Posts by Moz
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Speaker: Low-quality language on immigration, in reply to Katharine Moody,
certain international markets have the will and the ability to force change
That's good news. I especially like that they're using their anti-slavery laws against us, because NZ likes to think of itself as above that sort of thing (the fishing industry {cough}).
There is a certain circularity is stagnant/lowering wages putting pressure on people to buy cheaper food etc, which lowers margins in the food industry and puts pressure on wages. But then I look at where the money goes, and the percentage of GDP going to the owner class, and I think "like that, but the other way round". More money going to the richest, less for wages, less for food, fewer people can afford to say "slavery? no thanks".
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Speaker: Low-quality language on immigration, in reply to Katharine Moody,
it will take years to reverse this 'race to the bottom' damage that National has wrought
I dunno, National has in other areas demonstrated a willingness to change the law when asked, then apply those changes very vigorously to the people who asked for them. Sure, it's usually "the dole is too low" and the change is to lower it, but the principle is there.
I suspect even the fence-sitters would agree that reform is needed, everyone needs clear guidance and violations need to be punished. My understanding is that the minister could change the guidance and increase enforcement to solve the problem without even a law change - it's already illegal to pay below minimum wage etc.
We've seen in Australia that it doesn't take much effort to find the violations, and action on those is generally easy. What's missing is political will, and usually a tiny bit of common sense. When you say to someone "I'm from the government, if you have this problem tell me and we will deport you"... that's not going to work.
A tiny tweak to the departmental guidelines saying "exploited workers in this situation will not be deported for complying with illegal demands" would work wonders. Although from a government perspective, the wrong sort of wonder: many more complaints, evidence of widespread, systematic lawbreaking... from the donor class. Ooops.
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Hard News: Media Take: Scandals, selfies…, in reply to Grant McDougall,
New Zealanders are not an ATM for ...
I think a much better response is "Forget ATMs, New Zealanders are where the government gets their money from. The real question is whether it's used to help the many or the few?" (to steal another foreign slogan).
If you must buy into destructive narratives ask "Should the government an ATM for rich foreigners or for ordinary New Zealanders"?
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Speaker: Low-quality language on immigration, in reply to Farmer Green,
It would be true to say that ruminants have always recycled most of their excretions into the grasslands/soil association which has evolved with them,
Nah bro, you're not in Africa now. Unless you're saying that there's ruminant moa somewhere in Aotearoa? The co-evolution you're talking about happened overnight like so: Mount Taupo erupted, hominids arrived, CO2 hit 400ppm. Blink. Wooah. Or gronk, as the moa apparently used to put it.
Linger nailed it, but I had the mental picture of a ruminant moa saying "gronk".
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Speaker: Low-quality language on immigration, in reply to Farmer Green,
Cutting immigration would be easier and cheaper than reducing the impact of the present population.
Which is not to say that reducing the impact of the present population is particularly difficult, just that immigration is a seemingly trivial thing to change. The flow-on effects are much more exciting, not least because "real" GDP growth depends almost entirely on immigration. National is more dependent on that effect than Labour, but both rely on it to provide the illusion of progress in the neoliberal framework they use.
The annoying thing is we could reduce the environmental impact of a number of sectors just by reducing the subsidies or changing the subsidy mix. Some of the stupid things we spend money on only make any sense at all if you rely on tradition and never think about what we're actually doing. "We have always sacrificed our first-born to Moloch" makes as much sense as "farmers have always let the cow shit run off into streams".
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Access: The Driverless Road Ahead, in reply to Kumara Republic,
The kind of polytech that helped produce the Poly-1?
I may have used one of those, as part of a Scout Jamboree somewhere, but beige plastic thing with handles, all smooth-ish plastic and I can't remember any of the details. It seemed less hackable than the C64 I had somehow managed to acquire ($1000 was a lot of money back then).
At that time the hacker community was ham radio based for the most part (unless you wanted to do TV with the Christians). I got some valuable help from local radio people and ended up with a "tweaked" C64, before the C128 came out with similar mods.
