John Nick
Contributor
It was huge news for those of us who have involvement.
Easily missed I guess if it's not your thing
Politics NZ Politics
- Thread starter wizard of Tauranga
- Start date
Easily missed I guess if it's not your thing
- Thread starter
- #5,062
While I agree I feel costs and particularly house prices have shifted to account for whats average.
Ie when there was 1 breadwinner the average house price was multiple x income. When 2 person income became normal, house prices were ABLE to drive out to multiple x HOUSEHOLD income until it became unaffordable for a single income.
This means the family unit with 2 incomes was no better off because prices had adjusted to compensated and gobble up the financial benefits but we still have the negatives (childcare costs, loss of time, loss of a homemaker (kids, meals prep, etc)).
I agree with the Asian way you have mentioned in the past. But it works if it’s the exception, not the rule (strictly financially - excluding sharing care, etc)
If we get more and more people pooling to buy houses, the prices will continue to adjust as the ability to pay ever more, increases. Already there’s groups of young people combining to buy. It could be the future but it shouldn’t have to be.
Really we need some sort of control to restrict lending based to some arbitrary reasonableness and not require pooling ever more resources to pay ever increasing loans/ house prices.
Bay39er
Contributor
Given that the righties didn't think it was of such news value to post here perhaps it was seen as a good idea
You're not wrong but it's deeper than that too.
Schools have traditionally been catergorised into deciles which means the poorer the area the lower the decile. Schools get more funding the lower the decile, so they can do things like provide books for the kids. The bottom 30 schools I would guarantee to be the poorest 30 areas or very close to that. So it's not so much a parenting issue it's a social economic issue.
Now, if you just dump money into the problem it won't go away because it's systemic. Many kids don't care about education even in some well off families but these kids really don't care. Then some of the ones that do care, have to care for their families because they might be one of the older ones in the family, they would have to get part time jobs to help support or take days off school to look after sick siblings. The ones that work will be working after school or at night, which means lack of sleep, turning up to school late if at all.
The parents themselves want to do better for their kids (I hope) but they are bogged down by costs, they themselves have had very little schooling, they might have to send money to families overseas. They can't see 10 years ahead or see how education will get their family out of the pits. They can't see that if their child can get a good education, they can get a job that not only can provide for their family but also hopefully have a fulfilling job.
Now if a family can see the point of education, money can be a big thing. 3% graduate with university entrance but how many of those actually go? How much does it cost to go to University? Interest free loan? Do they even understand what 35k debt means? More if they get sucked into student weekly loan. $60k and that will be for a cheap degree.
https://www2.nzqa.govt.nz/about-us/publications/insights-papers/university-entrance/ this website has a lot of data to show around ethnicity and we should know that there is a strong correlation between ethnicity and low ses in New Zealand.
Last year universities recorded an overall course pass rate of 88 percent for Pākehā students, but for Māori students it was 80 percent and for Pacific students 69. At Te Pūkenga’s polytechnics, the rates were 81 percent for Pākehā, Māori 72 percent and Pacific 70 percent.
:quality(70)/cloudfront-ap-southeast-2.images.arcpublishing.com/whakaatamaori/PU3ULGEISBA65HWL5JH24VKPSQ.jpeg)
Universities fail on Māori, Pasifika success targets
Some universities are reluctant to set deadlines for ensuring Māori and Pacific students are as successful as other groups of students.
If 3% pass, how many of that 3% go to university (maybe 70%) and then of that 2% how many of them pass. How many of them drop out and have debt.
---
tl;dr yes parents education matters but what happens where parents aren't educated and are poor and living day to day, week to week?
putting state housing all in certain areas is one of the big problems.
- Thread starter
- #5,065
Asset sales is a good idea? Are you an ACT voter?
Us greenies detest any ownership sale, especially to foreign interests!
