th, 2012 - 65 comments
The government has splurged $20m putting 3,300 unemployed people through 6 week-long military ‘boot camps’ ($6K each). Result: up to 3 years later, only 19% have jobs. Compares to the typical stint of unemployment of 12 weeks. Looks a lot like the Nats are pouring money into a programme that makes unemployment worse. out of sheer ideological idiocy.
Written By: - Date published: 6:40 am, April 11th, 2012 - 190 comments
The Rightwhingers are saying extending parental leave is too expensive. We’re talking about a tiny sliver of government spending – 0.2% to be precise. And a tiny fraction of what the government is borrowing. If money is really so tight, there’s plenty of poor quality decisions that National could reverse first.
Written By: - Date published: 11:02 am, March 30th, 2012 - 54 comments
Friday 13th (April) – a scary day as submissions close on 2 major government bills. Make sure you get your submissions in on the Mixed Ownership Model Bill and the Social Security (Youth Support and Work Focus) Amendment Bill.
Written By: - Date published: 8:15 am, March 24th, 2012 - 42 comments
The government has introduced their welfare changes to parliament. In addition to making mums of 1 year-olds seek paid work in addition to raising children, it introduces private companies profiting from unemployment misery with welfare to work schemes. The UK has been trying this for a couple of years – let’s look at how that’s going…
Written By: - Date published: 9:42 pm, March 19th, 2012 - 31 comments
Tapu Misa has an excellent article in today’s Herald. She hopes those predicting the demise of Labour’s pre-election promise to extend Working to Families to the children of beneficiaries are wrong. So do I. Labour will be defined by what it does for our children. Let’s not throw out what was a very very good policy.
Written By: - Date published: 2:28 pm, March 13th, 2012 - 133 comments
Student loans will remain interest free, but the Nats are planning to rein them in “in a big way”. I guess that means that typical Nat slash-and-burn thinking will result in damaging restrictions to educational access in due course.
Written By: - Date published: 8:10 am, March 5th, 2012 - 70 comments
Anyone saying there are plenty of jobs, people are just to snobby (ie lazy) to take them, has to explain why 90,000 people suddenly got lazy between 2008 and 2009 as 80,000 jobs disappeared.
Written By: - Date published: 11:02 am, February 29th, 2012 - 72 comments
Maybe it’s the influence of Bill ‘Guess’ English but National has this strange habit of only doing half the sum. Paula Bennett counts people going off the benefit, but not people going on. John Key looks at normal job creation but ignores normal job destruction. Now, he’s claiming that a mother with a 1-year old is better off working, but he’s not counting the costs of working.
Written By: - Date published: 8:52 am, February 28th, 2012 - 169 comments
So, naturally, the answer is to spend a whole lot of money forcing solo mums to spend their time looking for jobs that aren’t there.
Written By: - Date published: 8:33 am, February 27th, 2012 - 164 comments
332,000 people are on benefits, up by 60,000 under National. Coincidentally, there are 250,000 Kiwis who want work but can’t find it, up 82,000 under National. Probably a lot of cross-over between those two groups, eh? So, you can understand why National’s solution is to take a few bucks off a few thousand women.
Written By: - Date published: 11:34 am, February 24th, 2012 - 84 comments
Google news has 1.5 pages of articles mentioning David Shearer to John Key’s 13 in the past week. The only ones directly about Shearer or Labour are saying ‘where’s Shearer? He’s wasting his honeymoon’. I wondered what his strategists are thinking. Then I saw they’re all the same people who just led Labour to 27% and I realised the scary part – they’re trying their best.
Written By: - Date published: 10:32 am, February 6th, 2012 - 38 comments
The superannuation problem isn’t going away. The Nats will be fuming that Treasury have just dropped in their laps again.
Written By: - Date published: 11:41 am, January 25th, 2012 - 11 comments
Headline – PM to Ratana: National has made a difference
Are Maori looking forward to another three years of Key’s ‘difference’?
Written By: - Date published: 12:10 pm, January 10th, 2012 - 41 comments
Other day, Curran asked what they should do with Red Alert. Now, Mallard’s again using it, in conjunction with Pagani on his blog, to try to do an end run around his own party to promote benefit ‘reform’. Leaving aside the fact it’s the employment system, not the backstop, that’s broken, this is more strategic idiocy.
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