Posts by Kumara Republic
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
FletcherB: some automated edit buttons à la Wikipedia would also be in order.
-
We've had little trouble attracting foreign investment. Problem is, not enough of it has been the greenfields type. People haven't forgotten the sorry sagas of TranzRail and the Deane-era Telecom, among others.
-
Steve, there are plenty of kiwis around with the attitudes you encountered and found distasteful. It's commonplace in these parts. I truly hope you make your own place here and come to call it home.
And Canada, for all its officially recognised multiculturalism, is still getting to grips with Anglo-French relations, probably even more so than the Maori-Pakeha equation.
-
I am really angry about the Government scrapping the Training Incentive Allowance. People on benefits have for years been able to access tertiary education because of the TIA, including the current Minister of Social Development, Paula Bennett, who used it to get her BA while on the DPB,
What's the point of having a social ladder, when people who've climbed it then proceed to take the ladder with them?
-
If I'm not much mistaken, Chris Comeskey invoked the provocation defence on behalf of Bruce Emery.
It really frightens me how quickly people move from horror at brutal, intentional sadistic violence to insistence that it be inflicted upon the perp for a few decades until we feel a bit better.
What next, the PAGAD?
-
The thing is that both parts have to be in place together. If you simply make it easier to fire people, as this Government has done, you make people markedly less secure in their jobs, so they cling to them. That can have the effect of making the labour market less mobile, not more.
Not surprisingly, in France, this insecurity has taken the form of boss-napping.
-
Isn't the general idea to wear down public medicine until it too is privatised? Let's face it, public hospitals have, even after nine years of Labour, never recovered from the savaging of the Richardson/Shipley years.Isn't the general idea to wear down public medicine until it too is privatised? Let's face it, public hospitals have, even after nine years of Labour, never recovered from the savaging of the Richardson/Shipley years.
And how would the Richardsonites like it if a Labour Govt threatened to anti-trust or unbundle a privatised state asset, until its share price plummeted to junk bond status, then nationalised it?
-
I doubt though that Dr Brash will suggest anything to improve our robot density, since his concept of increased productivity is the "flexibility" to work longer for less.
"Flexibility" in this case is a euphemism for union-crushing.
An interesting story by Brian Fallow in the Herald today notes that Treasury research suggests that a key problem isn't the efficiency of the labour market, but "capital shallowness" -- a failure by business to make productive capital investment.
A few good starting points would be in order:
* a new DFC, or otherwise an expansion of the VIF.
* re-instating the R&D tax credits.
* a "McMansion tax" - better and more targeted than a CGT."recommend things Australia have done/are doing to help their productivity"
Like discover more uranium.
And the equivalent for NZ would be an oil strike in the Great South Basin.
-
Having said which, our surge in migration over the last couple of decades was certainly not negotiated beforehand, so unresolved fear (and Winston) is to be expected.
And in fairness, multiculturalism seems to come across as an ivory-tower luxury to those whose jobs have just been offshored to Bangalore or Shenzhen. Just the sort of people most vulnerable to falling for opportunist BNP-style rhetoric.
Thankfully, the trade unions involved in the Lindsey oil refinery dispute told the BNP to go and fuck itself. And unions in mainland Europe have, for some years now, made it a practice to expel members who are found to belong to neo-Nazi groups. Unions in NZ could do worse than to take a similar lead.
-
We drink instant coffee.
There's cheap & cheerful, and then there's cheap & nasty.