- promoting a clearer understanding of men's experience -
Article on NZCPR Weekly By Dr Muriel Newman:
Compehensive welfare reforms now underway
Over the years our welfare rolls burgeoned – especially once the stand-alone Domestic Purposes Benefit was introduced in the early seventies. Pushed by feminists as a way of enabling women to raise their children independent from men, the DPB incentivised family breakdown – undermining marriage and creating widespread fatherlessness.
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL
Please note that comments which do not conform with the rules of this site are likely to be removed. They should be on-topic for the page they are on. Discussions about moderation are specifically forbidden. All spam will be deleted within a few hours and blacklisted on the stopforumspam database.
This site is cached. Comments will not appear immediately unless you are logged in. Please do not make multiple attempts.
Contact me for rates
NZ teacher Peter Joyce’s settled life was disrupted when a woman he had never met accused him of historic rape. With a unique brand of angry humour, his diary plots the stages of his despair and traces his attempts to find justice in the face of the current insistence that we must “believe the victim”.
Dry Ice is a compelling memoir, but much more. The accusation made the writer a reluctant expert on similar cases from all over the world. He throws light on everything that limits public knowledge of false sexual allegations, from dangerous counselling to flawed statistics, and he exposes police investigation methods as blinkered, inefficient and insensitive.
You can purchase Dry Ice on Kindle for just $6.00 here: https://www.amazon.com/Dry-Ice-Peter-Joyce-ebook/dp/B01N19JKAR
Peter Joyce writes a blog: www.blackstonesdrum.com
If you are in one breath going to say that social welfare reforms are good and that national and key govt = have got it right, but in the same breath talk about the lack of jobs, ……..heres my take on this.
We have allowed successive small businesses to leave these shores, while at the same time we have opened up our doors to new migrants, many from island nationals with little or no skills – and yet most of the work we used to bring these people down here to assist with – no longer exists.
We are even sending live animals off shore to market – depriving NZers of work in the once booming meat works industry. Talk about shooting ourselves in the foot…..is farming not out primary sector – but we happily send the work off shore??
We send all the leather hides to australia for treatment – shutting down all the factories who employed people here in NZ and now any leather worker in NZ must re-import our own product back at huge cost. This is our primary sector…….and we cant get that right and create jobs here in NZ.
We import pork from Aussie – please tell me why we cant establish a larger pork industry here in NZ – we have the land, the water the people???
Raw logs are now exported – depriving NZers of work in the many timber mills we once had – and we wonder why northland – up where you live Murial, have so many good healthy lads unemployed.
NO apparently its better to send the logs offshore to be made into furniture so we have to re-import it all back home and pay the 15% GST….further depriving kiwis of work.
Even our Maori use foreign contractors to harvest fish, rather than employing New Zealanders and helping this economy.
We have traded in the right to work, for cheap low cost imports which we must pay GST on – so in effect what we have become is a nation that has decimated our small business sector, and the many jobs it provided in favor of allowing govt an easy way to tax us all as we must now buy all things we now need in our lives….and import them.
We used to have five car manufacturing plants in NZ, thats right assembling cars and selling them to OZ for a profit.
We used to make clothes here, shoes, we were relatively self sufficient. Even our bread and cooky companies have now left these shores.
We used to have fisher and pykl, and many other home grown innovative companies – who employed people, but more than that created a small economy in the area they did business – supporting industry and services – generating work and opportunity from these businesses and their presence on NZ shores.
But some how its easier that we accept most every product now be made off shore and imported with duty and 15% GST slapped on top of its manufacturer price. This has no good ending.
So govt revenue is down, because we allowed many good businesses to be sold or to move off shore. We did not protect these businesses or make it easier for them to remain here and export to the international market.
So to make up for those losses we have a system – the old banker mind set – charge for everything, make more paperwork, tax any thing we can, while making it harder and harder for anyone to ever get any help. thats all this is about.
Keep reducing Govt services and the cost to govt and where possible turn these entities into a business and make the people pay for it, when it used to be free.
Policing – they do half of what they used to do – now if you want anything investigated you have to pay for it.
Councils are fast outsourcing everything they should be doing as part of your rates, and then asking the people to pay for it when its contracted back. Why is this so wrong??
No we now prefer to tout and seek accolades for establishing yet more free trade agreements – with countries who protect their local industry, and who in many cases also make it easier for a company to prosper – because they dont enforce OSH or other regulatory requirements on business like we do here – to bolster govt revenue.
You see what we have done is smother business with red tape and overhead and we are forever making it harder and harder for small business to move forward.
Now with the latest round of social reforms – the reality is we are just making it harder for any poor sole who cannot get work to get any help at all – thats all that is being done, make it harder, put time constraints on people, make them jump through more hoops before they get any help at all.
You cant praise in one hand – touch on the other pressing issue of not creating jobs in the other……without laying blame where it belongs….the latest reforms are NOT GOOD for New Zealand.
We lost rail work building new carriages to china – surely its more beneficial to employ people in NZ, give them a sense of pride – yes it was cheaper – but why – because in china they have NO red tape, no OSH, none of the constraints we are seeing placed on good people in NZ trying to run a business – thats why its cheaper in china – why do we not demand same for same when seeking tenders – if they are going to compete – then demand they have the same constraints and cost overheads as placed on NZ businesses by our very own govt – at least then the NZ company would lose the contract on a level playing field.
