Posts by Sacha
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Muse: A Friday Kind of Linky Love, in reply to George Darroch,
here, because all the other threads are just a little too political.
ahem - seems to have survived the experience
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Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
I had the desire for a miso soup
That'd be the Auckland snow/sleet/graupel - not seen since 1939.
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Fixating on the wage is similar to the nonsense about headline tax rates. Sound employers and good leaders - both of which this nation needs more of - consider more than bare input costs, just as productive employees are motivated beyond dollars.
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Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to Rob S,
How do you keep private providers in line?
Accountability mechanisms tend to be undercooked.
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Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to Chris Waugh,
all while keeping their youth in Otorohanga instead of disappearing off to the Big Smoke. And how? By getting everybody working together creating jobs for the kids. Well, I'm sure there was a lot of quite complex work involved in getting this all together
Otorohanga's Dale Evans is also current chair of the nationwide Mayors' Taskforce for Jobs.
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Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to Heather Gaye,
My Ben’s theory is that it’s a pilot scheme tested on a small number of people that noone will kick up too much of a stink about, with the ultimate intention of privatising the welfare system
I'd say he's right (smart man, that). This also fits this govt's pattern of floating part of a policy and testing public reaction before tweaking the rollout politically.
And it's working very well for them in the absence of coherent opposition. I thought Labour's youth employment spokesperson Jacinda Ardern's repsonse was admirably clear on the main TV news bulletins. Sadly at least one of her colleagues undermined that with more of the usual feral online bitchiness fixated on Key, which does anything but build trust and respect. Message discipline is pretty basic politics, surely, especially in an election period.
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Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to BenWilson,
[Businesses] become the actual beneficiaries
That's likely to be the end-game for these clowns in any case.
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Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to Tom Semmens,
Oh how I wish that was satire.
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This may simply be because a demographic bubble, that of the children born in the early 90s "baby blip", is moving out of that age range.
Which will make it easy to claim the policy's success - just like Judith Collins trumpeting a reduction in boy-racers since 2008 without mentioning the shrinking cohort, or the impact of higher petrol prices and cost of living.
(and a Cactusrequest: can we please have a Reply button on the original post, with the same auto-quoting and back-linking features)
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Guardian article about the impact of youth programme closures and parental poverty with (gasp) quotes from actual young Londoners.
Agnes and her friends chose their route carefully from their estate to the chicken shop. Most often they were to be found at the Crib youth club, a safe space for dozens of children who wanted to avoid trouble. But the Crib this year lost three quarters of its funding. Its opening hours have been slashed. "Usually we have loads of things going on in the summer, this year – nothing," said youth worker Kelly Reid. "What are the kids doing instead? Looting. We were out patrolling those nights, making our kids go home, we BB'd [BlackBerryed] lots of them, telling them to go home. They are latchkey kids and there's no one at home telling them to get indoors. That's why you saw so many little ones out there on the streets, they were being looked after by the older ones. That's the only childcare anyone can afford or when the mums are out working their fingers to the bone trying to bring in some money."
Many youth projects across London's inner city estates have closed down due to funding cuts. Yet the capital dominates the child poverty statistics, with far higher proportions of poor children than other European cities – 44% of Hackney's children live in poverty.
For Candy, 14, on the Whitmore estate off Hoxton Street, that's a poverty that sees her sleep each night under a coat on a bare mattress on a bare floor. "Sometimes we have food, and sometimes not much," she says, opening an old, scratched fridge. Her mother is asleep on a plastic-covered sofa in front of an old TV. "She is not very well, she gets depressed," explains Candy. Next door three children under nine are home alone. Their mother will feed Candy when she gets back from work for keeping an eye on them.