Makes me laugh to hear the boss of the Salvation Army saying that the government should fix the child poverty problem. The moment they attempt to fix it they will badly upset their supporters and be thrown out of office at the next election. The only solution is a major shift in public mind set, and that is very unlikely. Over the last 50 years we have mostly imported negative social attitudes, such as, greed, selfishness and dishonesty. These are now built in and are the major cause of the breakdown of society. Until we change our attitude there will be no improvement. This used to be a relatively happy and caring society. It no longer is. It's dog eat dog today!
Cedric Sutherland, Tauranga.
2 comments
Shift in mindset the only answer to ending child poverty
Posted on 17-02-2013 13:32 | By algail
Well Cedric it doesn't make me laugh it makes me mad. There is no such thing as child poverty. A child cannot be poor or rich. It is the parents that are short of money not the child and as long as we keep talking about child poverty we are not addressing the situations of the parents that cannot afford for one reason or another to feed their family. Wages in NZ are a disgrace as are retail prices esp in Tauranga. NZ is a rip off country and Tauranga is the capital. You can't blame the public as whole for the poverty of others people who are short of money for many reasons and none of them are my fault or your fault. The main reasons are too much income be wages or benefits is spent to feed Drug and alcohol habits also smoking. Another reason is the greed of the business community in NZ not as a whole but many of them such as the supermarket duopoly. Then there is the reluctance to pay a decent wage in NZ which is made obvious by the exodus of skilled workers form NZ. Any firm of any substance can do better than the minimum wage as they sued to before advent of greed in NZ. How can you expect someone on the minimum wage of $13.50 an hour to live a decent life as we used to know it. At $13.50 an hour that is $540 a week take tax off that it leaves $440 take GST out of that $57 which leaves the slaves $382 to take home and that is a national disgrace. I just cannot think how anyone can survive on that with rent even as low as $200 a week leave some with $180 to pay for food phone power petrol medical etc etc. So Cedric and others there is the problem parent poverty not child poverty, forget child poverty and concentrate on parent poverty and we get somewhere. We can't expect any Govt to sort it out it is entirely up to the business community to get their greed under control and be prepared to live on a decent wage themselves rather than absolute luxury while their slaves struggle. T write al the above as member of the business community. I am not an underpaid worker doing a bit of whining . The above figures are off the top of my head and are as close to facts as I can get without using a calculator. Alastair Bethlehem
watchdog
Posted on 21-02-2013 16:05 | By Watchdog
Alastair Bethlehem is quite correct and I salute his well written comments. On a minimum wage of $13.50 per hour no one really wants to work for that! I wrote to Simon Bridges recently stating firmly that $20.00 per hour is a realistic and logical figure in this day and age and will help to curb some of those out of control bills like fuel for going to and from the work that we do at $13.50 per hour. The answer was "The country can't afford it!" So - all the smart people who can afford to go will end up in Australia, and NZ will place all the rest on benefits to top up the income they need. So who pays anyway? May as well pay a decent wage to people. Then you get the tax anyway. And what cars are the bosses of these hard-up companies driving? And pay a decent mileage allowance for us low hourly rate people please. You Public Servants get .75 cents per km. We get $1.00 for up to 20km. Yes - that's $1.00 in total for 20kms. There should be a case to the Human Rights Tribunal in that!!
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