remember the phenomenon of long-term unemployment has only existed since the phenomenon of mass unemployment – it is a symptom of that.
enhancing labour demand is the crucial issue.

incidentally i’m hearing a lot of temping/recruitment company advertisements lately – is this linked to increasing job-anxiety?

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I disagree. You are misrepresenting Green Policy, if it is the Eco-Tax policy you are thinking of.

It was Green Party policy to exempt the first $5,000 of income from PAYE tax IN EXCHANGE for introducing a carbon tax and increasing Diesel taxes. It was meant to be tax neutral, with the vain hope that the lower incomes would be better off.

The Greens brochure for this didn’t even have any sense of urgency about this:

We will remove all income tax on the first $5000 of income, for everyone. We will do this in three stages over the next three years.

[Greens Eco-Tax Policy Review]

I haven’t caught up with any completely revised tax policy for this election, and so much has happened since this initial policy that I’m expecting significant revision.

I would like to see a tax free threshold of around $24K advanced by the major parties – it would make things interesting. It would also be the required sort of threshold (IMHO) for the Greens to advance if their Eco-Tax offset of taxing the bads were to have any significant effect.

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I say, what’s stopping you? Why don’t you all do it, spend more of your money on helping the less well off, dedicate time to doing it, stop campaigning to force everyone else to do it, and just do it with your own money, and then fund raise. Why do you need to wait for the state to help people?

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For it to be fixed there need to be more brackets and some higher ones for those who have incomes in the stratosphere. I predict that this will happen exactly when and if I manage to achieve such an income.

respectfully
BJ

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But when the lower classes drink, gamble, smoke or fornicate, as they may, then the more privileged strata of liberal society become understandably resentful of having to deal with the consequences.

Liberal capitalism will not act to impose consistent and comprehensive moral rules on society, and neither will it be willing to fund the social costs of the resulting moral vacuum. The solution to this conundrum will only come when the poor themselves voluntarily adopt a rigid moral code as a means out of their predicament – in other words expect to see the resurgence of militant fundamentalism among the working classes as their social and economic condition becomes more acute.

And then the champions of liberalism may wonder why they chose to make such a fuss about a few thousand solo mothers on the DPB or dope addicts living on sickness benefits.

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… and the Public Service became the way it is now because of the big drive from those outside the Public Service to make it follow the “business model”.

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And you are partly right about the over-stuffed public service. But as an ex-policy adviser myself I can tell you that the public servants at the coal face did a great deal of work. The reason why we had to shuffle paper and not get anything meaningful done was because everything we did had to go through about 3 levels of bosses before it got to the minister. These managers had to read through everything and make sure it was what the minister wanted to read before passing it on to the next level. One of my colleagues was an expert in molecular biology and the minister wanted some advice on GM crops. Was my colleague allowed to see the minister and explain it directly? That would be too simple and too democratic. She had to first explain it to the boss, who knew nothing about biology, who then explained it to the minister.

So yes, get rid of the parasitic government bosses, but leave hard working public servants and politicians alone.

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And you’ve enabled those conditions for the past nine years.

What conditions did you think low growth, low productivity, abundant welfare, and wasteful government spending would create? Prosperity?

You’ve got exactly what we’ve been predicting all along.

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How much do you get a year Sue B ?

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What a sick, sad country when countless primary schools must feed the kids each school day. Meanwhile, the privileged them politicians jet set around drinking socialist champagne on the ski slopes.

You deserve what’s coming New Zealand !!

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From my experience, most of the long term unemployed are like me in having problems fitting in to the type of society that employers want, rather than being lazy, incompetent or unemployable. I attended a work session with WINZ, and I was impressed with my peers, many of them long term beneficiaries, who were intelligent, hard working and competent, but who for one reason or another (political beliefs, shyness, modesty) had difficulties fitting into the employment system. I ‘was also impressed with the WINZ facilitator who did not buy into the normal “get a job as soon as possible” mould, but who encouraged us to find work that fitted in with our value systems.

I am doing work I enjoy teaching at a tertiary institute and have consistently high student evaluations, so i am certainly making a valuable contribution to society. From societies viewpoint it was certainly worth their investment in my benefits for me to wait for a suitable job, rather than find the first dead end job pumping petrol or serving at McDonalds that I could find. While i was on the benefit I was busy looking for work (which is actually quite time consuming if you do it properly) and helping with community education projects.

I recently took my students on a field trip to an IHC bottle recycling plant, and I was impressed with the way these long term beneficiaries, all with severe mental disabilities, had decided that they did not want to spend their time sitting around in sheltered workshops and watching DVDs, but wanted to give something back to the society that was supporting them. these people worked hard collecting bottles, taking off the tops and aluminium around the tops, crushing them and sorting them, and all were volunteers. They would all be totally unemployable under the current work system, but under an alternative system that encourages community involvement, they all lead productive lives.

So yes there are a few beneficiaries out there who exploit the system (as there are people who exploit any system based on trust and honesty) but in general they are no more lazy or dishonest than the general population.

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I believe that a zero tax bracket is Green policy, and is one of the few that I agree with. My honest opinion is that WFF was an attempt by Labour to lock the middle classes into a cycle of quasi-welfare dependency and therefore marry their votes to the Labour Party.

That has always been a weakness of the National Party – because they encourage people standing on their own two feet, they don’t have a guaranteed voter base. Labour does, in the form of the welfare dependent who wouldn’t want to vote National, lest they be attempted to be pulled out of the dependency trap.

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how about food vouchers and electricity vouchers so the money I give can only be spent where it is needed
IE no smokes sky TV or booze

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I think you are right.

I know that unemployed sole parents (who may also be seeking work) are automatically put on the DPB because it is the only Benefit with the child-friendly add ons.
I’m not sure about the disabled or sick (who may also be seeking work … often “part time” or with “special conditions”). I think they stay on the Sickness Benefit ?

Presumably both these groups are entitled to attend Work-Ready courses as well, but without the pressure attached.

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Our challenge constantly is to separate the solution from the problem and put that through critical analysis. That process needs to be done with WFF and the whole tax structure. It’s one that needs to be lead by both Labour and National because the minor parties can suggest anything without worrying about the total costs and social impact – although I see the minor parties having a vital role to introduce more radical ideas to consider – the Greens Eco-tax and ACT flat tax are two examples of tax reform important to the overall discussion.

Like the slow inexorable collapse of the finance industry here in NZ, the conditions faced by our poorest citizens is slowly going from bad to worse. We are standing quietly by as spectators while our middle class savings are wiped out and while our less well off neighbours begin to starve. Shouldn’t we be doing something now, before these trends overwhelm our ability to cope?

Yes, but doing the wrong thing will actually make things worse. Describing the problem twice doesn’t automatically mean we should double WFF and change the benefit structure.

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Panda _ if there are “whole suburbs” beneficiary dependent (which types of benefits are you refering to?) maybe that has more to do with cheaper or available housing.

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