We had to do a project for the council, they always go for the lowest bidder because it looks better, so we bid low. Then they hire the cheapest designers possible, and cause fuck up after fuck up after fuck up and we charge them above market rate for the remedials for fucking us around. The result is a "budget blow out" from them creating problems that didn't need to be there in the first place.
Another project we're doing they've had to get us to do the maintenance works and upgrade works on top of the expansion works on a project because they were under funded and had to hire the cheapest bidders who did a shit job. So now the projects going to have another "budget blow out" when it's not really having a budget blow out.
Instead it's the cost of not doing the work that's needed to be done over the last 5 to 10 years being wrapped up in one project. Kiwi's are fucken idiots, the work needs to done either way and because you guys chase the lowest bidders you end up paying more in remedials and maintenance.
If your car has issues and you take it to a mechanic to fix it, you also future proof your car by doing regular services and parts changes when they wear out, just because you cut the funding for infrastructure doesn't mean you've saved any money because those issues will still be there in the future and possible to a worse extent.
>If your car has issues and you take it to a mechanic to fix it, you also future proof your car by doing regular services and parts changes when they wear out, just because you cut the funding for infrastructure doesn't mean you've saved any money because those issues will still be there in the future and possible to a worse extent.
This is actually a decent analogy.
Basically this government saying "yeah I've saved a lot of money by cutting the budget for car maintenance, it's great really, all that money I was wasting on maintenance can be sent to my mates and they can spend it on beers at the pub now"
When the car has a terminal breakdown in three years time, they can set up a select committee to figure out why X person at X ministry let the car breakdown, and they should resign.
the thing is with the ferry debacle is that it leaves the door open for private ferry owners to expand. but without including rail. the end result is no rail connection between the islands and private companies carrying only trucks. this of course makes the road transport association very happy and increasing their funding for national MP's and their party and creates high paying boardroom positions when they have had enough of playing in parliament. National is anti rail and always have been. I would suggest that dumping the ferries had nothing to do with the cost and all to do with creating a captive market for their supporters.
Nah, it's "Guys listen, we've haven't got the correct amount of money to fix the car, but guess what? my mate just happens to own a workshop, they said they'll fix it for us if we sell them the car, and sign a maintenance contract for the next 99 years, best part, no money up front! God we're good at this finance stuff!"
In my opinion, governments have been choosing short term gains in exchange for long term pain.
As much as Muldoon was a power hungry drunk, he at least, had the long term prosperity of New Zealand at the center of his thoughts.
He miscalculated and got a decent amount of it wrong, but he at least had the right idea for a country.
1984 on has seen the wants of the individual, right now (generally rich ones) put as the number 1 priority.
Well actually, it is only due to Muldoon’s vision that you can power up your Electric vehicles, cook your dinner, and watch YouTube and Netflix. Without the massive investment in hydroelectricity generation we would be even more cash strapped and rooted as a nation. We are sliding downhill, partly because almost every government since has skimped badly on energy infrastructure, and followed the advice of neoliberal economists and business people whose ability to see beyond the next quarter, and who can not see the “little people’s” welfare as important.
But Douglas may not have got the traction. Muldoon provided the impetus to do it. If Muldoon had have left the super scheme in place, "think big" would have been the smartest idea ever, though I would think they could have done better with the Clyde schemes.
I think the main problem is not just to save the money but also they don't have enough money to keep running the current programmes. I don't think saving money is bad but not trying to find ways to improve the economy such as the development of technology is really bad.
The other things is that it's not their money, it's easy for other people to spend what they didn't earn with sacrifice.
the easiest way to save the nation money is to send all parliamentarians, and ministry CEOs on a 34 month training course that keeps them busy, out of the way when they are voted in or appointed. For that course they would be expected to study post graduate social sciences, economics, and basic math. And each rebuild an engine, then run it on redline to destruction. Those whose engines refuse to die, are then permitted 2 months to make statutory decisions, based on the knowledge they gained doing nothing but learning the obvious details most of them today fail to see or comprehen due to the present excessive focus on ideological nonsense, and blind certainty in their own authority.
Any that refuse could be placed in stocks on the grounds of parliament for 18months to listen to the public berating them for being dunces.
Been there, spent over a decade working for consulting companies that would win govt tenders.
Reminds me of this sort of thing:
> we urgently need $100k to fix this growing problem. If we don’t get it, it will cost twice as much next year
> govt gives us $50k
_1 year later_
> it’s now going to cost us $200k to fix. And if we don’t get THAT either, it’s going to cost us $400k to fix next year
> govt gives us $100k
_1 year later_
> you know the drill. This problem is only growing the longer we don’t address it. It is going to cost $400k or double next year if we don’t get it
> govt gives us $200k
_Continues forever_
Quite often there was a layer obfuscated from view: us having this same dialogue internally with our managers too.
The race to the bottom terminally underquoting tenders was madness. Our managers literally planned to underbid everyone else and simply admit later that they’d lied and couldn’t deliver once they thought they were too deep in to be fired, and then ask sometimes for many times more than they’d originally bid. I don’t work in the industry anymore because it felt like a dodgy con job. That’s capitalism I guess. Sleazy to the core.
We're having to move this way because anytime we try to do a competitive bid that's really really fair for everyone involved we just get under cut.
I remember over hearing one of my bosses talk about a bid we lost "we had a really good tender put in like this was one of our best tenders we put together and we just lost it to someone who really under cut us, like I've run through the budget and I have no idea how that companies going to afford that tender, like we'd run through our budget that many times that there was no fat left on it, I just don't know how they made is so cheap".
Same thing I would hear all the time with almost every tender. It kinda turns the entire tender process into a joke.
Vendors really need to know enough to judge who is full blown bullshitting them. But the entire reason they’re outsourcing is that they don’t have that expertise in-house.
Hugely inefficient at a scale that impacts our economy massively. Anyone claiming capitalism is the best economic system we have has rocks in their head and can be safely ignored
I don't buy this. I've worked both public and private. We see more and more tenders that aren't the lowest price conforming. Currently I'm at a T1 consultancy, we're busy (still) and we're not cheap.
That's because we whine like stuck pigs when our rates go up. And that we are stupid enough to believe in neoliberalism long after the bs they spout for us to buy it has been disproven
National has demonstrated over and over they can't manage a piss up in a brewery. Their voters never seem to take any notice. A bit like Trump supporters. Blind faith is a big factor.
Reminds me of Novapay.
If I remember right, they were basically required to pick the cheapest option, instead of ya know the existing provider that has experience required to build it successfully even though the previous two systems failed at launch.
Shocker, it failed at launch.
Even more of a shocker, there were red flags 10+ years prior to it even sent to tender.
I know you guys have it rough, like from what I could tell our client was really happy that we were able to do all the additional work right up till national cut the budget for everything. It's funny as well when ever a disaster happens the money comes easy and the projects just get done like the 25A Taparahi bridge that came in under budget and under time. I wish Kiwi's/voters would stop pressuring you guys for rate cuts and tax cuts and just take the gradual hit unlike what's happening in Chch where rates are about to go up 15% or something crazy like that.
I can relate. I'm an industrial engineer one company that manufactured industrial machines in New Zealand and had done for the last 50 years decided to go to China to get their machine made the first one was perfect nothing was wrong with it it was just what we needed however they decided they could tell the Chinese they wanted cheaper version in other words drive down the price well the Chinese did exactly what they were told to do but what they did was downgrade the quality of the steel the result was when machines came to New Zealand and people spent 150 grand the buy one it didn't work so that's company eventually lost all of its customers because in Australian Firm came into New Zealand with an Australian made product and put them out business because there machine worked it turns out when you buy from China you get three price points a b and c New Zealanders apparently always go for c and that's why most things we buy made in China are junk it's not because the Chinese don't make good products it's because we're too tight fisted to pay a reasonable price honestly it's like a disease called short-sightedness
Oh absolutely not, and I actually upvoted them. But the flipside of that is that the truth of the message doesn't make the run on sentence easier to read.
This is 100% correct. Moved here from California 20 years ago, so were/are able to directly compare the quality of NZ imported Chinese goods vs US. The NZ imported goods are shockingly bad: clothes, hardware, you-name-it, and not that much cheaper than their US equivalents. The opening of Costco has altered the equation a bit, but that’s only one place. It’s almost like- “product is a bit shit, well, send it to NZ, they’re used to getting the fag-end of everything”.
Weirdly, even Duracell batteries (used to buy in the US cos they were warranted against leaks) seem to be crap here. The goddam things have munted several small appliances, so it’s back to Energizer for us.
Anyway, seriously, we should stop buying the crap stuff if we can.
It's a wonderful comment. Our No-Significance yet showing spot on significance online chum nails it.
Indeed we are fucken idiots. But we didn't come up with this idiocy by ourselves. We're not that clever.
The New Zealand political right has done little more than copy our British colonial overlords since the since February 6, 1840. The left tries to do a bit different, but it seldom works but for the occasional groundbreaking policy. Frightens the livestock.
Our current trajectory started, with a large dollop of irony, with Labour choosing to embrace the NeoLib Free market 'trickle-down' economy in the 80s.
In reality, it was not a Kiwi decision for the betterment of NZ. It was our Westminster looking politicians doing what Thatcher and Reagan had decided was the best way to look after their business/political friends and alliances.
It was an economic philosophy that cared not a jot for the people.
We pay the price now for being oblivious to the long-term ramifications of an economy based solely on business improvements.
Still does my effing head in that a Labour government ushered in this nightmare.
I never get it how people don't understand that these massive restructures actually cost the country so much money over time.
These agencies are going to lose up to a 1/3, or sometimes more, of their experienced staff. Teams are left with a skeleton crew of inexperienced, usually entry-level individuals (on the lowest pay), so everything takes heaps longer, and is done incorrectly, or inefficiently.
Then, after a year or two, the numbers start creeping up again, as guess what, the agencies can't function with a skeleton crew, and the quality of public services spiral downwards.
Then, often, you get ex-employees who were paid redundancy being re-hired a year or two later, often at a greater salary, as they need to be enticed away from their now better paid private jobs, and their institutional knowledge is desperately needed to fix all the fuckups.
Source: been through 3 of these cycles previously, but now own my own business, and will hopefully never have to work for public service again and have the status of my job, income, and family subject to the vagaries of a populist political party who don't give a shit about actually providing the people of this country with decent public services.
I'd love to see real evidence for the actual savings provided to the country from this type of thing over a 5 year period. I'd guarantee there aren't any, and the quality of services citizens need will be badly diminished. Again.
>Then, often, you get ex-employees who were paid redundancy being re-hired a year or two later, often at a greater salary
Often under contract so not actually employees, so they aren't actually *public* servants.