Bay39er
Contributor
I"m so bruised I'm blue
Nah you are missing the impact of higher people per dwelling - as soon as you start playing around with that variable in any meaningful way at a national level then the demand supply imbalance corrects. So more people per dwelling = less demand for houses & a lower overall price.
Supplementary information on ACT - https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/politica...lan-says-party-created-fake-grassroots-groups
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POLITICS LIFE AND SOCIETY7 Apr 2021
Ex-ACT staffer Grant McLachlan says party created fake grassroots groups
11:40 am on 7 April 2021
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Ruth Hill Ruth Hill, Reporter
ruth.hill@rnz.co.nz
Political pundits and media experts are warning that artificial grassroots organisations - nicknamed "astroturfs" - are being used to manipulate and mobilise public opinion for political gain.
ACT Party sign in Auckland.Former ACT Party researcher and electoral agent, Grant McLachlan, said as a small party, ACT struggled to get much attention on the big issues like economic policy. File photo. Photo: RNZ / Cole Eastham-Farrelly
The recent public apology by a lobbyist to leading public health experts for defaming them on the Whale Oil blog has once again shone a spotlight into the murky world of lobbying.
Carrick Graham, who was in the pay of the food and beverage industry, has admitted his statements about Doug Sellman of Alcohol Action, health professor Boyd Swinburn, and former director of the Māori Smokefree Coalition, Shane Bradbrook, were "untrue, unfair, offensive, insulting and defamatory".
However, it's not just big business seeking to influence public opinion by surreptitiously controlling the narrative.
Former ACT Party researcher and electoral agent, Grant McLachlan, said as a small party, ACT struggled to get much attention on the big issues like economic policy.
"So they started to look for other issues - or create new issues - where they weren't going head-to-head with the National Party.
"They would create these astroturfs that would break new ground and they [ACT] would appeal to the ground that was broken."
Astroturfs differ from ordinary lobby groups in that they purport to be something they are not.
For instance, they may masquerade as groups of concerned citizens for instance, while actually pushing the interests of large corporates.
McLachlan said ACT "weaponised" astroturfs.
He claimed the New Zealand Taxpayers' Union did a lot of the groundwork for the party in the 2020 election with their Campaign for Affordable Housing to fight the Green Party's proposal for an asset tax.
"So when they were saying 'This is a problem', it was actually a contrived problem that the ACT Party told them to create.
"That's the problem."
The campaign involved letters to thousands of householders, a website and media work.
Investigative journalist Nicky Hager, whose 2014 book Dirty Politics lifted the lid on Whale Oil's web of connections with lobbyists and politicians, said it was a textbook example of astroturfing.
"It seemed like someone cared about affordable housing - but they were only concerned there were going to be more taxes on it...
"We still don't know whose money was behind it, whose interests, who pushed it along, what they were trying to achieve.
"So that's a classic example of something that looks like a reasonable contribution to democratic debate, but is murky and probably making things worse.
"And as a country, we shouldn't be tolerating it."
However, the Taxpayers' Union executive director Jordan Williams said the affordable housing campaign was justified in opposing what he called the Green Party's "unfair and economically destructive" proposal for a wealth tax.
Jordan Williams speaks to the media after the verdict was announced.Taxpayers' Union executive director Jordan Williams. Photo: RNZ / Sarah Robson
"The average home-owner in Auckland, once they've paid their mortgage, would be hit by that proposed tax. So of course that's a die-in-the-ditch issue for a taxpayers' organisation.
"We were more than happy to raise awareness of the truth around the Green Party policy using their own manifesto and thankfully the Labour Party saw sense and ruled it out entirely."
The Taxpayers' Union, co-founded by Williams and National pollster David Farrar, describes itself as "an independent activist group running a grassroots campaign for lower taxes and against government waste".
Many of its members have close ties with ACT.
Williams - who also featured in Dirty Politics - interned with the former ACT leader Don Brash, was involved in MP Stephen Franks' 2008 election campaign and worked in his law firm.
The organisation's founding chairman, John Bishop, was formerly constituency services manager for the ACT under Richard Prebble.
