Posts by George Darroch
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Unite puts the number into the 100-200k range. That’s not heaps, but it’s far from vanishingly tiny.
And those on wages less than around $16-17 are directly affected by the minimum wage. If the gap between their wages and the minimum decreases, theirs must increase to maintain relative attractiveness. A degree of flattening in the economy occurs as well, as employers cannot maintain the absolute percentage wage differentials possible in a low-wage economy.
The theory on the right is that this all bleeds through into inflation. Certainly, some of it does, but low inflation rates under the last government showed that wasn't necessarily the case. Much of it is absorbed as decreased returns to business owners and shareholders. Under the last Government, the percentage of the economy represented by wages increased from 42% to 45%. Still less than half of the economy, but an increase all the same.
-
You guys are hilarious. I'm in stitches.
Partly because any of this seems a long way away...
-
Didn't they increase the minimum wage from about $8 in 1999 to about $12 in 2008? Can't find the data easily on the bleddy StatsNZ site.
I knew I'd seen such a graph. Just found it, and it's instructive.
-
On the unemployment benefit there's the two week stand-down, and the requirement to have exhausted all your liquid assets before you qualify. Is that the case with PACE?
-
I've rarely been as moved by political speech as I was watching Metiria Turei speak today.
My father was an ordinary man from Palmerston North who wanted an ordinary life.
He wanted a decent, regular job with decent take home pay, he wanted a home where he could raise his two kids.
What he got was a lifetime of hardships and he died of a stroke at the age of 48....
If his reforms were in place when I became a solo mum, I would have been forced out to work in an unskilled, low-paying job instead of caring for my baby daughter.
With no qualifications, John Key would have considered me "unsuited" to university and I probably would never have been able to go to university let alone law school.
I've known Metiria for a few years now, so I'm hardly an unbiased observer, but it stands in contrast to every other message I've heard recently.
This could easily have gone in the PACE thread, but one post is enough.
-
If anyone is West facing, it's us; we're studiously avoiding seeing anything in our geographic neighbourhood.
-
The worst deals we pay for as taxpayers are the massive ones with huge multi-nationals that fall very short in terms of value and have zero transparency.
At least NZ doesn't buy much in the way of military hardware. Secrecy upon secrecy - commercial confidence and "matters of state" - tends to produce unjustified expenditure. Massive cost overruns in the defence sector are pretty much par for the course, because there is little accountability to the nations which host these bodies.
-
Low cost, high quality, ready tomorrow; pick two.
Ready in time for the Rugby World ...?
-
Matthew, indeed. There's the trees, and then there's the entire conduct of a war. One has to do with the other, but secrecy is more than often wielded to avoided talking about both.
-
There's a great deal that is done behind secrecy, in the name of security, that has more to do with preventing decisions having to be explained - both domestically and abroad.
There's nothing to say a country can't conduct almost entirely open and properly democratic foreign affairs. Not that I've seen, anyway.
Honesty in foreign policy. Now there's a thought.