Phil Goff has just delivered an excellent speech to start a year of laying out Labour Policy. $100/week tax free, stopping tax-dodging bludgers, support for R&D and exporters, correcting housing market anomalies and encouraging investment in the productive sector. There was a lot to like.
Remember back when Labour was in power and the Right had this myth that dole numbers had only dropped because Labour had moved people to other benefits? It wasn’t true but that didn’t stop John Key saying it during one of the 2008 debates as he promised to get more people into work. Now, 2 years later, 83,879 more Kiwis are on benefits.
Three government investment decisions in the last couple of weeks have shown the deficiencies in the neoliberal way of doing things. SOE Solid Energy’s lignite-to-liquids obsession, Kiwirail buying trains in China rather than making them itself and Steven Joyce decision to re-create Telecom’s monopoly by giving it 70-84% of the broadband contracts.
It’s a tough Christmas for far too many Kiwis. Poverty is up, wages are down. 350,000 Kiwis are jobless or underemployed. The job losses are still coming. The rich got tax cuts, 70% got nothing. Drought is spreading. Thousands of Cantabrians face an uncertain future. Meanwhile, the Nats cynically exploit disaster to advance their agenda.
I was in Christchurch this weekend for the second time since the quake. It felt like things are gradually getting worse. Compared to the pre-Christmas bustle in other cities, Christchurch CBD was a ghost-town. The public service’s emergency preparedness got us through the initial disaster – has enough been done since? What are your impressions?
This collection of articles from recent days illustrate the class war going on within this country. In a time of economic, environmental, and social crisis, either the established elite can be reined in or it will use its power to cement its position and take a greater share of the wealth. Because we’re letting them, the elite are winning the class war.
Labour picked up on the statistics I revealed yesterday that show the median income of Maori has fallen 11.5% under National and the Pacific Island median income is down an astounding 19%. Kris Fa’afoi and Annette King put out press releases. Then King took the battle to Bill English in the House, who it seems is also a reader.
So people get sick and become less productive. I would have thought that that was pretty much stating the obvious.
Spending tax payers money trying to quantify how much imaginary wealth these sick people could have created for their employers if they had been perfectly well, seems to me to be bordering on lunacy.
At 6.4% unemployment appears to be falling, slowly. But it also looks to be above where it was at the start of the year, when it supposedly plunged to 6.0%. Economists are viewing the wildly fluctuating numbers sceptically. Whatever precisely is happening, with one in ten working age Kiwis unable to get work, it’s not time for dancing in the streets.
It takes a lot to screw up a great country like New Zealand. It can’t be done overnight. But if you’re really negligent, anti-worker, and focused on hand outs to the rich, you can start to make things worse pretty quickly. Let’s look at the key measures of National’s performance, according to their own criteria:
At the last election we chose tax cuts and unemployment instead of stimulus and stability – which was the more ambitious, high wage way to go?
National are not fulfilling their government’s core reason for existence: closing the wage gap with Australia. No, we’re fast going backwards on that score, and it’s predictable: high unemployment causes low wages.
One of the strange things about helping to run a left blog like this is looking at the varied opinions of those on the left of the political spectrum, and then looking at the monolithic opinions that the right seem to have of the left. I was musing on this while reading Matt McCarten’s excellent Saturday article. Now you have to understand that Matt and myself are almost at the ends of the spectrum when it comes to politics on the left….
In three short years John Key and National have gone from economic bravado, to failure, to lies, excuses and whining. As the economy languishes they will have nothing to offer except more lies and excuses.
This is a time for fresh thinking, both globally and locally. But we won’t get it from National.
It was a year ago that Paula Bennett first declared victory over rising unemployment. Since then, John Key has been working his economic strategy hard: high-fiving every schoolgirl he can find, playing with spiders, announcing and re-annoucing literally tens of kilometres of cycleway, smiling and waving till it hurts. But dole numbers are rising.
“I also want to pay a special acknowledgement to my friend and deputy, Bill English. What a great job he is doing as Finance Minister. He’s delivered two Budgets that have steered New Zealand out of recession and put the economy firmly back on track to grow and create jobs”. Or has he?…
86 workers have been fired from Kaiapoi New World, which will be closed for a year due to quake damage. This is exactly why the government should implement the kind of scheme I outlined where the government steps in to supply the full wages of workers who can’t work due to the quake, funded by delaying the tax cuts for the rich.
The unions, business, and Phil Goff have all gritted their teeth and called the Nats’ $15 million wage subsidy scheme for small quaked-affected businesses ‘a start’. The problem is, it’s likely to be the end. This scheme will leave workers and employers severely out of pocket, killing businesses and jobs.