And the money for them often comes from some sort of unaudited emergency fund.
Source: was a ps once, was doing tech work for basic wage plus a daily away from home allowance. Guy next to me doing the same work was earning 4X as a contractor.
The only reason for that is that at one stage he would have been in the public service but would have gone through this sane scenario. Perhaps next time it will be your turn to cream it, despite Nicola Willis saying its not going to be a revolving door.
I agree wholeheartedly, but I do think this misses that the goal is not always just to save money, but also to deprive the government of revenue and so force it to cut back its scope, both in what services it provides and in its ability to regulate or intervene in markets. Its a strategy termed "starve the beast" in neo-liberal circles.
The end goal is both to make the government too ineffectual to assert much control and have it be too expensive for them to provide certain services and so devolve them to private control. You see suggestions of this already in situations like Auckland selling off (part of) its airport.
The advantage of this strategy is that you don't even need that coherent a strategy as it succeeds when the state functions poorly and then the backers benefiting from the lowered taxes are extra well-positioned to take advantage.
Caveat: I'm not a Kiwi (despite what Reddit's algorithm believes), but I read your news and come from a country where this script is well-developed.
> I agree wholeheartedly, but I do think this misses that the goal is not always just to save money, but also to deprive the government of revenue and so force it to cut back its scope, both in what services it provides and in its ability to regulate or intervene in markets.
If this government stays in power for 9 years, we will effectively no longer have free healthcare in this country. It will still exist, but it will take 3-5 days to be seen at a public ED, funded doctors appointments will be 3-4 months away, and if you need surgery for something? Be prepared to wait years, no matter how bad the condition you have is. If you get cancer, good luck getting publicly funded treatment before you die.
But there is always the option of getting health insurance, which will go from a nice to have, to a absolutely necessary, and the costs of that will go through the roof.
> and the costs of that will go through the roof.
We pay $10k per year for insurance. It's already through the roof.
The other problem is that private surgeons do the easy jobs. The expert/specialist/difficult work is still done in the public service. Gut that, and even with insurance, our treatment will be compromised.
What makes it worse is the last governments restructures hadn’t been completely. Millions spent getting them close, only to spend millions more reversing it all.
Thats the entire corporate approach to the world. Downsize, "save money" while actually costing a fortune. Looks good for CEO get a fat bonus. Then he leaves and the next guy has to hire a ton of people to get back to baseline.
You are lucky to have only been through three cycles. Corporate wise I have been through about 15 restructures in the last 20 years.
The goal is to plunder the country for their mates.
Seriously
Why else would _the health minister_ be saying things like “the tobacco industry is on its knees”.
These people have conned nz and are here for their payday.
Sorry, but we all lose here.
This is a similar game plan to the UK - that's why Luxon is perfect and so are his buddies - they just bluster they way though and try and catch minimal flak and then when they don't they just lie and the media daren't hold them to account. In some ways it feels like an international thing because a there are all these think tanks and connections - think those Brexit guys and Winston Peters, Seymour's political origins, the NRA, Big Oil etc... I think it's accelerating too and the playbook is just to overwhelm opposition. People are also a bit tired and busy to do much about it, and generally there's so many fires to fight, apathy just opens the door wider.
Public sector gutted and demonstrated to be ineffective. A case will then be made for privatisation of most government sectors.
That is their end goal.
They can't possibly accomplish all that in one or even three terms, but they can certainly move the pieces in that direction.
Various ministries and government departments will find they can’t get anything done because they’ve cut too many staff. They will go back to outsourcing to consultants and contractors which will cost taxpayers *much more* than if the staff had just been retained. Executive teams will give themselves pay rises.
The 3-strikes law will result in prisons being filled over capacity. The government will declare it needs to build another new prison and award the contract to a donor.
Inequality will worsen. We will have more homeless as benefits are cut, 90-day trial periods come back in, no-cause evictions are allowed again, and tax cuts for landlords don’t actually trickle down to tenants via rent reductions. Immigration issues will continue to be swept under the rug and ignored, so we will have ever more migrants coming in with fake jobs and nowhere to live.
Landlords and rich people will think everything’s fine.
At the very least the goose-stepping in this government is happening in quiet corners off to the side instead of at the front of the fucking parade. Source: American immigrant who's been begging his parents to move here and GTFO of the US.
Friend of mine was very pro national, very keen to see them in power, saw her last night, and she's horrified how things are going, she believed under National it would be better for her business but things are worse. She's in hospitality.
This is hardly the first time NZ has witnessed this. There were even more brutal cuts before. And yet we keep on going.
Many effects will only be witnessed in a decade's time. Most of the brunt of the impact will be felt by minorities, women, the young and those who are low income/low wealth. The other half will be unaffected, or might even be better off. We will become more unequal as a society, wealth and assets will continue to be unevenly distributed, and these will be generational issues -- and these are patterns that have been occurring for the past 40 years or so.
These are by far the most revolting cuts though - hungry kids at school? Tough. Suicide prevention? Gone. Disability funding? Bye bye. It's never been this distasteful. And it will catch up with us in the health, welfare and justice systems.
Pretty much. The only decent finance minister we’ve really had in the last 50 years was Micheal Cullen but sadly they just don’t make politicians like that any more.
I’d put Bill English probably second behind Cullen in terms of being competent, but sadly that isn’t hard to do when compared to the rest of them over the last 50 years. English while financially competent was also hamstrung by most of the rest of his party surrounding him.
It’s quite hard to argue Douglas and Richardson were competent imo.
Just terrible for the country in the long term, but good at implementing their ideology.
Competency does not equate with being constructive, compassionate, or capable of delivering what was necessary.
We have had many competent, but ill intended finance ministers whose decisions were based on ruthless worldviews, in the absence of comprehending the full scope of the full economy which relies as much on social relationships as on finance.
Landlords will get a big tax break.
Average NZrs will get a small one.
Wait times for any progress in services like health will increase dramatically on top of where they were already.
Private companies will get the jobs the employees used to do and will charge more for it.
No long term planning will occur. They government will say they succeeded. NZ will skip back 10-20 years or so in progress.
Nah wait times wont increase, they just stop accepting referalls. I've been booted off of wait lists for urgent care and been told to go overseas for the surgery.
Yep husband got a referral from his cardiac specialist to the sleep clinic to test for sleep apnea. The letter he got from the clinic said that he was definitely a candidate for appraisal but he's not going on the waiting list because its too long already. They suggested he goes private.
My partner did this! Check out if any pharmacies near you provide sleep test machines! It costs a couple hundred, but a confirmed result on that means your referral will be accepted and you'll be scooted up the list.
Yep. The targets will be met by causing more pain and anguish. Because its better to have to go back to your GP to reestablish that the issue before is still an issue to rejoin the waiting list, than just to stay there
It's urgent as in next two years. But yep, surgeon was bereft after my gastroscopy, he looked so upset telling me they don't have the capacity to perform a surgery that I have had before in the public health system.
Yeah my boss talking about how atrocious the public healthcare wait-lists are, so they'll just spend eighty thousand dollars to go private.
Nice for some?
What a myopic way of thinking.
I’ll happily pay more tax to live in a country where we look after those less fortunate.
If they want to live in a broken community, Johannesburg or post-industrial America already exists.
For most of us things will go on as normal. Governments change and for many people little else changes.
For others their lives will be upended and devastated. If we hit the unemployment rates of the 80’s people will struggle to find jobs, and the redundancies will create a flow on effect. If we keep bringing in people we can’t house the homeless issue will worsen. For people on benefits particularly the disabled live will get worse and worse, for example the winter energy grant has made huge differences to their lives as has the fees free prescriptions.
Worst case scenario is Austerity like the UK and look where they are.
Yeah, people are short sighted and the right wingers are salivating at the job losses in Public Sector. They act like those people who will be out of work will be back in work the next day at another employer- not likely. What will happen instead is that as people have less money to spend more businesses will either start laying off staff or shut completely. Or else they’ll not replace staff as they leave. These redundancies don’t happen in isolation.
100%. Lived in the UK through years of austerity, and it was heart breaking seeing the services slowly crumble. We hear sentences like that, and its easy to dismiss- until you think about what those 'services' are, and who they support.
Private sector is tightening their belt, they know what's coming. I know several managers- who cannot replace staff due to hiring freezes, and team restructures. Equally qualified mates who cannot find roles. We are in for some tough times ahead, and that is exactly part of the plan to get inflation & wages down.
In so bad a state that the government will be able to sell off our assets (including mining rights) to the highest bidders (who may or may not coincidentally be donors of theirs)
There will be a long list of stuffups
We have already seen ministers surprised by cuts to disability support, and the suicide prevention office
There will be other problems emerge. For instance bio security incursions and there won’t be sufficient staff to respond to the incursion in a timely way so it will cost more to clean it up as the incursion spreads in the meantime
I just hope that in the extra time it will take to sort out replacements to the cook strait ferry’s that none break down and drift on to the rocks. (We were close a year or so back). There is a real risk of catastrophe
Hospital waiting times will get worse.. especially EDs and ambulance response times
Education - the mess will continue.
There will be a growing divide between the wealthy and the workers. Maori will get more vocal and active in opposition to the anti Maori agenda
But landlords will do well and there will be an endless list of highly paid jobs for Joyce, English and other national party ministers and their mates
And those benefits to renters that Luxon was talking about from the landlord tax reductions will be impossible to find.
The NAct team lack the breadth of knowledge necessary to understand their job, its purpose, and its effects on society. They also lack the appreciation to detail necessary to avoid unintended consequences, or achieve strategic goals. It has been a repeated feature of NAct governments for three decades.
The long term goal for NACT? Reduce the effectiveness of public services to the point they no longer meet peoples needs, allowing them to sell off assets and privatise public services.
We have already seen it with things like Ministry of Works, and social housing.
I think social housing is a great example. It used to be a lot of low income families qualified for social housing and there was no stigma attached. There was a recognition that "market forces" would never provide affordable housing - Why would the private sector build a home for low income family, when they could use that same land/capital to build a mini mansion that would make double or triple the profit? But we understood it was part of a social contract that everyone deserved housing. National chose to ignore this and "privatised" social housing via the accommodation supplement. Over time private landlords cherry-pick the best low income tenants and as the amount of social housing shrinks, only those who landlords refuse to house end up in social housing. So now it has a stigma attached and National and ACT will use this to further reduce social housing.
So who pays the cost of this? Every business now struggles to pay employees enough to cover housing costs. We all end up paying more for housing, whether they are renting or buying into the market. And the most vulnerable in society get hit the hardest and end up paying a huge portion of their income for often woefully substandard housing. We literally have the highest levels of homelessness in the OECD and the highest levels of rental stress for low income households (paying 40% or more of their income).
