Posts by Sacha
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Hard News: Again: Is everyone okay?, in reply to richard,
This is awful. Cathedral spire gone, but it’s the looks on people’s faces that are doing my head in.
Same - and knowing this time there are people under all that rubble. Have to be. Upsetting
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TV3 live coverage now - looks worse than the original quake, rubble in streets and obviously a lot more people there this time. Cathedral steeple gone. Shit.
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anther massive shake just hit Chch
New thread. Sounds bad - RNZ says some city centre buildings down.
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Can we have a thread about the issue, please
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Hard News: Welfare: Back to the Future?, in reply to nzlemming,
Try not to get too incandescent too soon.
please. wait until this arvo :)
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Hard News: Welfare: Back to the Future?, in reply to Russell Brown,
A competent Labour response would absolutely hammer that suggestion and the people who have made it.
.. and the people who selected the group's members
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Hard News: Welfare: Back to the Future?, in reply to Sue,
Because i know i can't work traditionally (i can be good one day/week/month) bad the other. I'm slowly attempting to build my own business that works around my health in the hope that one day i will make enough to become benefit free. My case manger last year and my manager the year before were ok with that, but what if new rules make this unable to be ok.
I want to see more of this - the best answer is often to build work around yourself rather than try to influence change in someone else's arrangements.
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Efforts to get more disabled people into sustainable work will be welcomed if they are done properly and resourced sufficiently. However confidence about that is not high. Will add more later.
I share Russell's reservations about the system's current capacity to work with disabled job-seekers. I particularly lament the lack of focus on the main barriers to employment - which we know are the attitudes of employers and society, not anything to do with disabled people's actual capacity to contribute. Working on that now, but not nearly enough in place.
At a summit for employers hosted by MSD in 2005 at which I was one of only a few disabled attendees, it was clear there were groundless fears from smart employers (including the head of one of the largest businesses in the country) about hiring disabled staff.
The recently established Employers Disability Network is a response to that. Despite solid support on board, the time elapsed since 2005 should tell you something about how this is valued across the political spectrum. Systemic problems with abatement rates and other arrangements that impede suitable part-time work for sickness and 'invalid' beneficiaries also need to be addressed after years of knowing inaction.
The prevailing weakness in the WWG's thinking so far is that disabled people will all be getting back to work. That reflects the only member of their group with any disabililty expertise being a rehabilitation academic, and the rest sharing common misperceptions amongst most New Zealanders that disability is just being sick for a long time.
Another glaring weakness is a seeming reliance on doctors to assess a disabled person's capacity for work - straying beyond their clinical expertise and further reinforcing existing prejudices about disability being an indivdualised medical problem rather than a systemic social one for all of us to solve.
In practical terms, Simon Collins examines a likely model for some of the WWG's changes - ACC's pilot scheme to get people off their books faster.
Better@Work, which began in Taupo and Hawkes Bay, has been praised by the Government's Welfare Working Group as a model for getting many of our 145,000 sickness and invalid beneficiaries into work.
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Better@Work steps in as soon as an injured worker turns up at a doctor's clinic. ACC pays the doctor an extra $50 to spend an extra 15 minutes with the patient to discuss their work and write a report on what they can do, as well as what they can't do.
The doctor's report is transmitted instantly to a Better@Work coordinator in the clinic's primary health organisation (PHO), who must negotiate a return-to-work plan with the injured worker and the employer within five days.
Dr Glen Davies, a Taupo doctor who worried at first that the scheme might pressure people back to work, now sees it as a rare case of "everyone wins". Workers keep their jobs, employers keep their workers, and no one loses money because workers can get partial ACC payments as long as they can't work at full strength.
ACC compo, which is 80 per cent of workers' former wages if they can't work at all, is not reduced until the employer pays more than 20 per cent of the former wage.
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Jeremy Mihaka-Dyer, who ran the Lake Taupo PHO until last October, says the scheme cut $1.1 million off the district's ACC weekly compo costs in its first year - a saving of almost 10 per cent. The net saving to ACC, after paying the doctors' fees and Ms Mintoft's salary, was between $900,000 and $950,000.
The scheme's most controversial element is that ACC pays half of that net profit back to the doctors as an inducement to use the scheme.
Ms Kelly says unions objected to the profit-sharing because it risked "warping" the scheme.
The Medical Council said last year that the arrangement raised important ethical issues.
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Muse: Shelf Life: The Dying Elephant in…, in reply to DCBCauchi,
No longer can you have a strictly material conception of what exists.
Most human cultures never did have that - it's a more recent abberation
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Muse: Shelf Life: The Dying Elephant in…, in reply to DCBCauchi,
The text is constructed by the reader, and the reader is constructed by the act of constructing the text.
Nothing is real! Nothing is true! Nothing exists!
You're missing any connecting logic between those two statements