Putting Lipstick On The Pig (Same snouts in the trough)

by Phil Ossifer

So, the Natsis have changed their Fuhrer and they think this is going to get them into Government.

Let’s hope not, or rather, let’s make sure it doesn’t, because despite the make-up the Natsis are still the same old bunch of self-serving trough feeders that they have been for the last four decades or more.

They had a lame-duck leader up until a week ago who was costing them dearly in the polls, so they did what any sensible party would do and jettisoned him and his sour-faced deputy. So far, so good.

Bit what did they replace him with? A bozo who thinks wearing a Trump cap is cool and who doesn’t even know who is in his shadow(y) cabinet, never who or what they are! His sidekick is no better. After having a quick conflab with their newest Maori MP to confirm his ethnicity she returns to the press to affirm his Maoriness only to be immediately contradicted by the bloke himself.

Then they both showed that neither of them could count or remember the order of the first 17 members of the gang they had just announced.

Some might say they are new to the game and it was first night jitters, but K (Y) has had three terms in the Beehive ( two of those in Government) and Mullet has had two and one of those was in Government. Plus, Mullet (there’s certainly something fishy about him) has banged on relentlessly about what a hotshot he was in Fonterra and Zespri, so he should be well used to dealing with media and speaking in public.

But it is not just minor matters like not knowing who your team are that make these clowns unsuitable for higher office, it is their lack of any good policy for taking New Zealand ahead following this Coronavirus Pandemic.

One of the first major policy bloopers made by Mullet & Co was to concede that the PM had done a good job getting NZ through this lockdown, and then saying that leading a country through a crisis was one thing, but that did not mean she had the necessary qualities to lead us through the economic recovery. That, he said, would need the expertise of the National Party.

Huh?

Does he seriously mean the National Party that, when it was booted out of office in 2017, left the country groaning under a pile of debt and with infrastructure and essential services so underfunded that despite their best attempts, the current Government is still struggling to bring up to the level they should be at.

And does he mean the same National Party that criticised this Government for taking a cautious approach to righting those wrongs because it saw the need to get us into a budget surplus so that we would have “something for a rainy day”?

And does he mean the same National Party that, had it been in Government when an unprecedented pandemic hit the country, would have had to borrow a hell of a lot more than this one has because there was no money for that rainy day?

It is probably timely to say here that this particular Government has been quite unlike any we have had during my six plus decades on this earth. It has been more concerned about our well-being than any other, certainly any other we have had over the last 50-60 years, anyway.

There is an old saying that goes, "As you be muche the worse. and I cast awaie. An yll wynde, that blowth no man to good, men saie. Wel (quoth he) euery wind blowth not down the corn I hope (I saie) good hap [luck] be not all out worn," which is the original quote from John Heywood (1546). I just thought I’d be a smarty pants and put the whole quote, which we all know as “It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good”.

Covid 19 is no different with regards to that quote. It was a time to learn that what we had been doing for ages and ages was simply not working. Which reminds me of another great phrase, “Unemployment is not working”. Sadly, I don’t know who coined this one, but whoever it was he had a touch of the Spike Milligan about him (or her).

I bring this quote to the discussion because if you look closely at how our economy has operated for the last 40 plus years you can see that unemployment was always part of the plan. CEOs were paid enormous truckloads of money while those who actually did the work that made those companies function struggled from payday to payday, not because they couldn’t budget, but because they were not being paid a liveable wage. Whenever there was a drop in profits for those large companies with those CEOs on eye-watering salaries, there was never any question that their salaries or bonuses would be affected; instead they would get rid of a load of their minimum wage slaves instead.

This was not only morally wrong, it simply mad no sense because they were earning so little that they needed to get rid of heaps of them whereas had the CEOs had a cut to their packages (annual packages which the low paid workers would need to work 10 years or more to earn) a large number of those workers could have been kept working.

Anyway, I digress (slightly).

So, what does Mullet and Co bring to the table? New ideas? Brilliantly thought out policies to get our economy back to “normal”? Well, yes and no, actually.

He has announced one idea and it manages in its own peculiar way to get our economy back to “normal”, The only trouble is, that “normal” is what was not working with our economy. Having a few weeks where our entire focus was the well-being of New Zealanders rather than the well-being of the economy, gave us pause for thought. It gave us time to realise that unless we have healthy and happy people will never have a healthy economy. Had we not locked down so soon and so tightly we would have had far more people infected with Covid19 and that would have caused even more lost productivity than the actual closedown, increased medical costs and the likelihood of a second and much longer lockdown than the first one.

As the PM said, and also so many others, we need to do a lot of things differently. It cannot be business as usual ever again. It needs to be a new way of conducting ourselves that looks at the bigger picture rather than selfish and short-term gains.

Mullet’s “silver bullet” is to offer employer of medium sized businesses a $10,000 incentive for every new employee they take on (capped at $100,000 per employer). He thinks that this is a brilliant policy to get the economy going again, which it might be if we ant the economy to go back to how it was along with all the inequities it had and with a slightly larger but still minimum waged workforce.

This is a stupid and short-sighted policy at best and a scheming and cynical one at worst.

What the Government has done instead is to pour money into education and training so that we can have a better skilled workforce; one that will be able to command a better wage and fill all those mid-level jobs and trades that we are so often having to import workers for because we don’t have enough qualified people of our own to fill them. They have also put a load of money into environmental projects so that we can take better care of our land and reap the rewards of that care in terms of productivity and improving our “clean and green” image for our tourist trade once that is up and running again.

We need to learn from the bad stuff that happens to us in life and Covid 19 is an excellent opportunity for us to revolutionise our entire system. More people working form home will help with urban congestion and pollution, a better trained workforce will improve productivity, a better paid and healthier workforce will spend more in the local economy etc etc etc.

So, don’t be duped by that red stuff on the lips. In the 21st Century we need forward thinking people who are tough enough to get the country through the biggest crisis it has ever faced in modern history and who can bring new ideas and ways of operating an economy not dinosaurs that are so firmly wedded to the old ways and incapable of learning from their mistakes.