The Herald continues its campaigning today with a puff piece about a poll that claims business wants National’s 90 day ‘fire at will‘ policy enacted as soon as possible.
The policy would remove the right of any worker in a small business to appeal against unfair dismissal during their first 90 days in a new job. But apparently the Herald didn’t think workers - you know, us, the people whose rights are being taken away - were worth talking to.
Instead, they quoted National’s employment spokesperson Kate Wilkinson - “It certainly reinforces the need for a commonsense policy like this” - and Ben Ridler, the managing director of something called the ‘Results Group’ - “It only takes a couple of bad hires to kill a small business, so this flexibility is urgent.”
The Herald acts like it’s a journal for the ruling class, then they wonder why people aren’t buying their newspapers.
There’s a lot of talk about the ACC budget deficit and National’s use of the issue to create an environment in which their privatisation scheme can roll with the minimum political fall-out.
Any doubt I had that this was their plan evaporated this morning when I heard Nick Smith on RNZ moving the story along by talking about maybe having to increase levies.
You see the ACC “blow out” is an anchor-story. It’s a big newsworthy story that can be spun with an “urgent” media conference and get lots of press that then anchors a whole stream of smaller stories that wouldn’t have got any coverage without it.
And National is doing exactly that. The urgent media conference was a great piece of theater as was the “ministerial inquiry”, and the lines “billion dollar blow-out” (gotta love that alliteration) and “ticking time-bomb” (oh noz! the clock is ticking!) were clearly prepared well in advance. The aim was to make as big a splash as possible and they pulled out the stops to do so.
Now they’ve created this anchor expect to see lots and lots and lots of minor ACC stories such as Nick’s ‘levies could rise’ bunkum spill out over the next few weeks with lines like “this follows closely on the heels of the billion dollar blow-out” and “against the background of a government inquiry in to the ACC timebomb” in them.
After a few months of this coverage it will look like there are a million things wrong with ACC. And then? Well, who could blame them for flogging it off?
I despair at the mentality behind this ad.
Why should universities, which are all publically-owned, be advertising to try and take students off each other? I mean, it’s one thing to compete on quality but this kind of vacuous ‘marketing’ nonsense just shows we’re losing our universities.
Universities were once places to learn how to think, to discover; they were places where you went to gain a broad range and real depth of knowledge. This ad and the emphasis on rubbish like MBAs shows they’re becoming places for preeners to network and get pieces of paper to show what great businessmen they are.
The Reserve Bank has cut 1.5% off the official cash rate, bringing it down to 5%. The rate has now been cut 2.5% in just six weeks, an unprecendented slashing. Mortgage rates will drop as well, but perhaps not by as much because the banks (excluding Kiwibank) have to borrow most of their money from overseas for lending here and international credit is hard to come by.
The Reserve Bank should have been cutting rates much earlier as the economy started to slow due to the credit crunch and high oil prices. Instead, it pointlessly tried to fight the inflation coming from those oil price rises by strangling our economy with high interest rates. Now, at least we are finally getting cuts but they are so large that they amount to little short of panic from the Reserve Bank.