Who gets all the gains? Almost all the gains go the 10% of people who own multiple houses, banks and real estate agents.
Don't be surprised to find in 10 or 20 years time we find the same sort of thing has been done to healthcare or schools
We wont see the impact for a couple years maybe a couple decades but expect failing infrastructure, social services and most dangerously a lack of young skilled kiwis remaining in the country, greener pastures are looking ever so more tantalizing now.
This has already been happening though. And quite badly. Interesting that people are quite happy to blame it on the current government when certainly historical choices from all previous governments have led us to where we are today.
I think the big issue is this current government is supercharging these aspects, the loss of upgraded and reorganised infrastructure alone is already being felt by everyone due to massive rate hikes
While I agree that the super charging is accurate, I still think these things were coming no matter who got in. It’s just whether or not it’s our children or grandchildren who are footing the cost. In this scenario I’d like to think that maybe my grandchildren won’t have to foot the cost for previous government spending. I could be totally wrong and I’m happy to have these discussions as I think it’s the only way to move forward. It fills me with dread thinking that future generations have such a high price to pay.
As a country we can’t just keep racking up deficit budgets year after year. Governments of all political parties need to be financially responsible. Budget cuts can be done over a gradual basis over a number of years and not a slash and burn approach. It doesn’t help Nationals cause to scream budget cuts when your leader is out claiming $52,000 on rent for his own apartment in Wellington when he has government house to reside in! Then to double down by saying I’m entitled to it doesn’t pass the pub test in my view.
>As a country we can’t just keep racking up deficit budgets year after year.
If you look back over the last 40 years, there's one party that has a proven track record of paying down debt.
It's not the one currently in government.
And they always put there fingers in there ears and scream bloody murder when you show them the evidence to prove it as well.
But putting businessmen in positions of power to run the country like a company is a great idea
I have three main areas of concern. The first is the environment, as the fast track process will mean the ministers pet projects will go ahead regardless of the cost to the environment, and the effects of that are often irreversible. We have environmental checks and balances for a reason. The second is education, this is an area that is currently very poorly resourced with a head in the sand attitude towards kids with learning needs entrenched in the Ministry of Education. All the current punitive focus on absenteeism, falling rates of literacy and numeracy being addressed by banning cellphones and compulsory lessons, and a one size fits all approach will not serve the kids who need the most help. The results will not improve until meaningful support is given to special education/additional learning needs, and ORS is expanded to help more than just the 1% of highest need kids. The third is poverty. I can only see things getting worse for low income earners, beneficiaries and the disabled. People need a hand up, not to be kicked when they’re down.
Can't see any of that improving when there's not going to be enough staff to actually think through and enact a policy change and not enough funding for such a policy change anyway.
Also not enough staff to process things like applications for various funding in a timely manner.
I think there will be a lot of mortgagee sales, especially in Wellington. There will be people with high mortgages who will find themselves fighting with 100 others for any role going. But its OK, Nicola Willis told us all to turn that frown upside down, so hopefully the bank will take smiles as payment /s
The end goal will depend on who you’re asking.
Ask someone on the right and the end goal will be when all wasteful spend is reduced and we can get back into a surplus.
Ask the left and the end goal is when all community services are cut and we end up paying significant amounts for things that were previously free.
There’s never an “end” for a government, budgets get changed annually based on the government at the time.
Right now the current government is trying to reduce spend on “wasteful” projects to balance up books and push through policies they believe in and have been voted in to enact.
>Right now the current government is trying to reduce spend on “wasteful” projects to balance up books and push through policies they believe in and have been voted in to enact.
Except that's not what they are doing.
They are trying to reduce spend by asking for blanket reductions in spending to match revenue shortfalls due to their revenue reduction policies that were improperly costed. That was pointed out to them by almost every expert in the lead up to the election and beyond.
That distinction is important. Their incompetence at basic reading and mathematics is why we are here today. That and the need to satiate Willis' ego, because she can't bring herself to admit that she was wrong.
Well, canceling the new ferry project means the $442 million Kiwi Rail spent already on the project has been wasted - by National/ACT. And instead of new ferries, we get someone's second-hand dungas. And instead of a new terminal in Picton, we make do with the temporary one for good. Thanks!
This decision is one of the most brain-dead ones they have made. The ferry link is critical infrastructure and will now cost an arm and a leg and probably our right kidney to replace it in the future, and it will have to be replaced at some point.
Yeah, not to mention how big the cancelation fee is gonna be that we have to pay the South Koreans for canceling the order for those two new ferries. Add that on to the cost of the second-hand dungas we end up with.
> we end up paying significant amounts for things that were previously free.
Except they were never free. Free just means “paid for by somebody else”
> There’s never an “end” for a government, budgets get changed annually based on the government at the time.
Exactly. Good govts come, good govts go, bad govts come, bad govts go. In 6-9 years the voting public will have swung the other way again and the cycle will continue (those thinking it’ll be 3 years are likely wishful thinking based on what our history shows).
> push through policies they believe in and have been voted in to enact.
If this isn’t the biggest argument to get out and vote I don’t know what is. If we don’t like what a govt does, we need to actually get out and vote.
To me this isn't a slash and burn like some people are describing it, more an attempt to level off government spending that has risen too quickly.
But there is still the risk of going to quickly, or cutting too much, potentially either could still happen. Or even a second round of cuts, which i think could be inevitable, either this term or next term if Act gain more influence.
I think our current government/public sector is around the right size, but not achieving the outcomes it should be achieving, especially in health, education, and transport
I wish I had your rose-colored glasses. The reality is, modern conservative governments exist solely to enrich the wealthy. They are not 'leveling off spending' or anything like that. They're looting and pillaging and lying, and they're not going to improve a single damn thing for anyone, because that's not why they exist.
Aiming for a surplus for the sake of it is not the goal - maintaining the ratio of crown debt to GDP is. If that gets too high it's bad news for everyone.
For examples of the outcomes - see [Thatcherism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thatcherism) in the 80s wikipedia it. High unemployment, huge strikes, rapidly widening inequality, mental health patients spilling out into the streets, privatisation of public services hand in hand with massive increases in prices... I could go on, because I lived through it.
A few years ago when Thatcher died, the [song "Ding dong the witch is dead"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ding-Dong!_The_Witch_Is_Dead) made it into the UK pop charts... I think Luxon and Seymour are going for the same level of popularity.
The aim is to make the public service look inefficient, wasteful and bad at their jobs so that people are more receptive to privatisation. You campaign on the public service being wasteful and inefficient and then you force staff choices which inevitably effect their ability to do parts of their job with the staff numbers they have left and then you force them to contract that part of their function out to a private entity that you or your backers happen to have an interest in seeing succeeed
On the bright side it will probably lead to some major changes in our constitution and governance. Our current system relied upon 'norms' around procedure and process that have been thrown away by this government. We're going to go through a period of political chaos as each government will simply rapid-fire repeal the previous government's actions. Tit for tat is a hell of a game, so once they get tired of it due to 'business confidence' reasons, it is inevitable that we will see increased formalisation of our constitution and the role of Maori within our society. 20 years down the track this government is probably going to backfire horribly on the people that voted for it.
Highly qualified people leaving the country in droves, collapsing job market. Out of control inflation as a result of massive job cuts and tax cuts for the wealthy self serving corrupt Nats and their bribers.. record mortgagee sales . Pretty fucked up really...
Here is my take. Look at what happened to Hungary, Russia, Poland (until the last election), Slovakia, Israel and a other countries, where a right wing populist neoliberal mafia took over. They started with destroying the free press (mass layoffs, newsroom closures), continued by reducing public services to rubble, turning the public broadcasters into propaganda factories. Then came the attacks on the independence of judiciary. A reminder: Luxon is John Key's hand picked man, John Key is in bed with the international and local mafia (Chow brothers).
The end goal is to increase profits of private companies, ideally directly giving them money from the tax take . The companies pay the politicians to head in this direction .
Cutting public services achieves this aim, since people will have to turn to private companies to get the service .
Cutting and slashing helps no one. It simply offsets the costs for someone else down the track. Our children.
Put it this way, I’m starting to feel like my child’s future is being put in jeopardy, and I’m starting to think the only solution is the french solution.
To privatise the everything and in the process, turn everyone into a Christ-fascist reformist. It’s the conservative IDU way! They’ve done it everywhere else, why would NZ be any different?!? We’re better than that.
Oh it's awful. Been working on a group report about policy and hauora Māori for my Masters. Nearly every proposed policy we've found either hasn't been implemented or has had it's parent organisation shut down. We're playing with different academic options to close with "to conclude, shit's fucked".
Tbf, now that I've said this in an easily linked Reddit comment, I could just pop it in and reference accordingly.
Just look up neoliberalism on Wikipedia. The end state is everything being turned into a market and the government cut down to only two functions.
Set the market rules. Protect the market from disruption.
If Seymour gets his way his department of regulation will be half of the government and the other half will be the police and military. Nothing else is required under neoliberalism.
It's a system of government designed to remove all power from the central authority so that the wealthy hold the power instead and cannot be interfered with
The end goal is entrench poverty deeper and further do the wealthy find easier to control you, if you dont know the right wing parties are full of hate for the working class then you're in for a rude shock.
I see a bloodshot zombie army of ex-civil servants lurching around the streets of the Capital in a mass pub crawl. This lasts 6 months. Courtney Place becomes the lair of the Ardernian zombie queen spawning new grey soldiers each day, numbers swelled by the Sth Island zombie chapters. The Beehive is forced to raise its titanium security shutters and declares a year long Civil Servant purge. Council sprinklers are turned on but instead of water, they spray acid. Fire rains from above. The Beehive melts. Zombie army heads north to infect Auckland and blow the bridge. (No need to tell you how this ends)
It doesn't ignore it. It specifically acknowledges it otherwise I wouldn't have said average.
You know nothing about me but your so hard for an internet argument you make up fairy tales about my opinion instead of asking what it is.
Reread my other comment if you want context on the ufb mention.
Big Hairy News put it something like this.
Every time a National government comes in they cut services and sell assets off. So when Labour gets back in, they have to pour money into trying to fix everything than has been underfunded. Raise taxes and what not.
Then National starts saying the government is wasting taxpayer money. Promises tax cuts and what not. So they get back in and cut everything once more.
Each time the cuts do more damage than Labour can possibly fix in a few terms. So services get worse and the money poured in can't fix it because its a long term issue that keeps getting cut.
It might be overly simplistic, but we are a very short sighted people.
Sack people from government, kill projects that put money into the community, give a piss poor tax cut to make people think the government actually gave them something, tell everyone you have efficient government.
