Why do so many of us snort at Radio New Zealand? I dial into RNZ.com almoast every day. It may be a behaviour from the same brain region as my compulsion to smell the old milk in the fridge; I know it’ll be putrid, but I have to check. Maybe it’s about cost of living; dismissing it. So I dial into rnz.com, because I’ve paid for it so I should check before I dismiss it.
Post-budget, rnz (let’s relegate it, henceforth, to lower case) could’ve written a positive piece about the increase in funding to Pharmac – afterall this affects pretty much every eN-Zedder now or in their future. It’s fundamentally ‘Kiwi’;’ because the Pharmac fund is taxpayer funded and it goes to sick eN-Zedders. It’s professionally managed (I think) and it works. The one thing that would make it better for sick eN-Zedders is more funds.
Instead, rnz had a chitty chat with some Wellington-based Salvation Army people and apparently there was noting in teh Budget for struggling eN-Zedders.
And just below that on my screen was another story – university students protesting about having to pay fees for their first year. So noting for university students either. (I’ll resist writing an elaborate essay about nothing for students, and that being the likely outcome for all those studying art history, history, peace and vegan feelings, transgender political science and whatever it was the Bussy Boy Doyle wrote his thesis in – colonialism and very creepy social media posts? Because an essay on all taht would be too easy. Like the BSA, not needed, not wanted.)
It’s tough being poor. I know that – from personal experience. Becoming ‘not poor’ requires persistence, sacrifices and usually a little (or a lot of) help can make being poor not a long term situation. eN-Zed already does a very strong job at helping our poor people. I have an hypothesis: The eN-Zed government has helped poor people too much. Hold on to your pearls and let me explain – over the decades, from the womb to the tomb, maybe we’ve been helping poor people so much that we have created a culture of expectation and entitlement. Poor, you see, is subjective. IN Pakistan, poor means living under sheet plastic during the monsoon, your children working in a brick kiln. Poor in Afghanistan means selling your daughters off to be child brides. In eN-Zed, poor isn’;’t that extreme, thanks to generations of Governments and taxpayers. Poor in eN-Zed isn’t so tough. Here’s another hypothesis: Being poor in eN-Zed is often not an economic issue, but an education issue and/or a psychological issue. Education? Fix the schooling system, starting with the curriculum: compulsory personal economics courses in early high school, and personal healthcare lessons at the same level. So every eN-Zedder learns about budgets, income, spending, tax… and every eN-Zedder learns about calories, fresh fruit and vegetables and meat, and cooking, and ultra-processed and junk food.
It’s tough being poor; and it’s even tougher being stupid. Making free fees for the first year at university was nothing less than a cynical vote-grab: we all know that younger people vote Labour, Greens and TPM. And we know reciprocity lives in that same brain region as sniffing ikky milk. So Chris and Chloe would be off down to the bars and cafes at Vic saying to the students, ‘we gave you a free year of fees., so you owe us your vote’. If they really wanted more graduates, they would have targeted the free fees to poorer families for the duration of the degree, or they’d subsidise post graduate fees. But if they REALLY wanted to make a better educated workforce, they’d sack all the woke lecturers, here’s looking at you Massey, Victoria, Auckland…
The Budget was good. Now I want to see some details about responsible spending within Ministries and Departments, for example Corrections got more money. Good, we need more prisons and we need better rehab programmes in all prisons because we want criminals out of prison and earning their own way in society. But let’s put pressure on the Ministries and Departments to be sure they’re not mis-spending their allocations on daily waita, unlimited ethnic-specific leave, and tampons and pads in the men’s wash rooms.
eN-Zed 