Campaign manager Louis Houlbrooke is the son of former ACT deputy leader Beth Houlbrooke.
Williams said the organisation had staff connected to parties across the political divide, from New Zealand First to Labour and even the Greens.
"We've certainly got a heck of a lot more diversity in terms of political connections on our staff, than say the Radio NZ newsroom."
He says it was "ridiculous" to suggest the Taxpayers Union was a mouthpiece for any political party, when it had 60,000 members and was majority funded by "small dollar donations".
The coffers of the Taxpayers' Union more than doubled in a year from $406,532 in 2018 to $831,848 in 2019.
Williams said Labour and the Greens were "far more guilty of using proxies like the unions and ActionStation" to spread their political messages.
"We've got countless groups on the other side, often taxpayer funded, often a tiny fraction of the size of our organisation that have disproportionate influence because of the editorial decisions of groups like Radio New Zealand."
The head of the Council of Trade Unions, Richard Wagstaff, said unions represented the interests of hundreds of thousands of workers and they deserved a political voice.
But unfortunately money still did a lot of the talking, he said.
Richard WagstaffRichard Wagstaff, Council of Trade Unions president. Photo: supplied
"Very often a few voices have a very amplified voice because of the resources they have and the people they have working for them, and that's a real issue."
ActionStation director Kassie Hartendorp said the advocacy organisation was "majority crowded funded by small donations from supporters, while grants and major donors were listed on their website and were publicly accessible at all times.
The ACT Party was itself originally a type of astroturf - the Association of Consumers and Taxpayers - which mutated into a political party.
It was founded to further a neoliberal agenda of privatising state assets in electricity, transport and communications.
In the early 2000s, the party positioned itself as the "tough on crime" party.
According to Grant McLachlan, leading figures in the ACT Party (including Catherine Judd, Stephen Franks and David Garrett) were deeply involved in the early days of the Sensible Sentencing Trust, which championed the Three Strikes policy for repeat offenders.
When the party got into government with the National Party under John Key in 2008, Three Strikes became law.
But he said law and order was "a red herring" and ACT quickly turned its attention to more urgent neoliberal priorities: overhauling the Resource Management Act to make it easier for developers to subdivide, and repealing the Electoral Finance Act, which (depending on your political stripes) either stifled free speech - or attempted to stop wealthy "third parties" from influencing elections by covertly funding political campaigns.
McLachlan said ACT's "tough on crime" stance did not extend to their own MPs: Donna Awatere-Huata, defrauded an education trust - and David Garrett, former legal adviser to the Sensible Sentencing Trust, was found to have obtained a passport in the name of a dead child.
He said ACT officials were aware of Awatere-Huata's "loose spending" - although perhaps not the full extent - and the fact her dramatic weight loss was the result of a stomach-stapling operation, not diet and exercise as she has claimed.
"They knew about what she was up to but they only seemed to do something once the media and the police found out.
"I was very uncomfortable with that and I just had to get out of there."
So did he feel complicit in the astroturfing? After all, he worked for ACT from 1999 and 2002 and sporadically since then, most recently in 2011.
"I didn't feel comfortable with it but I actually noticed it wasn't just ACT doing it.
"But the thing is the way ACT was doing it using astroturfs was a little bit more dishonest than the Green Party using Forest and Bird or Greenpeace, or Labour with the unions, or National with Federated Farmers.
"ACT actually particularly created these groups just to push their particular agenda."
McLachlan said astroturfing only worked because people were fooled by it.
The news cycle is short.
"They just seem to think 'Oh well, in a couple of elections time, people will just forget about that'. And unfortunately, that's exactly what happened."
Sensible Sentencing Trust founder Garth McVicar acknowledged its message did appeal to those on the right of politics - but he did not believe the cause was hijacked.