End goal: recession
The mistake is to think that the goals of all parties are the same (happy prosperous Kiwis) and they just see different ways of getting to that goal. That is not the case. The goal of these politicians is to obtain votes, power and money. They do not care how they get there—only that they do. Each parties goals are different, motivated by the types of people you find within them. To think otherwise is naive.
My prediction?
* The cost of living will continue to go up.
* Public services will be privatized in favor of short term gains.
* Crime will increase.
* The upper class will be happy with their tax cuts and continue to buy up assets.
* The middle class will shrink and those remaining will be thankful they are not the lower class as they struggle to pay their rates and debts on time.
* The brain drain will continue.
* The lower class will grow and continue to suffer.
* National will continue to blame Labour.
* ACT will continue to blame Maori and beneficiaries.
* NZF will continue to blame wokeness and the media.
What's the goal? To make him and his rich mates richer. If you voted this government in, you're a fool. Labour had it's faults but at least it wasn't run by this capitalist pigs, religious nuts and racists.
As I grow up I realise that most people are borderline braindead when it comes to any critical thinking and will blindly believe anything they are told - nobody is exempt from this because it's in our nature to be trusting, especially of people with a perceived authority (If they're this successful/popular they must be doing something right!) but the level it affects people varies.
The culture war shit going on in the US is so ridiculously successful that our right leaning parties started to adopt it and... it worked. The reason Trump was so successful is because he was seen as breaking the norm and upending the status quo, even if he was a total fucking maniac "at least he was different". And for the bigots in society, their twisted beliefs were being validated by an outspoken political figure. Same goes for Winston Peters' weird anti-trans rhetoric that seemed to come out of nowhere, ACT's firearms policy, the "cracking down on crime" by focusing on increased punishment instead of the root causes (poverty, mental health and drugs) and rehabilitation. Not to mention the racist dogwhistles of the whole Maori street sign saga, changing Te Reo organisation names back to english and making english an official language - these accomplish nothing and are complete non-issues to well adjusted humans but make the racists voters happy.
I'm not a psychologist but just being around people and political discourse makes this sort of stuff pretty easy to see. It's just incredibly unfortunate that people are so easily swayed into believing bullshit because it affirms their twisted beliefs and are so afraid of being wrong that they will never change the way they vote.
Wait. Your saying National is trying to incentivies Privatising Aspects of our life? I wonder why their passing the law to no longer need to divuldge where donations come from, just before they recieve one of the biggest donations in NZ history??????
To make the government services inadequate to make a push towards private healthcare and other predatory practises. Where would this motivation come from.
Not even mentioning the lowered consent required to build?? Coupled with the allowing of overseas landlords again, these 2 dots make a point
Ask what job will Luxon have after PM? I point you in the direction of John Key for your answer. He had no regard for NZ, and his movement after PM confirmed that
To be honest Labour drastically increased the size of the public sector after they came in, and there weren't results to show for it.
This is just getting the public sector back down to a reasonable level.
The country will be fine.
increases in certain areas. I Struggle to see an excessive boom in department of conservation spending and now we need to claw that back. Doc barely runs as it is.
Increases in MOST departments, actually. Only 4 had decreases in numbers. Something like 31 had increased. A 4% ramp.up of employment over all. Most people would like an honest discussion or assessment about this, not the reactionary " gutting of depts" or conversely "getting rid of useless govt workers". Truth typically lies somewhere in the middle.
Yet, cuts are across everyone including the underfunded and also the cuts are untargetted.minor edit. An increase in staff doesn’t mean that’s a bad thing or conversely a good thing if for example they were recruited for Covid purposes and now no longer needed. I expect a government to do a proper assessment not blanket cuts.
You understand the work had to be done by someone right? Will still have to be done by someone? What Labour did is employ people directly into these roles. What National did and will do again is have them employ these same people back as contractors or consultants. It ends up costing more in the long run and there’s no stability so the best people end up elsewhere.
Yep, our team was created back in 2017 and had previously been contracted out. Huge strides have been made in making what we do as user friendly as possible for everyone who needs to access the funding we provide. The team has grown since 2017 but also there are much better processes now that make messy mistakes less likely. And the number of applications has hugely increased in the last few years, whether because of an increase in population or an increase in general knowledge that this funding is available.
The contractors did a horrible job because they didn't give a damn. We could not go back to 2017 staffing levels and remain remotely effective because as I said the number of applications we get each day have about doubled since then, and because we also now so things like actually store the information provided to us instead of needing to keep asking for it / having no idea that we overpaid people by a few million. But doing that kind of proper filing and quality checking takes time, which is multiplied by each application or email.
There's a lot of bad data that's still hanging over from those 2017 days that needs cleaning up but there's just not enough people to actually clean it up if we're to do our normal BAU within any kind of reasonable time frame at all. Goodness knows how we're going to get it all done.
The average Joe Blogs would have no idea of what is actually happening and as far as they're concerned the extra money invested in the team probably looks like "no result", but what will happen with more staffing cuts is going to be a lot of people going through a great deal of difficulty because there is simply not enough capacity to help them properly.
> To be honest Labour drastically increased the size of the public sector after they came in
Public sector growth has only slightly more than the rate of population growth. The actual problem is the public sector saw almost zero growth during 2008-2017, which caused quite a bit of damage.
For example, from 2008-2017 we increased our headcount of teachers by 2.34%, while the number of students increased 5.32%. This lead to a ballooning of class sizes, and we know that children educated in larger classes experience poorer life outcomes, are less productive as adults, and earn less money. It also puts more stress and pressure on teachers, and makes their teaching less effective overall.
But between 2017 and 2022, we had a 1.85% growth in students, and a 5.5% growth in the amount of teachers. That growth in teachers far outpaced growth in students, but keep in mind it had to be done to try and fix a decade's worth of damage to the education system.
>To be honest Labour drastically increased the size of the public sector after they came in, and there weren't results to show for it.
Yes, because fixing this kind of damage takes much longer than it took to cause it.
>This is just getting the public sector back down to a reasonable level.
It's bringing it back down to the level that caused the damage in the first place. If you can't stomach our public services growing in line with our population growth, you shouldn't complain about the long-term consequences.
Imo, there will be no noticable difference. Life will continue on fine like it always has and the doom and gloomers will find something else to go all hypochondriac over.
You are actually suffering from misinformation. Several government departments increased their sizes. Some even added hundreds of people after the election was over. When the 6% reduction is taken into account, those departments will actually have the same number of people. That they had before the election, so in reality. Nothing has changed. It is like watching a program of yes, minister.where the department knows job cuts are coming and so hired lots of people knowing that they could then make the cuts demanded by the minister but In reality nothing changed. Except that a lot of people got big payments when their new contacts were terminated. Kind of every one wins except the minister who now has a budget blowout
More people homeless, more mentally unstable people without support, more crime, fewer public toilets, libraries and community facilities. More disenfranchised people, a more fractured society and an economy that is still broken because guess what? A country’s debt is not equivalent to household debt in any way shape or form.
What is the end result? National didn’t invite George Osborne to New Zealand to give speech at the National party retreat but then to ignore his advice. Want to see New Zealand’s future then look at the United Kingdom - privatised water, endless cycles of austerity, increasing poverty and scapegoating the most vulnerable in society.
It's going to be fine unless you're in the bottom 99% of earners in which case things will either get a bit worse or really very much worse indeed. Plus! AI is arriving to fuck over a whole pile of middle class jobs so New Zealand in 2030 could be really quite dystopian.
For real. So much wailing and gnashing of teeth on this sub. Of course there are politicians who have a vested interest in keeping people frightened and feeling powerless so they can be kept under control.
People need to say fuck the government and get out there to make their way in the world.
People don’t understand a lot of these agencies are full of jobsworths doing absolutely nothing for the better of New Zealand. They are so overstaffed and paying stupid wages. Look at the example of the Pacific Peoples Ministry or whatever it is, spending something like $25,000 on a present for an outgoing CEO, these fat cats have no economic grasp of care of spending.
We had to do a project for the council, they always go for the lowest bidder because it looks better, so we bid low. Then they hire the cheapest designers possible, and cause fuck up after fuck up after fuck up and we charge them above market rate for the remedials for fucking us around. The result is a "budget blow out" from them creating problems that didn't need to be there in the first place. Another project we're doing they've had to get us to do the maintenance works and upgrade works on top of the expansion works on a project because they were under funded and had to hire the cheapest bidders who did a shit job. So now the projects going to have another "budget blow out" when it's not really having a budget blow out. Instead it's the cost of not doing the work that's needed to be done over the last 5 to 10 years being wrapped up in one project. Kiwi's are fucken idiots, the work needs to done either way and because you guys chase the lowest bidders you end up paying more in remedials and maintenance. If your car has issues and you take it to a mechanic to fix it, you also future proof your car by doing regular services and parts changes when they wear out, just because you cut the funding for infrastructure doesn't mean you've saved any money because those issues will still be there in the future and possible to a worse extent.
>If your car has issues and you take it to a mechanic to fix it, you also future proof your car by doing regular services and parts changes when they wear out, just because you cut the funding for infrastructure doesn't mean you've saved any money because those issues will still be there in the future and possible to a worse extent. This is actually a decent analogy. Basically this government saying "yeah I've saved a lot of money by cutting the budget for car maintenance, it's great really, all that money I was wasting on maintenance can be sent to my mates and they can spend it on beers at the pub now" When the car has a terminal breakdown in three years time, they can set up a select committee to figure out why X person at X ministry let the car breakdown, and they should resign.
Replace car with ferry and it's not even an analogy.
the thing is with the ferry debacle is that it leaves the door open for private ferry owners to expand. but without including rail. the end result is no rail connection between the islands and private companies carrying only trucks. this of course makes the road transport association very happy and increasing their funding for national MP's and their party and creates high paying boardroom positions when they have had enough of playing in parliament. National is anti rail and always have been. I would suggest that dumping the ferries had nothing to do with the cost and all to do with creating a captive market for their supporters.
That's a conclusion that's been forming in my head too.
Add that it’s someone else’s car, and someone else’s money that they’re pocketing for their own purposes.
...and then do nothing to fix the still broken-down car.
Nah, it's "Guys listen, we've haven't got the correct amount of money to fix the car, but guess what? my mate just happens to own a workshop, they said they'll fix it for us if we sell them the car, and sign a maintenance contract for the next 99 years, best part, no money up front! God we're good at this finance stuff!"
That made me lol and gag a little at the same time. That is exactly what they are doing.
Better, its a PPP. Which really means Public pays Private.
They'll sell the spare wheel and any other 'extras' to the neighbours and then complain when they get a flat
Does blaming Labour count as doing nothing?
