Matisyahu's Blog

A nice relaxing day at home where I was catching up on some news and once again it appears that the National lead coalition government is demonstrating how detached they are from what is happening out in the real world at the moment (link). I can understand the logic of means testing but why not make it consistent by bringing it in line with the student allowance or better still, wouldn’t it make a whole lot more sense having a universal student allowance but means test the unemployment benefit to send a signal that the government would sooner see you learning a skill than being on the dole?

Personally, I think the whole idea of means testing the unemployment benefit and the student allowance are both ridiculous and I also think it is ridiculous to expect someone who is 18 or 19 years old to get a job in an economy that is contracting, record number of businesses shutting up shop and the employers who are employing are getting 600+ applications for a single position. Once again we have a narrative put out there of an economy that doesn’t exist – it has the same energy as the ‘young people need to stop eating smashed avocado on toast then they’ll be able to buy a house’ meme with the same entitled class of people are now insisting ‘there are jobs out there, they just need to get off TikTok and start applying for jobs’ as if there was an avalanche of employers out there who are demanding workers but cannot get anyone to apply for a job.

You can see the prime minister was clearly asked a follow up question regarding the jobs that are being created as being seasonal jobs and he failed to address the fact that those jobs only exist during that particular season so what happens when their contract ends? I’m sorry but just ‘charging through’ the questions instead of addressing the concerns the journalists have raised in the press conference just shows how out of touch the prime minister is from the real world. It reminds me of the idiotic thing someone said almost two decades ago: “I’ve been on food stamps and welfare, did anyone help me out? No.”. That is what wealth does to some people – makes them completely disconnected from what is happening in the real world.

I can understand why people voted for Luxon because many saw him as a continuation of John Key, they were struggling to make ends meet and saw him as maybe a return to a time where the cost of living wasn’t so bad and the economy was better. I would use my sister and her partner as a barometer to represent normies out there and that was the rationale that they used. Who did I vote for? I split my vote between the Green Party and the Labour Party, Chris Hipkins received my constituent vote and Green’s for the party vote. I’m a member of the Labour Party and recently made a $20 donation. What I am hoping is that maybe next I can get more involved politically because I’d like to have some input into the direction of the party when it comes to policy. I wouldn’t call myself a radical although I do sit on the left with most views being pretty traditional Labour policy that existed prior to the neoliberalism hellscape that New Zealand was subjected to in the 1980s (and was continued on through by subsequent governments).

I was completing a Connections and Wordle puzzle tonight – it is funny how with Connections how one can think there is a pattern but there isn’t or end up over analysing the words to the point that you end up missing the obvious connections. Anyway, I like having something that gets my brain working – reminds me of the crosswords in the newspaper back in the day when mum and dad had a newspaper subscription to ‘The Dominion’ (the paper in the morning, there was ‘The Evening Post’ which used to be the evening paper).