Garth McVicar outside the Rotorua High Court. 27 June 2016.Garth McVicar, Sensible Sentencing Trust founder. Photo: RNZ / Cole Eastham-Farrelly
"There's no doubt political parties started to take notice of what we were saying and ask for meetings with us. So there's no doubt they want to get on board or on side with organisations that are becoming a public voice, as we were."
When he started the group, he did not expect it to become so big - but he has no doubt it was always a genuine grassroots organisation.
"We went from running the thing from a computer in the corner of my bedroom on the farm, to having an office in Napier and then having branches throughout the country. That was never planned, and in the early days, that's not something we even considered. It just took off."
McVicar, who later ran as a candidate for the Conservative Party, said he was "a political novice" when he first started, but quickly realised the only way to effect real change was through lobbying Parliament.
ACT leader David Seymour declined to be interviewed.
However, in response to written questions by RNZ about whether ACT used other organisations like the Taxpayers Union to generate support for its positions or created them for that purpose, he said "no".
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POLITICS LIFE AND SOCIETY7 Apr 2021
Ex-ACT staffer Grant McLachlan says party created fake grassroots groups
11:40 am on 7 April 2021
Share this
Share on Twitter
Share on Facebook
Share via email
Share on Reddit
Share on Linked In
Ruth Hill Ruth Hill, Reporter
ruth.hill@rnz.co.nz
Political pundits and media experts are warning that artificial grassroots organisations - nicknamed "astroturfs" - are being used to manipulate and mobilise public opinion for political gain.
ACT Party sign in Auckland.Former ACT Party researcher and electoral agent, Grant McLachlan, said as a small party, ACT struggled to get much attention on the big issues like economic policy. File photo. Photo: RNZ / Cole Eastham-Farrelly
The recent public apology by a lobbyist to leading public health experts for defaming them on the Whale Oil blog has once again shone a spotlight into the murky world of lobbying.
Carrick Graham, who was in the pay of the food and beverage industry, has admitted his statements about Doug Sellman of Alcohol Action, health professor Boyd Swinburn, and former director of the Māori Smokefree Coalition, Shane Bradbrook, were "untrue, unfair, offensive, insulting and defamatory".
However, it's not just big business seeking to influence public opinion by surreptitiously controlling the narrative.
Former ACT Party researcher and electoral agent, Grant McLachlan, said as a small party, ACT struggled to get much attention on the big issues like economic policy.
"So they started to look for other issues - or create new issues - where they weren't going head-to-head with the National Party.
"They would create these astroturfs that would break new ground and they [ACT] would appeal to the ground that was broken."
Astroturfs differ from ordinary lobby groups in that they purport to be something they are not.
For instance, they may masquerade as groups of concerned citizens for instance, while actually pushing the interests of large corporates.
McLachlan said ACT "weaponised" astroturfs.
He claimed the New Zealand Taxpayers' Union did a lot of the groundwork for the party in the 2020 election with their Campaign for Affordable Housing to fight the Green Party's proposal for an asset tax.
"So when they were saying 'This is a problem', it was actually a contrived problem that the ACT Party told them to create.
"That's the problem."
The campaign involved letters to thousands of householders, a website and media work.
Investigative journalist Nicky Hager, whose 2014 book Dirty Politics lifted the lid on Whale Oil's web of connections with lobbyists and politicians, said it was a textbook example of astroturfing.
"It seemed like someone cared about affordable housing - but they were only concerned there were going to be more taxes on it...
"We still don't know whose money was behind it, whose interests, who pushed it along, what they were trying to achieve.
"So that's a classic example of something that looks like a reasonable contribution to democratic debate, but is murky and probably making things worse.
"And as a country, we shouldn't be tolerating it."
However, the Taxpayers' Union executive director Jordan Williams said the affordable housing campaign was justified in opposing what he called the Green Party's "unfair and economically destructive" proposal for a wealth tax.
Jordan Williams speaks to the media after the verdict was announced.Taxpayers' Union executive director Jordan Williams. Photo: RNZ / Sarah Robson
"The average home-owner in Auckland, once they've paid their mortgage, would be hit by that proposed tax. So of course that's a die-in-the-ditch issue for a taxpayers' organisation.