MY guess is that is why we outsource this work – because its cheap in one hand but also the more we have to import to live the more %GST is collected, for every 1% increase in GST govt makes another 1 Billion in new revenue income – and this increases year to year the more we have to import.
WE care not that exporting this work deprives good kiwis of employment and a chance to feed their families – instead we prefer they have to suffer the humility of going to a welfare office and being asked to dance like a monkey every week just so they can receive a small pittance and think they are lucky they got that.
Jobs create personal wealth. Jobs prevent people from having to go on the dole. Jobs help reduce many of the social problems we have in NZ.
To now also say to parents you can no longer be a mother or father, a parent, you ,must work, is a massive breach of human rights – the right to be a parent – have we lost sight of that also, that mums ( and dads ) need to at home with kids providing and managing a home…..
No it appears not – now the new model for social reform is to demand parents dump kids into day care as soon as hey are born – and demand they go out and try and find work that does not exist. Hahah no benefit for you. Less cost to Govt – yeehaaa Im a happy little politician.
And to demand that a mother ( or father ) MUST seek employment when she is a full time mum, caring for kids – just so she can receive a benefit is a step too far. No parent should have that requirement placed on them……
Of have our politicians forgotten just how hard it is to run a home……thats a full time job if you do it right.!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Comment by hornet — Wed 31st July 2013 @ 2:03 pm
‘The kiwi way’ – YEAH RIGHT.
Comment by Peter — Thu 1st August 2013 @ 1:12 pm
hornet (#1): Some good points you make. It’s frustrating to see people in power keep doing such stupid things. A couple of things though. Firstly, we pay the GST regardless of whether goods were made in NZ or elsewhere. In fact, if goods are manufactured, processed etc in NZ the GST take would be greater because the cost of the items would be greater because the cost of labour and keeping to OSH and all the other bureaucracy is greater. Secondly, while I agree that parenting and being there for the children is important (and I seriously question this drive to rush children below 5 years old into their first little institutions, “early childhood education” – actually, I think even 5 years old is too young for many children to be leaving their own parents for many hours at a time), paying the DPB or sole parent benefit in its current form is not a good idea because it encourages the break up of families or women having children in the absence of a stable relationship with the child’s father and therefore no family to begin with. While I don’t agree with forcing sole parents to work, I would make the DPB a bit harder to obtain up front, perhaps a stand-down period.
Anyway, keep up the good thinking; those of us willing to think about and to discuss these matters provide a crucial voluntary service to the country.
Comment by blamemenforall — Fri 2nd August 2013 @ 12:34 am
3, great to see constructive – reasoned input.
Heres my assessment of what GST has done to local manufacturing and job creation in nz.
Its costly and expensive to establish a business – set up infrastructure and for govts, its longer to see taxable income realized from that business into the future. Ie through wages, paye, gst on local purchases etc…….. and there is the paperwork – and oversight requirements of govt trying to ensure they get there pound of flesh…..
But with GST on EVERYTHING we now need to live – all going through a single border check, racking in 15% on EVERYTHING for little or no effort – thats a far easier and quicker way to increase and calculate a tax revenue .
And if this becomes the best practice – which it now is – to sit back and clip the ticket – ( for every 1% increase in GST, thats ONE BILLION in new revenue through the border ) it removes the requirement to support the establishment of new business on NZ soil which employ people and support families – and if you look at the legal red tape, the costs most small businesses now have to deal with day to day, you can see why so many are shutting down, going underground , moving offshore or just not bothering – most small businesses are just surviving week to week, to give the owners a basic wage – what’s the point in that if you have all that additional stress and responsibility.
I have also seen this at the apprenticeship level – where those small or parts or components you once manufactured to give a your apprentice his skills and training are now readily imported en masse for little cost.
You see many forget the lessons of the last great depression – it was not the share market crash of 1929 which caused the collapse o the global economy – it was protectionism – where borders closed, the bigger countries looked after their local businesess, reduced imports and protected their work forces and companies.
if we have let all manufacturing go offshore – we have nothing to protect.
Postulating and flag waving – presenting free trade agreements with the US as the big saviour are sadly in reality not going to help the small business owner or little man on NZ streets. I attended a coalitions of interest conference with the US, Australia and New Zealand which Helen Clark attended – and at that meeting the audience were told = and shown – how INSIGNIFICANT new Zealands production was in the scheme of things when compared to the American economy. The senator speaking at the time told the audience, that the US wanted to see a joint Free trade agreement between NZ and Australia for this region, with the US…………did we follow the advise of the customer – NO we did not, Could the US take everything we could produce in a single year and not even break a sweat – of course they could – there economy is so massive, we are a microbe on the back of a blue whale. is all this snivelling and arse licking trying to get a free trade agreement necessary at the expense of our freedoms and civil rights – not really The world has a shortage of food, especially the food and produce we offer – will we always be able to sell it – of course we will.
Comment by hornet — Sat 3rd August 2013 @ 10:04 am
Since the DPB was introduced, it has been followed by the Child Tax Act which has been undermining small business and driving skilled labour offshore for 25 years – as mentioned above replaced by foreign labour. Who would destroy their country based on the principle that women should raise childred alone? Finatical extremists?
Comment by Downunder — Fri 9th August 2013 @ 10:04 am
It is simply socialist inspired social engineering to impoverish and hence control the population made dependent. Nothing is based on what is good for the family or individual.
Comment by NZexile — Thu 15th August 2013 @ 1:47 pm