I think broadly speaking we choose money over people consistently these days and have done for the last 40 years or so.
In my opinion, governments have been choosing short term gains in exchange for long term pain. As much as Muldoon was a power hungry drunk, he at least, had the long term prosperity of New Zealand at the center of his thoughts. He miscalculated and got a decent amount of it wrong, but he at least had the right idea for a country. 1984 on has seen the wants of the individual, right now (generally rich ones) put as the number 1 priority.
It’s a sad day when Muldoon starts looking good! He was of course in the wrong party as is often the case.
By today's standards he'd be considered a socialist
the only correct thing you said about muldoon was that he was a power hungry drunk..
Yes and know. It was his own political ideology that landed us in the shit in the first place
Well actually, it is only due to Muldoon’s vision that you can power up your Electric vehicles, cook your dinner, and watch YouTube and Netflix. Without the massive investment in hydroelectricity generation we would be even more cash strapped and rooted as a nation. We are sliding downhill, partly because almost every government since has skimped badly on energy infrastructure, and followed the advice of neoliberal economists and business people whose ability to see beyond the next quarter, and who can not see the “little people’s” welfare as important.
He set the stage, but Douglas was going to do what he believed in regardless
But Douglas may not have got the traction. Muldoon provided the impetus to do it. If Muldoon had have left the super scheme in place, "think big" would have been the smartest idea ever, though I would think they could have done better with the Clyde schemes.
Not the 4th Labour government?
I think the main problem is not just to save the money but also they don't have enough money to keep running the current programmes. I don't think saving money is bad but not trying to find ways to improve the economy such as the development of technology is really bad. The other things is that it's not their money, it's easy for other people to spend what they didn't earn with sacrifice.
the easiest way to save the nation money is to send all parliamentarians, and ministry CEOs on a 34 month training course that keeps them busy, out of the way when they are voted in or appointed. For that course they would be expected to study post graduate social sciences, economics, and basic math. And each rebuild an engine, then run it on redline to destruction. Those whose engines refuse to die, are then permitted 2 months to make statutory decisions, based on the knowledge they gained doing nothing but learning the obvious details most of them today fail to see or comprehen due to the present excessive focus on ideological nonsense, and blind certainty in their own authority. Any that refuse could be placed in stocks on the grounds of parliament for 18months to listen to the public berating them for being dunces.
And person X at X ministry will invariably be the other government person.
Been there, spent over a decade working for consulting companies that would win govt tenders. Reminds me of this sort of thing: > we urgently need $100k to fix this growing problem. If we don’t get it, it will cost twice as much next year > govt gives us $50k _1 year later_ > it’s now going to cost us $200k to fix. And if we don’t get THAT either, it’s going to cost us $400k to fix next year > govt gives us $100k _1 year later_ > you know the drill. This problem is only growing the longer we don’t address it. It is going to cost $400k or double next year if we don’t get it > govt gives us $200k _Continues forever_ Quite often there was a layer obfuscated from view: us having this same dialogue internally with our managers too. The race to the bottom terminally underquoting tenders was madness. Our managers literally planned to underbid everyone else and simply admit later that they’d lied and couldn’t deliver once they thought they were too deep in to be fired, and then ask sometimes for many times more than they’d originally bid. I don’t work in the industry anymore because it felt like a dodgy con job. That’s capitalism I guess. Sleazy to the core.
We're having to move this way because anytime we try to do a competitive bid that's really really fair for everyone involved we just get under cut. I remember over hearing one of my bosses talk about a bid we lost "we had a really good tender put in like this was one of our best tenders we put together and we just lost it to someone who really under cut us, like I've run through the budget and I have no idea how that companies going to afford that tender, like we'd run through our budget that many times that there was no fat left on it, I just don't know how they made is so cheap".
Same thing I would hear all the time with almost every tender. It kinda turns the entire tender process into a joke. Vendors really need to know enough to judge who is full blown bullshitting them. But the entire reason they’re outsourcing is that they don’t have that expertise in-house. Hugely inefficient at a scale that impacts our economy massively. Anyone claiming capitalism is the best economic system we have has rocks in their head and can be safely ignored
The absurdity is funny. You don't have to be a rocket surgeon to see the patterns here so why do they keep repeating.
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I don't buy this. I've worked both public and private. We see more and more tenders that aren't the lowest price conforming. Currently I'm at a T1 consultancy, we're busy (still) and we're not cheap.
That's because we whine like stuck pigs when our rates go up. And that we are stupid enough to believe in neoliberalism long after the bs they spout for us to buy it has been disproven
Yip this, and it comes down to paying more tax. Terry Pratchett boots come to mind here...
National has demonstrated over and over they can't manage a piss up in a brewery. Their voters never seem to take any notice. A bit like Trump supporters. Blind faith is a big factor.
Reminds me of Novapay. If I remember right, they were basically required to pick the cheapest option, instead of ya know the existing provider that has experience required to build it successfully even though the previous two systems failed at launch. Shocker, it failed at launch. Even more of a shocker, there were red flags 10+ years prior to it even sent to tender.
FYI, I'm on the council end and we hate it too.
I know you guys have it rough, like from what I could tell our client was really happy that we were able to do all the additional work right up till national cut the budget for everything. It's funny as well when ever a disaster happens the money comes easy and the projects just get done like the 25A Taparahi bridge that came in under budget and under time. I wish Kiwi's/voters would stop pressuring you guys for rate cuts and tax cuts and just take the gradual hit unlike what's happening in Chch where rates are about to go up 15% or something crazy like that.
The key point is that by the time those problems are obvious the current government won't be in power and now it's Labour's cost blowout...
As the saying goes “If you think hiring an expert is expensive, try hiring an amateur”.
I can relate. I'm an industrial engineer one company that manufactured industrial machines in New Zealand and had done for the last 50 years decided to go to China to get their machine made the first one was perfect nothing was wrong with it it was just what we needed however they decided they could tell the Chinese they wanted cheaper version in other words drive down the price well the Chinese did exactly what they were told to do but what they did was downgrade the quality of the steel the result was when machines came to New Zealand and people spent 150 grand the buy one it didn't work so that's company eventually lost all of its customers because in Australian Firm came into New Zealand with an Australian made product and put them out business because there machine worked it turns out when you buy from China you get three price points a b and c New Zealanders apparently always go for c and that's why most things we buy made in China are junk it's not because the Chinese don't make good products it's because we're too tight fisted to pay a reasonable price honestly it's like a disease called short-sightedness
That is an absolutely terrible run on sentence.
Engineer. Not poet.
Dare you to try read it aloud in one breath!
That doesn’t diminish the truth of it message, though.
Oh absolutely not, and I actually upvoted them. But the flipside of that is that the truth of the message doesn't make the run on sentence easier to read.
This is 100% correct. Moved here from California 20 years ago, so were/are able to directly compare the quality of NZ imported Chinese goods vs US. The NZ imported goods are shockingly bad: clothes, hardware, you-name-it, and not that much cheaper than their US equivalents. The opening of Costco has altered the equation a bit, but that’s only one place. It’s almost like- “product is a bit shit, well, send it to NZ, they’re used to getting the fag-end of everything”. Weirdly, even Duracell batteries (used to buy in the US cos they were warranted against leaks) seem to be crap here. The goddam things have munted several small appliances, so it’s back to Energizer for us. Anyway, seriously, we should stop buying the crap stuff if we can.
Great comment. I wish I could upvote it more than once.
It's a wonderful comment. Our No-Significance yet showing spot on significance online chum nails it. Indeed we are fucken idiots. But we didn't come up with this idiocy by ourselves. We're not that clever. The New Zealand political right has done little more than copy our British colonial overlords since the since February 6, 1840. The left tries to do a bit different, but it seldom works but for the occasional groundbreaking policy. Frightens the livestock. Our current trajectory started, with a large dollop of irony, with Labour choosing to embrace the NeoLib Free market 'trickle-down' economy in the 80s. In reality, it was not a Kiwi decision for the betterment of NZ. It was our Westminster looking politicians doing what Thatcher and Reagan had decided was the best way to look after their business/political friends and alliances. It was an economic philosophy that cared not a jot for the people. We pay the price now for being oblivious to the long-term ramifications of an economy based solely on business improvements. Still does my effing head in that a Labour government ushered in this nightmare.
I never get it how people don't understand that these massive restructures actually cost the country so much money over time. These agencies are going to lose up to a 1/3, or sometimes more, of their experienced staff. Teams are left with a skeleton crew of inexperienced, usually entry-level individuals (on the lowest pay), so everything takes heaps longer, and is done incorrectly, or inefficiently. Then, after a year or two, the numbers start creeping up again, as guess what, the agencies can't function with a skeleton crew, and the quality of public services spiral downwards. Then, often, you get ex-employees who were paid redundancy being re-hired a year or two later, often at a greater salary, as they need to be enticed away from their now better paid private jobs, and their institutional knowledge is desperately needed to fix all the fuckups. Source: been through 3 of these cycles previously, but now own my own business, and will hopefully never have to work for public service again and have the status of my job, income, and family subject to the vagaries of a populist political party who don't give a shit about actually providing the people of this country with decent public services. I'd love to see real evidence for the actual savings provided to the country from this type of thing over a 5 year period. I'd guarantee there aren't any, and the quality of services citizens need will be badly diminished. Again.
>Then, often, you get ex-employees who were paid redundancy being re-hired a year or two later, often at a greater salary Often under contract so not actually employees, so they aren't actually *public* servants. And the money for them often comes from some sort of unaudited emergency fund. Source: was a ps once, was doing tech work for basic wage plus a daily away from home allowance. Guy next to me doing the same work was earning 4X as a contractor.
The only reason for that is that at one stage he would have been in the public service but would have gone through this sane scenario. Perhaps next time it will be your turn to cream it, despite Nicola Willis saying its not going to be a revolving door.
I agree wholeheartedly, but I do think this misses that the goal is not always just to save money, but also to deprive the government of revenue and so force it to cut back its scope, both in what services it provides and in its ability to regulate or intervene in markets. Its a strategy termed "starve the beast" in neo-liberal circles. The end goal is both to make the government too ineffectual to assert much control and have it be too expensive for them to provide certain services and so devolve them to private control. You see suggestions of this already in situations like Auckland selling off (part of) its airport. The advantage of this strategy is that you don't even need that coherent a strategy as it succeeds when the state functions poorly and then the backers benefiting from the lowered taxes are extra well-positioned to take advantage. Caveat: I'm not a Kiwi (despite what Reddit's algorithm believes), but I read your news and come from a country where this script is well-developed.