"We were more than happy to raise awareness of the truth around the Green Party policy using their own manifesto and thankfully the Labour Party saw sense and ruled it out entirely."
The Taxpayers' Union, co-founded by Williams and National pollster David Farrar, describes itself as "an independent activist group running a grassroots campaign for lower taxes and against government waste".
Many of its members have close ties with ACT.
Williams - who also featured in Dirty Politics - interned with the former ACT leader Don Brash, was involved in MP Stephen Franks' 2008 election campaign and worked in his law firm.
The organisation's founding chairman, John Bishop, was formerly constituency services manager for the ACT under Richard Prebble.
Campaign manager Louis Houlbrooke is the son of former ACT deputy leader Beth Houlbrooke.
Williams said the organisation had staff connected to parties across the political divide, from New Zealand First to Labour and even the Greens.
"We've certainly got a heck of a lot more diversity in terms of political connections on our staff, than say the Radio NZ newsroom."
He says it was "ridiculous" to suggest the Taxpayers Union was a mouthpiece for any political party, when it had 60,000 members and was majority funded by "small dollar donations".
The coffers of the Taxpayers' Union more than doubled in a year from $406,532 in 2018 to $831,848 in 2019.
Williams said Labour and the Greens were "far more guilty of using proxies like the unions and ActionStation" to spread their political messages.
"We've got countless groups on the other side, often taxpayer funded, often a tiny fraction of the size of our organisation that have disproportionate influence because of the editorial decisions of groups like Radio New Zealand."
The head of the Council of Trade Unions, Richard Wagstaff, said unions represented the interests of hundreds of thousands of workers and they deserved a political voice.
But unfortunately money still did a lot of the talking, he said.
Richard WagstaffRichard Wagstaff, Council of Trade Unions president. Photo: supplied
"Very often a few voices have a very amplified voice because of the resources they have and the people they have working for them, and that's a real issue."
ActionStation director Kassie Hartendorp said the advocacy organisation was "majority crowded funded by small donations from supporters, while grants and major donors were listed on their website and were publicly accessible at all times.
The ACT Party was itself originally a type of astroturf - the Association of Consumers and Taxpayers - which mutated into a political party.
It was founded to further a neoliberal agenda of privatising state assets in electricity, transport and communications.
In the early 2000s, the party positioned itself as the "tough on crime" party.
According to Grant McLachlan, leading figures in the ACT Party (including Catherine Judd, Stephen Franks and David Garrett) were deeply involved in the early days of the Sensible Sentencing Trust, which championed the Three Strikes policy for repeat offenders.
When the party got into government with the National Party under John Key in 2008, Three Strikes became law.
But he said law and order was "a red herring" and ACT quickly turned its attention to more urgent neoliberal priorities: overhauling the Resource Management Act to make it easier for developers to subdivide, and repealing the Electoral Finance Act, which (depending on your political stripes) either stifled free speech - or attempted to stop wealthy "third parties" from influencing elections by covertly funding political campaigns.
McLachlan said ACT's "tough on crime" stance did not extend to their own MPs: Donna Awatere-Huata, defrauded an education trust - and David Garrett, former legal adviser to the Sensible Sentencing Trust, was found to have obtained a passport in the name of a dead child.
He said ACT officials were aware of Awatere-Huata's "loose spending" - although perhaps not the full extent - and the fact her dramatic weight loss was the result of a stomach-stapling operation, not diet and exercise as she has claimed.
"They knew about what she was up to but they only seemed to do something once the media and the police found out.
"I was very uncomfortable with that and I just had to get out of there."
So did he feel complicit in the astroturfing? After all, he worked for ACT from 1999 and 2002 and sporadically since then, most recently in 2011.
"I didn't feel comfortable with it but I actually noticed it wasn't just ACT doing it.
