Hours and hours of Kate speech

Diary of the last ten hours

5.10am

Still asleep, but across the water all the lights are on at the clickbait radio station.

For an hour each morning, early risers have a choice of entertainment: RNZ’s excellent Indira Stewart; the sweet call of the Tui;  the Waste Management truck wrestling with your recycling bin; and, if you prefer to have your prejudices and uninformed reckons validated, an hour of Kate speech.

This morning she is reaching out to Aotearoa or, as the audience prefers to hear it pronounced, New Zealand, about a proposed Matariki holiday.

With an unerring eye for the poorest weakest wrongest argument she has declared:

The upshot of this is, other businesses are fundamentally being asked to prop up the tourism sector. They're the ones who'll benefit from this holiday. But we need more than just a sugar rush for one sector, in reality what we need is a booming economy again, people working and being productive and creating jobs. 

In reality. God that's such a verbal prop phrase. But I'll bite.

In reality: People spend up large on public holidays.

In reality: Hanging on to most of our economic output in the teeth of a pandemic would be, notwithstanding the worry of it all, more accurately assessed as stable than crisis.

In reality: the part of our economy that’s not doing great, the part that has a large bearing on the missing 10 percent or so of our usual economic output is…. can you guess what it might be? Yes! The tourism sector! 4 million tourists are shut out and may be for quite a while.

I don’t know, maybe getting the hobbled tourist sector supported by more local activity is just what we need, don't you think?

The bit that needs help gets it from the bit that's doing okay, great concept, no?

Unless of course the whole concept of sharing is too too ghastly really, and you abhor it as only an arriviste can.

You can say: we need people working and being productive and creating jobs. But the big problem, the one we’ve been needing to fix for years, is that we just keep putting in longer and longer hours to achieve productivity rather than getting smarter about it. As it happens, tourism with its low skill low value jobs comes into that frame too, but you don’t want to run before you’re walking again.

Instead of just mouthing that empty reactionary mantra about creating jobs without considering what that actually means or entails, how about thinking about emulating economies that achieve a high value for every worker’s hour and share that wealth?

There's still more:

The idea is basically a sop to win Maori votes, Labour's worried about the Maori vote and Maori seats, hence the politicisation of Matariki.

In reality: I’m not sure she knows what politicisation means.

In all of this she is coming in behind David Seymour who, and I'm not making this up, declared: What is this, a fascist state?

Turns out he was intending this to be understood as a rhetorical flourish, that he’s just not into the Government telling people how to use their annual leave. Okay then.

Oh but there’s nothing like watching an ACT leader letting their logic get tangled up with their Y-fronts. The high mark was Jamie Whyte feeling obliged to defend, come what may, incestuous relationships between consenting adults as no business of the state.

Seymour argues that New Zealand has a range of people with different religions and cultures. He doesn't think the Government needs to be in the business of making laws to tell people what they should value and when they should value it.

There are only two public holidays worth keeping, he says.

Two things that bind all New Zealanders together are Waitangi Day - because that was the constitutional basis of the country - and Anzac Day, because that's when New Zealanders went and fought to make sure those freedoms were real.

Bind us together? You mean like….like….things that we value?

You can run but you can't hide from trying to have it both ways sonny, just like you ACT boys can't read Ayn Rand and also keep both hands on the table.

7.10am

While I'm making coffee and listening to the radio, John Campbell, I will learn later, is getting stuck in to Southern Response.

The Court of Appeal has affirmed a finding against Southern Response in their dealing with Christchurch couple Karl and Alison Dodds, whose house was badly earthquake-damaged. Southern Response had offered them a settlement that it knew was much less than the actual cost of repairing the home, and the owners were entirely in the dark.

The word you read again and again in the judgement is “misrepresented”, John says.

They knew exactly what they were doing, John says.

A state owned insurer was treating you like that John says. 

Good on him, truly, for keeping at it all these years.

On the talkback radio I would have callers  from Christchurch, and we would talk, and sometimes listeners would steer me to people like lawyer Peter Woods. It would always be staggering and dismaying to hear the trouble people were having. And no sooner would you begin talking than a stream of messages from other  listeners would commence, saying Christchurch borrrring get a life get over it, and you’d think what is wrong with people.

He restates the larger picture. This wasn't an insurance, company, it was an entity created with the sole task of settling AMI payouts for the Canterbury earthquakes. In doing so it carried out surveillance of claimants, it got involved in the discrediting of  claimants, and it looks as though it will have ended up as a state entity that wilfully underpaid people by 700 million dollars.

We want to see a formal inquiry, the Dodds tell John Campbell.

Now he’s talking to lawyer Peter Woods: The court said the decision to conceal these costs was made at the highest level. Are we informed at all, he would like to know about the shareholder’s role in this? Meaning: Minister Brownlee.

We don't know, says Peter Woods. We do know that the treasury estimated a liability of $100 million for all claims. They’ve already spent over a billion and are heading into the  second billion.

Where does the buck fairly stop for this? If you say Earthquake Recovery minister, Gerry Brownlee, you will not be the only appalled taxpayer saying it.

One might argue this is just one more demonstration that what his party claims to be is not what they are, not really; not so much sound and prudent managers as the sort of  government that’s always looking for the shortcut.  Always after a way to spend less than they have to on the citizens. Except when it comes to tax cuts.

And, of course, they retain their undying admiration for the power of private enterprise to do things right. Here, let's give it another energetic leg hump. Never mind the Ansett debacle.

On Morning Report, yesterday the finance spokesperson was keeping it up with dogged determination. RNZ reports:

Goldsmith said a National government wouldn't cut services, but wouldn't fund them at the level the current government does.

4.45pm

Time for merchndising. Still haven’t found the perfect mask? Foxy has you covered. Check these out.

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This:

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No promises, but if a paid subscription to More Than A Feilding included branded t-shirt and coffee mug and mask, would that improve the offer? Do let me know.