Another had their faith in the upbringing of their family endorsed when they got this note from their son: “We are not going to be up for this Xmas, after a dismal winter we just aren't in any position to attempt it, trust me, this is not what we'd hoped. On a brighter note, (we) are continuing the ever-so family tradition of over-doing it on Xmas visitors for dinner, we've invited the Ni-Van (Vanuatu) boys I work with to spend Christmas Day at our house! There is only Ten of them, after all. It just didn't sit right that the only Kiwi they get to know, and work with every day, leaves them to their own devices for Christmas when they are all far from home and loved ones, especially when we are feeling far from our loved ones this year too. So I didn't. They are coming round, we'll whack a few chooks in the oven, our own new potatoes, then into the trifle, Ice cream, Pumpkin Pie, a few drinks (soft- they are on 'dry' contracts) and Bob's your proverbial. ”
A long-time friend tells me, “The lodges in NZ are failing, I will not go into the background of all that in this letter but a lot of it is due to present government actions in loading small community groups with punitive compliance costs, a group of elderly folk cannot afford $25,000 registration and audit fees and survive for more than a few years. YET, I find it ironic that the same regulatory officials cannot hold control over the big financiers who strip people of life savings and spend Christmas, on bail, in their mansions in OZ!! ‘Nuff said??”
‘Golly, it’s a political fish in jackboots’ was the headline for Alan Emerson’s column in the NZ Farmers Weekly early in January. Alan was handing out his ‘Emies’. The Fairy Godmother Award went to the judge who agreed with former Hanover boss Mark Hotchin that. “…having to live on $1,000 a week was clearly too low. This was after Hanover collapsed owing investors $465m.’ Alan suggested “…most Kiwis with the obvious exception of the judiciary and Hotchin would happily live on $1,000 a week.”
His Irrelevance Award is for the Government’s cabinet rankings where Agriculture drops and becomes primary industries at No11 behind tourism, transport, ethnic affairs, arts, culture and heritage and youth affairs. Tourism and Agriculture see-saw as being our top revenue generators, but without exception Agriculture is most consistently the major exporter and significant contributor to our economy helping pay for those other portfolios. Go figure.
Apart from the fact that we have far more significant things to worry about, the government has had law drafters beavering away making up legislation to make illegal one of the foundation activities in our communities. Schools and churches are examples of the community groups who use events like gala days and garden parties to raise money to simply exist.
The quality of our education is enhanced with various fundraising activities where the community come along and show their support and buy things. What they buy is a lot of produce grown, jams, pickles and the like. Lovely homemade stuff that many of us don’t seem to have either the time or skill to make for ourselves.Well that is all about to end because it will be illegal for you to whip up a batch of scones with Grandma’s famous recipe, then sell them at the school calf club gala day.
I could understand it if the school car parks were littered with the bodies of those sick and dying from having consumed one of those scones. If that were the case I imagine we would have read quite a bit about that in local papers at least. What we have been reading about is over 11,000 cases of some kind of dog attack on people, most often children, which has resulted in over $12million dollars of tax payers money being paid out to victims in the last 12 months. I thought that might be a bit more of an issue to deal with than making law to prosecute me for making & selling my Grand Marnier Marmalade or John’s Zucchini Relish for the benefit of our village school.
I also thought this proliferation of attacks might warrant more of a response than the proposed solution… ‘Let’s spend less time in school teaching children how to read, write and count and teach them dog sense instead’…..Pleeease!
The other matter which I thought might warrant a bit more applied thinking is that which makes NZ an unsafe place for children. It seems I have to go through a more rigorous vetting for suitability to rehome a rescued dog than a human breeder does who decides to have a child then, if they don’t kill them, completely abdicate their responsibility for that child’s safety and wellbeing. When that responsibility is abdicated, a government department has to pick up the pieces. And woe betides them if they should fail in any way.
Rather than deal with the root cause, we satisfy ourselves by lashing the agency publically, and if we can find an individual in that agency to pin the blame on, we can relax knowing that justice has been done and all children are now safe. Who should be thinking seriously about that? Oh, that’s right, they are all busy thinking up laws to prosecute old Mrs B. who makes beautiful sponges to be sold for all manner of community fund raising activities.
And for the third leg of my bureaucratic nonsense trifecta, let’s look at the latest attempt to reduce the price of milk. The government has decided to make Fonterra sell more of its milk to its competitors.
You may recall when Fonterra was formed the government required them to sell some of their milk supply to their production competitors to ensure a competitive domestic milk supply. What happened? Well, the competitors, now assured of a supply of milk without having to invest in a supply infrastructure, turned it into milk powder for export because that was much easier to do and far more lucrative than bottling milk and selling it domestically.
So what exactly do you think they are going to do with their increased allocation? Apparently the government knows – this new intervention is going to magically lower the retail price of domestic milk….Yeah Right!
In a related vein, permission has been granted for a foreign consortium to buy the Crafar farms on the condition the government owned enterprise Landcorp manage them. And are they going to turn all this milk production into local lower priced milk? Hell no. They are going to work with other foreign partners to produce value added milk products and export them.
The logic of all this fails me, but never mind, oops there goes another kid to the emergency department with a dog hanging off its face and oops, there is a child and family social worker picking up another abused kid to try and organise a safe life for them. Oh my goodness what’s that flashing by? It’s a food inspector off to the school gala day, complete with blue flashing light and warbling siren, to arrest Granny B for selling her famous scones and sponges to help raise funds to refurbish the swimming pool, so they can teach kids how not to drown.