"But the thing is the way ACT was doing it using astroturfs was a little bit more dishonest than the Green Party using Forest and Bird or Greenpeace, or Labour with the unions, or National with Federated Farmers.
"ACT actually particularly created these groups just to push their particular agenda."
McLachlan said astroturfing only worked because people were fooled by it.
The news cycle is short.
"They just seem to think 'Oh well, in a couple of elections time, people will just forget about that'. And unfortunately, that's exactly what happened."
Sensible Sentencing Trust founder Garth McVicar acknowledged its message did appeal to those on the right of politics - but he did not believe the cause was hijacked.
Garth McVicar outside the Rotorua High Court. 27 June 2016.Garth McVicar, Sensible Sentencing Trust founder. Photo: RNZ / Cole Eastham-Farrelly
"There's no doubt political parties started to take notice of what we were saying and ask for meetings with us. So there's no doubt they want to get on board or on side with organisations that are becoming a public voice, as we were."
When he started the group, he did not expect it to become so big - but he has no doubt it was always a genuine grassroots organisation.
"We went from running the thing from a computer in the corner of my bedroom on the farm, to having an office in Napier and then having branches throughout the country. That was never planned, and in the early days, that's not something we even considered. It just took off."
McVicar, who later ran as a candidate for the Conservative Party, said he was "a political novice" when he first started, but quickly realised the only way to effect real change was through lobbying Parliament.
ACT leader David Seymour declined to be interviewed.
However, in response to written questions by RNZ about whether ACT used other organisations like the Taxpayers Union to generate support for its positions or created them for that purpose, he said "no".
Tags:
life and society
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Copyright © 2021, Radio New Zealand
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NEXT STORY IN POLITICS
National Party leader Judith Collins calls for immediate Pacific travel bubble
RELATED STORIES
Astroturfing more difficult to track down with social media - academic
6 Apr 2021
No caption
Weeding out fake news and misinformation is becoming increasingly difficult in the new media environment where social media rules, an academic says.
Astroturfing more difficult to track down with social media - academic
Dirty Politics: Saga ends with Carrick Graham apology in court
3 Mar 2021
Book cover
One of the last acts of the Dirty Politics saga has come to a dramatic end in court today with lobbyist Carrick Graham apologising for spreading defamatory statements about three public health…
Dirty Politics: Saga ends with Carrick Graham apology in court
Gloves off: Smoking researcher shunned over Philip Morris funding
27 Aug 2019
Indigenous smoking researcher Marewa Glover
Yesterday smoking researcher Marewa Glover told MPs that children could heal from exposure to smoking in cars. But perhaps most controversial is the source of $1.5m of her research funding - tobacco… AUDIO
Gloves off: Smoking researcher shunned over Philip Morris funding
POLITICS
Dayle Takitimu: Clarification, not debate, needed on Treaty principles
Māori Development Minister Tama Potaka: Ngaaruawaahia hui 'positive and constructive'
Industry group calls for clarity on government's water reform plans
Get the RNZ app
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Count the ways they're defrauding us to attempt to pay for their bribes I mean tax cuts, which generally benefit the already wealthy.
Coincidentally they're cutting funding to the institution that carries out balances and checks on the government - antidemocratic and authoritarian behaviour.
newsroom.co.nz
Coincidentally they're cutting funding to the institution that carries out balances and checks on the government - antidemocratic and authoritarian behaviour.
'Constitutionally concerning': Govt accused of 'defunding' Parliament
"I remain very concerned that the executive can effectively limit the work of the legislature by reducing its funding," David Wilson wrote to staff last week.
newsroom.co.nz
Grant McLachlan aye, I knew him in my youth, interesting individual.
During covid employment shortages grew as the immigration tap was turned off. Inflation occurred.
The reserve bank stated openly that it would manufacture a recession. That we needed more unemployed to bring prices down.
Neoliberalist policy needs a certain level of unemployment to suppress wage growth. It's built in to the model.