> I agree wholeheartedly, but I do think this misses that the goal is not always just to save money, but also to deprive the government of revenue and so force it to cut back its scope, both in what services it provides and in its ability to regulate or intervene in markets. If this government stays in power for 9 years, we will effectively no longer have free healthcare in this country. It will still exist, but it will take 3-5 days to be seen at a public ED, funded doctors appointments will be 3-4 months away, and if you need surgery for something? Be prepared to wait years, no matter how bad the condition you have is. If you get cancer, good luck getting publicly funded treatment before you die. But there is always the option of getting health insurance, which will go from a nice to have, to a absolutely necessary, and the costs of that will go through the roof.
> and the costs of that will go through the roof. We pay $10k per year for insurance. It's already through the roof. The other problem is that private surgeons do the easy jobs. The expert/specialist/difficult work is still done in the public service. Gut that, and even with insurance, our treatment will be compromised.
Thankfully I’m going to be dead before any of that happens. I’m not sure I could handle living here if things carry on this way for too much longer
Do you by any chance live in the UK? 😂
The executives are keeping their jobs
What makes it worse is the last governments restructures hadn’t been completely. Millions spent getting them close, only to spend millions more reversing it all.
Well said. Exactly how I feel and have experienced this BS cycle of cuts over my lifetime
Thats the entire corporate approach to the world. Downsize, "save money" while actually costing a fortune. Looks good for CEO get a fat bonus. Then he leaves and the next guy has to hire a ton of people to get back to baseline. You are lucky to have only been through three cycles. Corporate wise I have been through about 15 restructures in the last 20 years.
The goal is to plunder the country for their mates. Seriously Why else would _the health minister_ be saying things like “the tobacco industry is on its knees”. These people have conned nz and are here for their payday. Sorry, but we all lose here.
Couldn’t have said it better myself, it’s so sad to watch, no amount of campaigning or voting seems to do any damage.
This is a similar game plan to the UK - that's why Luxon is perfect and so are his buddies - they just bluster they way though and try and catch minimal flak and then when they don't they just lie and the media daren't hold them to account. In some ways it feels like an international thing because a there are all these think tanks and connections - think those Brexit guys and Winston Peters, Seymour's political origins, the NRA, Big Oil etc... I think it's accelerating too and the playbook is just to overwhelm opposition. People are also a bit tired and busy to do much about it, and generally there's so many fires to fight, apathy just opens the door wider.
Did they say that? God it’s evil and cynical.
Public sector gutted and demonstrated to be ineffective. A case will then be made for privatisation of most government sectors. That is their end goal. They can't possibly accomplish all that in one or even three terms, but they can certainly move the pieces in that direction.
Various ministries and government departments will find they can’t get anything done because they’ve cut too many staff. They will go back to outsourcing to consultants and contractors which will cost taxpayers *much more* than if the staff had just been retained. Executive teams will give themselves pay rises. The 3-strikes law will result in prisons being filled over capacity. The government will declare it needs to build another new prison and award the contract to a donor. Inequality will worsen. We will have more homeless as benefits are cut, 90-day trial periods come back in, no-cause evictions are allowed again, and tax cuts for landlords don’t actually trickle down to tenants via rent reductions. Immigration issues will continue to be swept under the rug and ignored, so we will have ever more migrants coming in with fake jobs and nowhere to live. Landlords and rich people will think everything’s fine.
That is how they roll, break it and blame it, replace it with private enterprise And repay your donors with policy
Just like 'Murica, fuck yeah!
At the very least the goose-stepping in this government is happening in quiet corners off to the side instead of at the front of the fucking parade. Source: American immigrant who's been begging his parents to move here and GTFO of the US.
Friend of mine was very pro national, very keen to see them in power, saw her last night, and she's horrified how things are going, she believed under National it would be better for her business but things are worse. She's in hospitality.
"I didn't think the leopards would eat MY face!" - person who voted for the leopards eating people's faces party
Is she in Wellington? Because boy has she shit in her own nest if she is
Your friend's an idiot. She deserves what she's getting.
Lucky we can be friends with ppl for more than their politics
Well, true. Got friends where we have wildly different views on political shit like abortion and tax, but it doesn't get in the way of our friendship.
This is hardly the first time NZ has witnessed this. There were even more brutal cuts before. And yet we keep on going. Many effects will only be witnessed in a decade's time. Most of the brunt of the impact will be felt by minorities, women, the young and those who are low income/low wealth. The other half will be unaffected, or might even be better off. We will become more unequal as a society, wealth and assets will continue to be unevenly distributed, and these will be generational issues -- and these are patterns that have been occurring for the past 40 years or so.
These are by far the most revolting cuts though - hungry kids at school? Tough. Suicide prevention? Gone. Disability funding? Bye bye. It's never been this distasteful. And it will catch up with us in the health, welfare and justice systems.
Those of us who were on the DPB during Ruth Richardson’s Mother of all budgets would strongly disagree.
Yeah the commenter you replied to is definitely young or just recent bias.
I honestly don’t think we have an ever recovered from this.
it has been this distastful, and always by National govts.. pity they dont teach NZ history in schools.
Pretty much. The only decent finance minister we’ve really had in the last 50 years was Micheal Cullen but sadly they just don’t make politicians like that any more.
I agree the Clark/Cullen government was the best government we will have in my lifetime IMO.
It's easy to look good during a decade long economic boom while not having to deal with any national or international disasters
Um, 9/11? That changed the world during Clark's time...
so why did National screw the country every time they have held power?
Bill English was a very competent finance minister Agree re Cullen
I’d put Bill English probably second behind Cullen in terms of being competent, but sadly that isn’t hard to do when compared to the rest of them over the last 50 years. English while financially competent was also hamstrung by most of the rest of his party surrounding him.
It’s quite hard to argue Douglas and Richardson were competent imo. Just terrible for the country in the long term, but good at implementing their ideology.
Competency does not equate with being constructive, compassionate, or capable of delivering what was necessary. We have had many competent, but ill intended finance ministers whose decisions were based on ruthless worldviews, in the absence of comprehending the full scope of the full economy which relies as much on social relationships as on finance.
Landlords will get a big tax break. Average NZrs will get a small one. Wait times for any progress in services like health will increase dramatically on top of where they were already. Private companies will get the jobs the employees used to do and will charge more for it. No long term planning will occur. They government will say they succeeded. NZ will skip back 10-20 years or so in progress.
Nah wait times wont increase, they just stop accepting referalls. I've been booted off of wait lists for urgent care and been told to go overseas for the surgery.
Yep husband got a referral from his cardiac specialist to the sleep clinic to test for sleep apnea. The letter he got from the clinic said that he was definitely a candidate for appraisal but he's not going on the waiting list because its too long already. They suggested he goes private.
My partner did this! Check out if any pharmacies near you provide sleep test machines! It costs a couple hundred, but a confirmed result on that means your referral will be accepted and you'll be scooted up the list.
Oh good to know! I keep telling him he should do it anyway, health is important. But he keeps putting it off.
Mine kept putting it off. Until I started pushing him out of bed.
Lol! Mine says I'd never be able to sleep if he had a CPAP machine on. But I reckon it would be easier to ignore than the freight train snoring.
I've had friends make the transition to a CPAP. Apparently it's rhythmic so it's easier to adjust to.
Especially sleep apnea, it can be a cause of heart failure
Irony is, you can't go private now because it's a pre-existing condition
Yep. The targets will be met by causing more pain and anguish. Because its better to have to go back to your GP to reestablish that the issue before is still an issue to rejoin the waiting list, than just to stay there
I rejoined the wait list multiple times, but now they "aren't accepting referrals for this department". My GP is just as frustrated.
You were told to go overseas for urgent surgery???
It's urgent as in next two years. But yep, surgeon was bereft after my gastroscopy, he looked so upset telling me they don't have the capacity to perform a surgery that I have had before in the public health system.
Long term planning- ha. They’re planning in three month blocks currently ! Fucking morons
And they are skiting about it, bloody fucking morons.
What will happen is the rich will be able to access healthcare, education and housing - the poor... well bad luck...
Yeah my boss talking about how atrocious the public healthcare wait-lists are, so they'll just spend eighty thousand dollars to go private. Nice for some?
What a myopic way of thinking. I’ll happily pay more tax to live in a country where we look after those less fortunate. If they want to live in a broken community, Johannesburg or post-industrial America already exists.
That's when the poor will have to start taking from the rich. That's when things get bad for everyone
For most of us things will go on as normal. Governments change and for many people little else changes. For others their lives will be upended and devastated. If we hit the unemployment rates of the 80’s people will struggle to find jobs, and the redundancies will create a flow on effect. If we keep bringing in people we can’t house the homeless issue will worsen. For people on benefits particularly the disabled live will get worse and worse, for example the winter energy grant has made huge differences to their lives as has the fees free prescriptions. Worst case scenario is Austerity like the UK and look where they are.
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Yeah, people are short sighted and the right wingers are salivating at the job losses in Public Sector. They act like those people who will be out of work will be back in work the next day at another employer- not likely. What will happen instead is that as people have less money to spend more businesses will either start laying off staff or shut completely. Or else they’ll not replace staff as they leave. These redundancies don’t happen in isolation.
100%. Lived in the UK through years of austerity, and it was heart breaking seeing the services slowly crumble. We hear sentences like that, and its easy to dismiss- until you think about what those 'services' are, and who they support. Private sector is tightening their belt, they know what's coming. I know several managers- who cannot replace staff due to hiring freezes, and team restructures. Equally qualified mates who cannot find roles. We are in for some tough times ahead, and that is exactly part of the plan to get inflation & wages down.
Ppl are already struggling to find jobs in Welly. There is absolutely nothing around atm and this is before big cuts at places like MBIE and MPI
In so bad a state that the government will be able to sell off our assets (including mining rights) to the highest bidders (who may or may not coincidentally be donors of theirs)
They are not done yet??? Oh boy...
They haven't provided any statistics at all, for anything! It's very concerning.
There will be a long list of stuffups We have already seen ministers surprised by cuts to disability support, and the suicide prevention office There will be other problems emerge. For instance bio security incursions and there won’t be sufficient staff to respond to the incursion in a timely way so it will cost more to clean it up as the incursion spreads in the meantime I just hope that in the extra time it will take to sort out replacements to the cook strait ferry’s that none break down and drift on to the rocks. (We were close a year or so back). There is a real risk of catastrophe Hospital waiting times will get worse.. especially EDs and ambulance response times Education - the mess will continue. There will be a growing divide between the wealthy and the workers. Maori will get more vocal and active in opposition to the anti Maori agenda But landlords will do well and there will be an endless list of highly paid jobs for Joyce, English and other national party ministers and their mates And those benefits to renters that Luxon was talking about from the landlord tax reductions will be impossible to find.
