Thursday, June 17, 2010

Kia-ora

I wonder if the Green  party is shooting itself in the foot by constantly referring to the rich as those in the 70k plus bracket.
Many Green party members must fit my profile.
We the earners in the 70 to 150k bracket are working class/middle class. We have had a drop in incomes and availability of jobs with Government policies also. Immigration is deliberately used to keep our earnings down while we are told an executive earning 100 times our salaries is necessary to attract "talent" (It takes a lot of talent, it seems, to cut costs by cutting wages and shifting jobs to lower paid workers offshore).
We are Teachers, small business people, General Practitioners, successful trades people, mechanics, electricians,  hairdressers, shopkeepers, farmers (the family ones who pay taxes), engineers, architects, draftsmen, supervisors. The people who have spent time getting an education or learning a trade. We are the people who along with Labourers, cleaners, rubbish men and road menders  keep everything working.
A lot of us have been on minimum wages, student allowances, sickness benefits or unemployment during our lives and know how miserable they are.
Most of us are happy to pay our share taxes for a fair society, but we are not happy to see the truly wealthy avoid their share. Much of our taxes are wasted through corporate welfare, bureaucratic and Government mis management rather than going to the people who need it. Not to say that private sector management is any better, but managing our state services should be to best practice, not a refuge for time servers. Most of the tax burden does fall on higher wage and salary earners who work for their money. Those who get it through capital gains and money earning money are largely untaxed.
We want to see poorer people have the educational opportunities we had, the  jobs and aspirations to become constructive and contributing members of society. So they can afford to pay our super :-) .We get annoyed when our young people have no jobs, apprenticeships or higher education to go to because of mean spirited and failed neo-liberal policies.
We are mostly boomers, but do not think there will be enough money to pay pensions soon. We would like to invest in something to offset the burden on, or pass on, to our kids, but housing is the only one not subject to fraud by unregulated financial traders.
We voted against Muldoons election bribery, Douglas's destruction, Richardsons meanness and Keys smiling deconstruction of welfare by stealth.
We support acknowledgment of disadvantages to Maori, but wonder why it also seems to be enriching a few rather than helping the kids we see in our schools and surgeries. The foreshore and seabed row seems more about making money from aquaculture than guardianship.
We join the Greens, not because we agree with everything they do, but because they are the only party remaining in NZ that does not see the pursuit of ever greater wealth as the overriding goal of society. The test of a society is how they treat their most disadvantaged and what they pass on to their children. as someone said the " Greens have their heart in the right place".

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