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Access: The Driverless Road Ahead, in reply to Prudence,
I'd build a huge workshop where people could...
There are "maker spaces" around Aotearoa, as well as other community workshops. If you're a man there's the men's shed movement, there are often similar things that are more inclusive if you search. Search is cheap now we have the internet, what people often need is the keywords to use :) Also, local councils are often good at having a list of things like that, it can be worth looking at their website(s), and as part of that libraries are starting to provide those resources (since apparently polytechs can't do that any more. Polytech used to be great, you'd pay $50 for six months of weekly evening classes in a workshop where you could generally work on your own vaguely-related project under expert supervision).
https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=makerspace
https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=mens+shedIt can also be worth broadening out to things like bicycle co-ops because community groups that incidentally do workshop-related things will often welcome someone who "just" wants to make their workshop better in exchange for using it. I have refitted a bowling club workshop on that basis once, they had a "shed" (I'm being charitable) that I did up and turned into a grounds-shed and workshop using their money and mostly my labour (the bowlers helped at times). I'm pretty sure both sides were happy with the arrangement (I definitely was). For a few months I had a much better workshop, but then ... I was renting, I had to move, suddenly it wasn't over the back fence any more. Bah!
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It's possibly useful to remind ourselves that in many cases overseas investors are not buying for cash returns so much as they are buying security. Through diversifying but also because often investing in their home country is extremely high risk. They're buying into our legal system and government as much as they're buying into our housing market. Something our lords and masters might want to keep in mind when playing fast and loose with the legal system.
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Speaker: Low-quality language on immigration, in reply to ,
, language like “first home” gives the impression that aspiring to multiple home ownership isn’t greedy
"first home"? I don't understand how someone can live in more than one home at a time. There's home, and there's "all my other houses" (which number is probably zero). The "first home" thing is designed to be completely misleading from the ground up. It's designed to separate young (under 40) people trying to move out of rentals into owning a home from people selling their current home and buying another.
The question should really be put as "landlords vs homeowners". Should we favour people leveraging multiple houses to buy another over people who want a stable place to live? But that would make it clear that the law deliberately favours the rich, and would also make the link to tenancy laws uncomfortably obvious.
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Speaker: Low-quality language on immigration, in reply to Bart Janssen,
My issue with this is the reason we need them is because we've failed to educate residents to fill those roles. Sure in an emergency
By "really, really need" I was thinking more of the emergency than the current approach of "why train people, we can import them". The latter is bullshit, the former is pretty unavoidable. There's also a "paying for talent" aspect, we import expensive livestock and plants to improve local stock so why not do the same for people? Admittedly I'm thinking Nobel Prize winners rather than the rugby players that some might prefer, but I think the idea is sound.
To be honest I'd be happiest with your list in reverse order :) but that's probably just me.
To me "we came to your country and made a problem/disaster" takes precedence over other refugees. Aotearoa isn't as bad as some, but we have our share of locals who took great risks to help our UN missions or soldiers then got shafted. I think that's far more shameful than the indirect "shame about the war in Yemen {shrug}" stuff.
The family reunion approach works better than raw refugee intake I think. Once one family of refugees has got to the point where they can persuade the system to let them bring in family you have a whole lot of helpful things in place. New New Zealanders are arriving to a place they know a bit about, people they know and who know them, they have social and financial resources to help them get started, and so on. I see it as an unofficial extension of the refugee program in that sense (I suppose I should mention at this point that my recently-ex partner is the daughter of Vietnamese refugees so I am both somewhat aware of how this works, and biased towards it. Her step-sister with husband and kid arrived this way, for example).
I presume NZ has the same problems with exploitation of vulnerable workers as Australia does? Over here one common scam is "you can only legally work X hours, so we pay you X hours at minimum wage. You work all the hours we want or we will dob you in for working more than the legal hours". The awesome thing is that it actually works that way in practice - if the company admits to breaking that law the worker is deported and the company asked if they would perhaps consider thinking about making a policy telling staff not to work more hours than their visa permits.