It’s been nearly two years now of Paula Bennett declaring that the unemployment crisis is over. Yesterday, she put out a press release titled ‘More than 6,000 beneficiaries find jobs in August‘. Wow, 6,000 in a month, pretty good. But Bennett must have been hoping we wouldn’t read beyond the title. The fact is that 900 more people went on the dole than came off it. The total number of beneficiaries just keeps climbing.
Unite Union’s Christchurch office has been flooded with phone calls and text messages from worried workers in post-earthquake Christchurch.
Rich investor and you put your money in a dodgy finance company? Did the company collapse? You get your money back. No questions. Lost your job thanks to this endless recession? Couldn’t afford insurance? Property damaged in the quake? Key says you can get stuffed. It’s called class war. Also, Key thinks the clean-up will be an economic stimulus. Someone tell this money-man about the broken windows fallacy.
20,000 more Kiwis’ jobs are at risk as commercial building construction grinds to a halt. The Greens have a plan to divert money from low-quality spending on motorways to high benefit to cost spending on housing that will save those jobs and give Kiwi families a better standard of living. That’s the kind of visionary economic leadership we need. We’re not going to get it from National.
Bill English came pretty close to admitting that the Nats are “relaxed” about our current high unemployment. Phil Goff came out swinging…
The government is canning it’s already too-small and ill-directed Community Max programme. $40 million was a pathetic amount that created, at best, just 3,000 temporary jobs when quarter of a million Kiwis are jobless. And, due to lazy policy-making all the Key government probably ended up doing was subsidising jobs that would have been created anyway.
Contrary to the sunny prognostications of Nice Mr Key, job queues are getting longer. How much more great economic management from John and Bill can the country stand?
In the last seven days a triple-conjunction of political portents has publicly demonstrated just how bankrupt of imagination and policy this current government truly is. The lack of direction and paucity of creative ideas is breath-taking. A “caretaker-government” would be a polite euphemism in this context.
John Key challenged the unions to “put up or shut up”. So they’re going to put up. The CTU has launched a campaign to name and shame businesses that are abusing the fire at will (90 day probation) bill. It’s a campaign based around personal stories. Heather Smith tells the first of many…
National’s promises aren’t worth the paper that they’re printed on. They’ve broken plenty and downgraded most of the rest to “aspirational goals”. Now John Key’s current anti-worker employment policies add a whole new chapter to the list of broken election promises.
The point of an ETS isn’t to just blindly pay more, it is to change our behaviour so that we don’t have to. National don’t get it, so they have brought us the worst of all possible ETS schemes. Badly designed and devoid of vision. An ETS with all of the costs and none of the benefits.
Phil Goff has delivered his speech on Labour’s economic vision ahead of the Budget. It’s a good one, filled with core Labour values and ideas that will get New Zealand moving ahead. Goff talks about fairer tax rather than tax cuts for the rich, better monetary policy, and investing in New Zealand’s future.
To build a brighter future for New Zealand we need to invest in it. We need to build up our national savings, invest in R&D, and build a sustainable, more self-sufficient economy. National has cut savings and R&D investment, and talked down New Zealand’s potential for hi-tech manufacture. Seems they’re only interested in short term pay offs for the rich.
The unexpectedly large fall in unemployment is to be celebrated. It’s great that unemployment has fallen so much but 6% is an appallingly high rate of unemployment. It is not natural or normal – it only became normal under National in the 1990s and in the last year of the current government. We still have a long way to go to the sub-4% unemployment we so recently enjoyed.
Steven Joyce has virtually ruled out Kiwirail building its new trains here in New Zealand. The Aussies have a completely different view about government purchasing, as I learnt from my years on the Industrial Supplies Office management committee in the 1990’s. They believe in Australian jobs for Australian money.
While John’s off playing soldiers, things are getting worse and worse for Kiwi workers. Wages are falling for the first time in a decade. The average hourly wage was $25.80 when National came to power. Now, it’s $25.30. I had hoped unemployment would start falling about now but the signs are discouraging. Only unionised workers able to protect themselves from the storm.
A new report says that building the half a billion worth of new rail rolling stock for Auckland in New Zealand would boost GDP by $250 million, improve our current account deficit by over $100 million, add $70 million to government revenue, and create 1200 skilled jobs. But the Government just want the cheapest price for the rail cars, and that means going overseas.
Paula Bennett is celebrating the fact that job ads are on the rise. The bad news is the numbers indicate like we are still, a year after the official end of the recession, not at the point where the economy is creating enough jobs to keep unemployment in check, let alone bring it down. Time to put away to bubbly, Paula, and get to work getting Kiwis back into jobs.
How economically illiterate do the Nats have to be to send the government’s research vessel Tangaroa to Singapore for a $20 million refit when VT Fitzroy at Devonport was ready and willing to do the work here? Sure the bid was a bit lower but did they consider the tax the government would gain, the fewer unemployed and the other benefits from keeping the work here in New Zealand?