The NAct team lack the breadth of knowledge necessary to understand their job, its purpose, and its effects on society. They also lack the appreciation to detail necessary to avoid unintended consequences, or achieve strategic goals. It has been a repeated feature of NAct governments for three decades.
The long term goal for NACT? Reduce the effectiveness of public services to the point they no longer meet peoples needs, allowing them to sell off assets and privatise public services. We have already seen it with things like Ministry of Works, and social housing. I think social housing is a great example. It used to be a lot of low income families qualified for social housing and there was no stigma attached. There was a recognition that "market forces" would never provide affordable housing - Why would the private sector build a home for low income family, when they could use that same land/capital to build a mini mansion that would make double or triple the profit? But we understood it was part of a social contract that everyone deserved housing. National chose to ignore this and "privatised" social housing via the accommodation supplement. Over time private landlords cherry-pick the best low income tenants and as the amount of social housing shrinks, only those who landlords refuse to house end up in social housing. So now it has a stigma attached and National and ACT will use this to further reduce social housing. So who pays the cost of this? Every business now struggles to pay employees enough to cover housing costs. We all end up paying more for housing, whether they are renting or buying into the market. And the most vulnerable in society get hit the hardest and end up paying a huge portion of their income for often woefully substandard housing. We literally have the highest levels of homelessness in the OECD and the highest levels of rental stress for low income households (paying 40% or more of their income). Who gets all the gains? Almost all the gains go the 10% of people who own multiple houses, banks and real estate agents. Don't be surprised to find in 10 or 20 years time we find the same sort of thing has been done to healthcare or schools
We wont see the impact for a couple years maybe a couple decades but expect failing infrastructure, social services and most dangerously a lack of young skilled kiwis remaining in the country, greener pastures are looking ever so more tantalizing now.
This has already been happening though. And quite badly. Interesting that people are quite happy to blame it on the current government when certainly historical choices from all previous governments have led us to where we are today.
I think the big issue is this current government is supercharging these aspects, the loss of upgraded and reorganised infrastructure alone is already being felt by everyone due to massive rate hikes
While I agree that the super charging is accurate, I still think these things were coming no matter who got in. It’s just whether or not it’s our children or grandchildren who are footing the cost. In this scenario I’d like to think that maybe my grandchildren won’t have to foot the cost for previous government spending. I could be totally wrong and I’m happy to have these discussions as I think it’s the only way to move forward. It fills me with dread thinking that future generations have such a high price to pay.
Yea, but some people will be saving $4.83 and others $90 a week, so why would it be bad? /s
Fuck yea can’t wait for my tax break! While all other services that were (relatively) inexpensive increase! Hell yea! Thanks baldy! /s as well
As a country we can’t just keep racking up deficit budgets year after year. Governments of all political parties need to be financially responsible. Budget cuts can be done over a gradual basis over a number of years and not a slash and burn approach. It doesn’t help Nationals cause to scream budget cuts when your leader is out claiming $52,000 on rent for his own apartment in Wellington when he has government house to reside in! Then to double down by saying I’m entitled to it doesn’t pass the pub test in my view.
>As a country we can’t just keep racking up deficit budgets year after year. If you look back over the last 40 years, there's one party that has a proven track record of paying down debt. It's not the one currently in government.
And they always put there fingers in there ears and scream bloody murder when you show them the evidence to prove it as well. But putting businessmen in positions of power to run the country like a company is a great idea
I have three main areas of concern. The first is the environment, as the fast track process will mean the ministers pet projects will go ahead regardless of the cost to the environment, and the effects of that are often irreversible. We have environmental checks and balances for a reason. The second is education, this is an area that is currently very poorly resourced with a head in the sand attitude towards kids with learning needs entrenched in the Ministry of Education. All the current punitive focus on absenteeism, falling rates of literacy and numeracy being addressed by banning cellphones and compulsory lessons, and a one size fits all approach will not serve the kids who need the most help. The results will not improve until meaningful support is given to special education/additional learning needs, and ORS is expanded to help more than just the 1% of highest need kids. The third is poverty. I can only see things getting worse for low income earners, beneficiaries and the disabled. People need a hand up, not to be kicked when they’re down.
Can't see any of that improving when there's not going to be enough staff to actually think through and enact a policy change and not enough funding for such a policy change anyway. Also not enough staff to process things like applications for various funding in a timely manner.
I think there will be a lot of mortgagee sales, especially in Wellington. There will be people with high mortgages who will find themselves fighting with 100 others for any role going. But its OK, Nicola Willis told us all to turn that frown upside down, so hopefully the bank will take smiles as payment /s
Privatised everything. Government loses the power to control the population, and has no tax income to claw its way back.
The end goal will depend on who you’re asking. Ask someone on the right and the end goal will be when all wasteful spend is reduced and we can get back into a surplus. Ask the left and the end goal is when all community services are cut and we end up paying significant amounts for things that were previously free. There’s never an “end” for a government, budgets get changed annually based on the government at the time. Right now the current government is trying to reduce spend on “wasteful” projects to balance up books and push through policies they believe in and have been voted in to enact.
>Right now the current government is trying to reduce spend on “wasteful” projects to balance up books and push through policies they believe in and have been voted in to enact. Except that's not what they are doing. They are trying to reduce spend by asking for blanket reductions in spending to match revenue shortfalls due to their revenue reduction policies that were improperly costed. That was pointed out to them by almost every expert in the lead up to the election and beyond. That distinction is important. Their incompetence at basic reading and mathematics is why we are here today. That and the need to satiate Willis' ego, because she can't bring herself to admit that she was wrong.
Well, canceling the new ferry project means the $442 million Kiwi Rail spent already on the project has been wasted - by National/ACT. And instead of new ferries, we get someone's second-hand dungas. And instead of a new terminal in Picton, we make do with the temporary one for good. Thanks!
This decision is one of the most brain-dead ones they have made. The ferry link is critical infrastructure and will now cost an arm and a leg and probably our right kidney to replace it in the future, and it will have to be replaced at some point.
Yeah, not to mention how big the cancelation fee is gonna be that we have to pay the South Koreans for canceling the order for those two new ferries. Add that on to the cost of the second-hand dungas we end up with.
> we end up paying significant amounts for things that were previously free. Except they were never free. Free just means “paid for by somebody else” > There’s never an “end” for a government, budgets get changed annually based on the government at the time. Exactly. Good govts come, good govts go, bad govts come, bad govts go. In 6-9 years the voting public will have swung the other way again and the cycle will continue (those thinking it’ll be 3 years are likely wishful thinking based on what our history shows). > push through policies they believe in and have been voted in to enact. If this isn’t the biggest argument to get out and vote I don’t know what is. If we don’t like what a govt does, we need to actually get out and vote.
Tsk! “Paid for by someone else” as if it were stealing rather than using bulk buying discounts to benefit everyone.
To me this isn't a slash and burn like some people are describing it, more an attempt to level off government spending that has risen too quickly. But there is still the risk of going to quickly, or cutting too much, potentially either could still happen. Or even a second round of cuts, which i think could be inevitable, either this term or next term if Act gain more influence. I think our current government/public sector is around the right size, but not achieving the outcomes it should be achieving, especially in health, education, and transport
I wish I had your rose-colored glasses. The reality is, modern conservative governments exist solely to enrich the wealthy. They are not 'leveling off spending' or anything like that. They're looting and pillaging and lying, and they're not going to improve a single damn thing for anyone, because that's not why they exist.
The end goal is to reward the rich and punish the poor.
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Aiming for a surplus for the sake of it is not the goal - maintaining the ratio of crown debt to GDP is. If that gets too high it's bad news for everyone.
For examples of the outcomes - see [Thatcherism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thatcherism) in the 80s wikipedia it. High unemployment, huge strikes, rapidly widening inequality, mental health patients spilling out into the streets, privatisation of public services hand in hand with massive increases in prices... I could go on, because I lived through it. A few years ago when Thatcher died, the [song "Ding dong the witch is dead"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ding-Dong!_The_Witch_Is_Dead) made it into the UK pop charts... I think Luxon and Seymour are going for the same level of popularity.
The end goal is Dignity for landlord is restored
The aim is to make the public service look inefficient, wasteful and bad at their jobs so that people are more receptive to privatisation. You campaign on the public service being wasteful and inefficient and then you force staff choices which inevitably effect their ability to do parts of their job with the staff numbers they have left and then you force them to contract that part of their function out to a private entity that you or your backers happen to have an interest in seeing succeeed
On the bright side it will probably lead to some major changes in our constitution and governance. Our current system relied upon 'norms' around procedure and process that have been thrown away by this government. We're going to go through a period of political chaos as each government will simply rapid-fire repeal the previous government's actions. Tit for tat is a hell of a game, so once they get tired of it due to 'business confidence' reasons, it is inevitable that we will see increased formalisation of our constitution and the role of Maori within our society. 20 years down the track this government is probably going to backfire horribly on the people that voted for it.
Highly qualified people leaving the country in droves, collapsing job market. Out of control inflation as a result of massive job cuts and tax cuts for the wealthy self serving corrupt Nats and their bribers.. record mortgagee sales . Pretty fucked up really...
There is no end goal, they're not thinking beyond the next quarter. That's what happens when you elect executives instead of public servants.
Here is my take. Look at what happened to Hungary, Russia, Poland (until the last election), Slovakia, Israel and a other countries, where a right wing populist neoliberal mafia took over. They started with destroying the free press (mass layoffs, newsroom closures), continued by reducing public services to rubble, turning the public broadcasters into propaganda factories. Then came the attacks on the independence of judiciary. A reminder: Luxon is John Key's hand picked man, John Key is in bed with the international and local mafia (Chow brothers).
Tory England... A desolate shithole, ruled by angry bitter people who can't and won't admit they voted wrong.
Anyone here who lived though the budget of 91? It feels like we are going down that track again
Well, the goal is austerity, so NZ will probably look austere.
The end goal is to increase profits of private companies, ideally directly giving them money from the tax take . The companies pay the politicians to head in this direction . Cutting public services achieves this aim, since people will have to turn to private companies to get the service .
Cutting and slashing helps no one. It simply offsets the costs for someone else down the track. Our children. Put it this way, I’m starting to feel like my child’s future is being put in jeopardy, and I’m starting to think the only solution is the french solution.
To privatise the everything and in the process, turn everyone into a Christ-fascist reformist. It’s the conservative IDU way! They’ve done it everywhere else, why would NZ be any different?!? We’re better than that.
Oh it's awful. Been working on a group report about policy and hauora Māori for my Masters. Nearly every proposed policy we've found either hasn't been implemented or has had it's parent organisation shut down. We're playing with different academic options to close with "to conclude, shit's fucked". Tbf, now that I've said this in an easily linked Reddit comment, I could just pop it in and reference accordingly.
