Posts by BenWilson
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Great post Jolisa.
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Hard News: Things worth knowing, in reply to Richard Aston,
They are, but isn't China a far bigger trading partner than any of those? They're starting to exert influence here that rivals the USA.
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FWIW, despite an Arts degree and a Computer Science diploma, my first 3 months of employment were unpaid, the next 3 on 15k pa, the next 6 on 30k pa (which was below the median starting income for graduates). However, from there the rise was rapid, roughly 10k pa.
I accepted unpaid because it was exactly the area I wanted to work in, and a rare one at that, so the foot in the door was vital. It was a small company starting up a new division, and they couldn't afford to hire any more people, due to one extremely well paid guy. By the end of 3 years, they'd realized I was for real, ditched the other guy (who was really just rorting them), and started expanding. But I can fully confirm that those early years had taken their toll on my sense of loyalty. I could never shake the feeling that the boss screwed me down on principle, and every step forward was going to come equally grudgingly, and by hell did I work hard those 3 years. What a massive difference it was to move into big corporate life. The old boss regularly sent me message for the next couple of years begging me to come back, offering me any money. But I was just over all the negotiations, the constant need to prove my worth in dollars to them, especially when I knew that the work I'd done had brought them back from the brink of bankruptcy.
I wouldn't get bitter on small companies for not having the foresight to pay well, though. In hindsight, they really were that hard up. Quite a few small businesses are only a few down months from bankruptcy. There's a lot more fat in the corporate world and that translates into easier terms for employees. On the flipside, your chances of doing the work you want when slotted into a big corporate machine are less.
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Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to bmk,
One friend was pissed when he found out this was possible and wanted to withdraw from Kiwisaver because he thought the employer contribution was one of the benefits off the scheme only for him to find out it wasn’t really
Precisely. That’s not a good dynamic, doesn’t encourage the system. Of course, if it’s compulsory that doesn’t matter, but it would have been such an easy thing not to make it a part of the wage/salary negotiations like that.
In effect employees pay for Kiwisaver twice – once in lower income and again in their own contributions.
That maths only works short term. It’s ignoring that the contributions are not lost, they’re invested. You get them back with interest. But yes, that’s how it feels in the pay-packet. I definitely made no bones to employers in Australia that if they wanted to quote my salary including super, I personally just considered it a lower salary. They argued the toss, but at the end of the day, salary negotiations are not really done by numbers at all. That’s a trick that the employer wants you to believe, but you’re not under obligation to take any offer they make, and can always make a counter offer. If you pitch the “I want X take-home, and that’s just how it is”, then who are they to say that’s not fair? We decide what's important to us in our lives for ourselves, after all. If I consider super as basically lost money (and at the start, I did), then there’s no law that says I’m not allowed to see it that way. The same goes for any other perk they may offer. It's common to try to get an employer to see a car package as actually worth what the car costs. It's not, if you would never have bought that car, quite aside from the fact that the company is only offering that because the car doesn't cost them what it would cost you.
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Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to bmk,
Labour are just trying to patch things on without fundamentally reforming the system in a meaningful manner – but still at least they are admitting that something has to be done.
Labour made the mistake of proposing raising the age of super, but later (after all of them retire). That went down like a cup of cold sick, because far from solving the problem for future generations that the population bulge is going to cause, they simply upped the ante on future generations. Absolute dick move. It was a policy that no one could like. It didn’t affect the older people, but it hurt the younger, for whom it was meant to be a solution. I could not fathom it at the time. If they want to do that, they should do it right now. Of course they won’t do that because it will actually fuck with their current demographic*. Did they drop that one? I hope so.
Compulsory super contributions is a is a much better idea. If they hadn’t put it on employers to match the contributions, but just made the contributions come out of pre-tax income (so they are tax free) then it would have been popular all round. As it is, Kiwisaver has been a popular scheme. It could be popular with business, if it were altered so as not to be a tax on them. I presume they did that to avoid raising other taxes, like they thought employers wouldn’t notice, or more likely, that they don’t matter because they’re less likely to vote Labour.
*ETA: Which is actually the only viable solution to the supposed boomer bulge that will bankrupt us all. Except I don’t think that’s going to happen, in reality. However much there is a bulge of both population and wealth because of the post-war baby boom, that will all redistribute downwards as they start dying. Then X generation will be the whipping boy, and I bet (knowing mostly people in this age group) that we do just as the baby boomers did, and as people mostly have since time immemorial, and hold onto such assets as we are given, however iniquitously we came by them.
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Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to bmk,
The proposed compulsory Kiwisaver running in conjunction with Super just seems a messy inefficient system.
It's less simple, but I don't see it as a replacement for a universal pension, which is actually something that's really good about NZ. Otherwise people with not much super end up getting considerably less as a result. But how to rejig it in an affordable way is a niggly practical detail. It's still bizarrely iniquitous that super rich people can get a generous pension, when young people with nothing at all might be ineligible for any kind of benefit. As I see it, though, it's the young people who are not getting the money that is the problem, not the old people who are.
The most sensible middle ground is probably means tested super, with a sinking lid as the amounts in super start growing into serious money. Which really doesn't take that long. Australians have a staggering amount stashed away (over 1.6 trillion dollars), and it's only a little over 20 years that it's been compulsory. It's been so popular that the minimum contributions are now way higher than they used to be.
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I'm basing that point on NZ conditions. Across most of the country, heating is needed at night, and extreme cooling during the day, not so much. Also, the basic capital outlay is just much less - a heat pump is only a few thousand, rather than tens of thousands. Got nothing against solar, would love to have it. But I'd love to have a lot of things I can't afford.
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Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to bmk,
I don’t vote purely out of self-interest but there’s a point where for all your noble intentions you simply have to consider the impact of a particular policy on yourself.
For sure. Is a tax-home reduction your only criticism, though? I ask, because that one is pretty easily nullified just by dropping taxes slightly, particularly for lower incomes. Would you object to compulsory Kiwisaver if it didn't cost you anything more per week than what you're already paying?
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Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to Sacha,
You won’t like it, Ben. :)
:-) Nah I'm happy with that. CGT and universal Kiwisaver, and resuming the Cullen Fund contributions are things I think are vital. Looking forward to more detail on the monetary policy and industry initiatives, but that's a good set of policies. ICT doesn't just mean exporting skills - there's huge demand for in-house ICT transformation, which is a vital part of heavier industry too.
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Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to Sacha,
Huge likelihood they will be services, knowledge and creative in focus.
We're still a fair way from shaking ourselves free from primary production, though. These are still highly lucrative businesses. And if we want to value-add to that, a future involving factories is not a crazy idea, should not be written off as a thing of the past. The factories should be modern, though. I'm by no means convinced that a growing services industry is a particularly dynamic formula for growth. It's still labouring. In a world of exploding access to knowledge, I think the overall trend on those kinds of earnings is going to be down, as we compete with cheaper intellectual labour. If the labour is physical, and delivered locally, like what tradies do, then the earnings will probably maintain, but competing with the whole world to write software? We can only really do that by being a low wage economy.
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