Which is why seeing comments about bludgers etc start to creep back into the discourse this needs pushing back on, because for the most part it's bullshit.
And then there's this utter crap from National's Louise Upston. She will be fully aware that they need unemployment to keep profits high and wages low.
www.beehive.govt.nz
The reserve bank stated openly that it would manufacture a recession. That we needed more unemployed to bring prices down.
Neoliberalist policy needs a certain level of unemployment to suppress wage growth. It's built in to the model.
Which is why seeing comments about bludgers etc start to creep back into the discourse this needs pushing back on, because for the most part it's bullshit.
And then there's this utter crap from National's Louise Upston. She will be fully aware that they need unemployment to keep profits high and wages low.
Benefit numbers show scale of repair job ahead
Benefit numbers released today paint a grim picture of the previous government’s economic mismanagement, Social Development and Employment Minister, Louise Upston says.
Bay39er
Contributor
There are always traps in life
I have been reminded that it wasn't an asset sale but a 25 year partnership so perhaps that is why there was no uproar from either side of the political fence
TAB partnership helps secure future of racing industry
Minister for Racing Kieran McAnulty has announced the approval of a 25-year partnership between TAB NZ and UK betting company Entain that delivers at least $900 million in guaranteed funding for the racing industry over the next five years.
Isn’t the issue that through an extended period of labour shortages that has directly contributed to inflation in NZ & declining living standards, the number of beneficiaries as a percentage of total population has increased?During covid employment shortages grew as the immigration tap was turned off. Inflation occurred.
The reserve bank stated openly that it would manufacture a recession. That we needed more unemployed to bring prices down.
Neoliberalist policy needs a certain level of unemployment to suppress wage growth. It's built in to the model.
Which is why seeing comments about bludgers etc start to creep back into the discourse this needs pushing back on, because for the most part it's bullshit.
And then there's this utter crap from National's Louise Upston. She will be fully aware that they need unemployment to keep profits high and wages low.
Benefit numbers show scale of repair job ahead
Benefit numbers released today paint a grim picture of the previous government’s economic mismanagement, Social Development and Employment Minister, Louise Upston says.
Why wouldn’t you call that out as a really bad outcome?
mixed metaphors there isn't there? Declining living standards linked to labour shortages? Can you provide sources there?
The manufactured recession and inflation due to global and internal pressures has had an effect sure.
Sorry to be clear I was referring to higher cost of living when I mentioned living standards.
The issue for a lot of companies has been a big shortage of skilled labour, I’m not sure how many of those on jobseeker would be considered ‘skilled’. One industry was really struggling to find job applicants that weren’t drug affected, I’m sure there were plenty of others dealing with the same problem.
Be interesting if they try and geoblock people from using other online gambling services. I know a fair few who use other sites like bet365. If they do manage to limit online gambling to the TAB they will need to up their game with what is offered currently by them. Also like to see a bigger, fairer allocation to sports funding.There are always traps in life
I have been reminded that it wasn't an asset sale but a 25 year partnership so perhaps that is why there was no uproar from either side of the political fence
TAB partnership helps secure future of racing industry
Minister for Racing Kieran McAnulty has announced the approval of a 25-year partnership between TAB NZ and UK betting company Entain that delivers at least $900 million in guaranteed funding for the racing industry over the next five years.
yes exactly - the shortage is a complex issue, in part because of deliberate policy and decades of underinvestment in training and upskilling people from the internal population and reliance on immigration to fill the gaps, with all the ramifications of infrastructure, corruption, societal gaps, health etc that also aren't being addressed. And that also drives wages down, resulting in the skilled younger workforce here going overseas where they can etc
Can they geoblock vpns?
John Nick
Contributor
I believe that was a part of their plans.
Tbf as far as I understand their approach to problem gambling is a much improved model.
However they are offering rebates to the punters with bigger turnovers.
Gold and Silver members.
They return percentage of these members turnover at the end of each month.
Somewhat conflicting imo
