Community champions worthy of recognition
Honours should recognise less well-known
Afew news items have caught my attention recently. The first was the New Year’s honours list.
As discussed in this paper, it seems to me a great pity that Porirua receives so little acknowledgement of the great work done by so many people who beaver away in the background trying to improve the lot of the less fortunate or simply to build up our community.
While on holiday recently, I saw a few episodes of the television programme Mucking In, and it occurred to me that the recipients of such property makeovers could well be nominated for knighthoods or damehoods.
Why are honours so often given to people who are in the public eye already and are more than adequately paid for their services?
The suggestion that a city council committee be set up to research possible recipients for the New Year’s and Queen’s Birthday honours lists is great. Go for it, Porirua! Let’s show the country what we are made of.
Second, have you watched television lately? Most of us have, I suspect. But I must say that the offerings on TV One for the holiday season are rubbish – infomercials, repeats, nothing of substance and endless advertisements.
However, paying for Sky Television is not that much better.
During the holidays, I watched some programmes on the Discovery channel.
It seems all television stations assume that our attention span is only about 10 minutes.
All the programmes we watched gave us about that length of information followed by an equal, or greater, length of time advertising upcoming programmes and other commercial information.
And the trailers
for upcoming programmes were always the same in each ad break.
You would think pay TV would provide better fare than that and offer at least some programmes without interruption. I’m glad I don’t subscribe. Third, one morning recently I heard Finance Minister Bill English remark that, given the fact that the inflation rate had dropped to under 2 per cent, wage-earners could look forward to a wage increase smaller than they might have anticipated. Why am I sceptical? It seems politicians and chief executives are not restricted in their salary increases by such trivia as the existing inflation rate.
Perhaps they should go out and try to survive for a month or two on the pay received by rest home careworkers and other low- income groups – and that applies also to beneficiaries and sole income superannuitants, neither of whom can expect even a 3 per cent increase in payments. And now I need your help. As a member of the Consumer Advisory Group to the Health & Disability Commission, I have been asked to do a presentation on rest home care.
I need some input if you have it.
What is required is any shortcomings in the treatment of the elderly in rest homes or, alternatively, anything you have noticed that has improved.
From time to time we hear some horror stories about the way elderly people in care are treated, but there are also many examples of excellent care and attention for these vulnerable citizens.
Do you have any of either? If so, please contact me on kilianv@xtra.co.nz, preferably within the next couple of weeks.
We start our monthly meetings again this month and our speaker is yet to be named, so he/she is a mystery package.
We look forward to seeing you there.