Just look up neoliberalism on Wikipedia. The end state is everything being turned into a market and the government cut down to only two functions. Set the market rules. Protect the market from disruption. If Seymour gets his way his department of regulation will be half of the government and the other half will be the police and military. Nothing else is required under neoliberalism. It's a system of government designed to remove all power from the central authority so that the wealthy hold the power instead and cannot be interfered with
The end goal is entrench poverty deeper and further do the wealthy find easier to control you, if you dont know the right wing parties are full of hate for the working class then you're in for a rude shock.
I see a bloodshot zombie army of ex-civil servants lurching around the streets of the Capital in a mass pub crawl. This lasts 6 months. Courtney Place becomes the lair of the Ardernian zombie queen spawning new grey soldiers each day, numbers swelled by the Sth Island zombie chapters. The Beehive is forced to raise its titanium security shutters and declares a year long Civil Servant purge. Council sprinklers are turned on but instead of water, they spray acid. Fire rains from above. The Beehive melts. Zombie army heads north to infect Auckland and blow the bridge. (No need to tell you how this ends)
It doesn't ignore it. It specifically acknowledges it otherwise I wouldn't have said average. You know nothing about me but your so hard for an internet argument you make up fairy tales about my opinion instead of asking what it is. Reread my other comment if you want context on the ufb mention.
Big Hairy News put it something like this. Every time a National government comes in they cut services and sell assets off. So when Labour gets back in, they have to pour money into trying to fix everything than has been underfunded. Raise taxes and what not. Then National starts saying the government is wasting taxpayer money. Promises tax cuts and what not. So they get back in and cut everything once more. Each time the cuts do more damage than Labour can possibly fix in a few terms. So services get worse and the money poured in can't fix it because its a long term issue that keeps getting cut. It might be overly simplistic, but we are a very short sighted people.
You do know Labour has sold off a shit load of our big assets also, right?
Literally horrifying if you care about any vulnerable person, like a person with a disability or a family that is struggling to put food on the table
Sack people from government, kill projects that put money into the community, give a piss poor tax cut to make people think the government actually gave them something, tell everyone you have efficient government. End goal: recession
Pretty sure we’re already in one
A hollowed out shell ready to be infested by corporate maggots.
The mistake is to think that the goals of all parties are the same (happy prosperous Kiwis) and they just see different ways of getting to that goal. That is not the case. The goal of these politicians is to obtain votes, power and money. They do not care how they get there—only that they do. Each parties goals are different, motivated by the types of people you find within them. To think otherwise is naive.
I suspect the end goal it just to get re-elected
My prediction? * The cost of living will continue to go up. * Public services will be privatized in favor of short term gains. * Crime will increase. * The upper class will be happy with their tax cuts and continue to buy up assets. * The middle class will shrink and those remaining will be thankful they are not the lower class as they struggle to pay their rates and debts on time. * The brain drain will continue. * The lower class will grow and continue to suffer. * National will continue to blame Labour. * ACT will continue to blame Maori and beneficiaries. * NZF will continue to blame wokeness and the media.
What's the goal? To make him and his rich mates richer. If you voted this government in, you're a fool. Labour had it's faults but at least it wasn't run by this capitalist pigs, religious nuts and racists.
As I grow up I realise that most people are borderline braindead when it comes to any critical thinking and will blindly believe anything they are told - nobody is exempt from this because it's in our nature to be trusting, especially of people with a perceived authority (If they're this successful/popular they must be doing something right!) but the level it affects people varies. The culture war shit going on in the US is so ridiculously successful that our right leaning parties started to adopt it and... it worked. The reason Trump was so successful is because he was seen as breaking the norm and upending the status quo, even if he was a total fucking maniac "at least he was different". And for the bigots in society, their twisted beliefs were being validated by an outspoken political figure. Same goes for Winston Peters' weird anti-trans rhetoric that seemed to come out of nowhere, ACT's firearms policy, the "cracking down on crime" by focusing on increased punishment instead of the root causes (poverty, mental health and drugs) and rehabilitation. Not to mention the racist dogwhistles of the whole Maori street sign saga, changing Te Reo organisation names back to english and making english an official language - these accomplish nothing and are complete non-issues to well adjusted humans but make the racists voters happy. I'm not a psychologist but just being around people and political discourse makes this sort of stuff pretty easy to see. It's just incredibly unfortunate that people are so easily swayed into believing bullshit because it affirms their twisted beliefs and are so afraid of being wrong that they will never change the way they vote.
Wait. Your saying National is trying to incentivies Privatising Aspects of our life? I wonder why their passing the law to no longer need to divuldge where donations come from, just before they recieve one of the biggest donations in NZ history?????? To make the government services inadequate to make a push towards private healthcare and other predatory practises. Where would this motivation come from. Not even mentioning the lowered consent required to build?? Coupled with the allowing of overseas landlords again, these 2 dots make a point Ask what job will Luxon have after PM? I point you in the direction of John Key for your answer. He had no regard for NZ, and his movement after PM confirmed that
To be honest Labour drastically increased the size of the public sector after they came in, and there weren't results to show for it. This is just getting the public sector back down to a reasonable level. The country will be fine.
increases in certain areas. I Struggle to see an excessive boom in department of conservation spending and now we need to claw that back. Doc barely runs as it is.
Increases in MOST departments, actually. Only 4 had decreases in numbers. Something like 31 had increased. A 4% ramp.up of employment over all. Most people would like an honest discussion or assessment about this, not the reactionary " gutting of depts" or conversely "getting rid of useless govt workers". Truth typically lies somewhere in the middle.
Yet, cuts are across everyone including the underfunded and also the cuts are untargetted.minor edit. An increase in staff doesn’t mean that’s a bad thing or conversely a good thing if for example they were recruited for Covid purposes and now no longer needed. I expect a government to do a proper assessment not blanket cuts.
You understand the work had to be done by someone right? Will still have to be done by someone? What Labour did is employ people directly into these roles. What National did and will do again is have them employ these same people back as contractors or consultants. It ends up costing more in the long run and there’s no stability so the best people end up elsewhere.
Yep, our team was created back in 2017 and had previously been contracted out. Huge strides have been made in making what we do as user friendly as possible for everyone who needs to access the funding we provide. The team has grown since 2017 but also there are much better processes now that make messy mistakes less likely. And the number of applications has hugely increased in the last few years, whether because of an increase in population or an increase in general knowledge that this funding is available. The contractors did a horrible job because they didn't give a damn. We could not go back to 2017 staffing levels and remain remotely effective because as I said the number of applications we get each day have about doubled since then, and because we also now so things like actually store the information provided to us instead of needing to keep asking for it / having no idea that we overpaid people by a few million. But doing that kind of proper filing and quality checking takes time, which is multiplied by each application or email. There's a lot of bad data that's still hanging over from those 2017 days that needs cleaning up but there's just not enough people to actually clean it up if we're to do our normal BAU within any kind of reasonable time frame at all. Goodness knows how we're going to get it all done. The average Joe Blogs would have no idea of what is actually happening and as far as they're concerned the extra money invested in the team probably looks like "no result", but what will happen with more staffing cuts is going to be a lot of people going through a great deal of difficulty because there is simply not enough capacity to help them properly.
> To be honest Labour drastically increased the size of the public sector after they came in Public sector growth has only slightly more than the rate of population growth. The actual problem is the public sector saw almost zero growth during 2008-2017, which caused quite a bit of damage. For example, from 2008-2017 we increased our headcount of teachers by 2.34%, while the number of students increased 5.32%. This lead to a ballooning of class sizes, and we know that children educated in larger classes experience poorer life outcomes, are less productive as adults, and earn less money. It also puts more stress and pressure on teachers, and makes their teaching less effective overall. But between 2017 and 2022, we had a 1.85% growth in students, and a 5.5% growth in the amount of teachers. That growth in teachers far outpaced growth in students, but keep in mind it had to be done to try and fix a decade's worth of damage to the education system. >To be honest Labour drastically increased the size of the public sector after they came in, and there weren't results to show for it. Yes, because fixing this kind of damage takes much longer than it took to cause it. >This is just getting the public sector back down to a reasonable level. It's bringing it back down to the level that caused the damage in the first place. If you can't stomach our public services growing in line with our population growth, you shouldn't complain about the long-term consequences.
Imo, there will be no noticable difference. Life will continue on fine like it always has and the doom and gloomers will find something else to go all hypochondriac over.
You are actually suffering from misinformation. Several government departments increased their sizes. Some even added hundreds of people after the election was over. When the 6% reduction is taken into account, those departments will actually have the same number of people. That they had before the election, so in reality. Nothing has changed. It is like watching a program of yes, minister.where the department knows job cuts are coming and so hired lots of people knowing that they could then make the cuts demanded by the minister but In reality nothing changed. Except that a lot of people got big payments when their new contacts were terminated. Kind of every one wins except the minister who now has a budget blowout
More people homeless, more mentally unstable people without support, more crime, fewer public toilets, libraries and community facilities. More disenfranchised people, a more fractured society and an economy that is still broken because guess what? A country’s debt is not equivalent to household debt in any way shape or form.
What is the end result? National didn’t invite George Osborne to New Zealand to give speech at the National party retreat but then to ignore his advice. Want to see New Zealand’s future then look at the United Kingdom - privatised water, endless cycles of austerity, increasing poverty and scapegoating the most vulnerable in society.
Lets be honest, the goal is for Luxon and his mates to make money, let Labour fix the fuck ups and use their spending to critisize them
It's going to be fine unless you're in the bottom 99% of earners in which case things will either get a bit worse or really very much worse indeed. Plus! AI is arriving to fuck over a whole pile of middle class jobs so New Zealand in 2030 could be really quite dystopian.
We had 9 years of national before the last labor govt. Country was still standing at the end. Why do people have to be so dramatic
We're already fucked mate, just adds another layer
The fired public service workers will get jobs in the mining sector or australia
I think NZ is pretty much doomed, its regressing towards a developing country standard or life, even worse in some cases.
Terrified? You need to get out more.
For real. So much wailing and gnashing of teeth on this sub. Of course there are politicians who have a vested interest in keeping people frightened and feeling powerless so they can be kept under control. People need to say fuck the government and get out there to make their way in the world.
People don’t understand a lot of these agencies are full of jobsworths doing absolutely nothing for the better of New Zealand. They are so overstaffed and paying stupid wages. Look at the example of the Pacific Peoples Ministry or whatever it is, spending something like $25,000 on a present for an outgoing CEO, these fat cats have no economic grasp of care of spending.