Rethink wage policy

‘‘Helicopter’’ grants and wage subsidies may help reactivate the economy in the short term, but a more worrying outcome of Covid-19 has been the huge increase in demand for food parcels from charitable food banks.

This must surely indicate the minimum adult weekly wage is insufficient and, therefore, for these workers saving for touring holidays impossible.

Perhaps this low-wage policy is deliberate to keep New Zealand’s export goods competitive internationally, but one has to wonder if that policy is justifiable, when, suddenly, huge amounts of government reserves have been made available to support businesses retain workers and help pay their fixed costs.

Too many people today are living ‘‘hand to mouth’’; it is time to rethink New Zealand’s minimum (and even average living) wage structure.

Some workers will spend their entire pay packet (good for the economy) no matter what, but surely the majority would make weekly savings, which they may spend on an annual holiday exploring New Zealand.

I think this would be a better way to support the tourist industry than declaring more public holidays.

Ray Richards, Trentham

Election bribe

Why is someone unemployed before March 1 worth less than someone after that date?

The Government is promising to pay workers who lose their jobs due to the coronovirus crisis more than double the unemployment benefit, in a new

$1.2 billion scheme. The untaxed payments are more than double that of the Jobseeker benefit for a single person over 25 years, currently set at $250, after tax.

Why do beneficiaries pay income tax on their benefit, they don’t ‘‘earn it’’. It is someone else’s taxed income being given to them. That has been taxed already.

This new payment by Labour is just an election bribe with nett taxpayer money. The real question is, how is Grant Robertson going to pay for it? We are in a financial hole and Robertson has no clue, just handing out more dosh.

Mike Mckee, Seatoun

Unconvincing victim

If New Zealanders need any more evidence of rising irrationality and intolerance among its political class, look no further than Green MP Gloriz Ghahraman, who cried foul at Todd Muller’s baseball hat – as something to do

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with bullying, misogyny, and racism.

Ghahraman, with her broad international experiences and legal achievements, should have known better.

The tide is turning on this type of pathological group-identity politicking from overpaid nation-state representatives.

Ghahraman makes an unconvincing victim, and we should see her microindignation against Muller for what it really is – theatrical media manipulation for political power – with fairness, integrity and reasonableness the casualty. Michael Munro, Ngaio

The great Poobah

I detect that Deidre Walsh (Letters, May 25) misunderstands the intention of my letter (May 23). It was not a criticism of the good director-general but rather that possibly too much power had been deposited with expert opinion. The world is full of experts, many of whom are in disagreement about a common topic at any given time.

New Zealand’s decision on Covid-19 appeared to be a knee-jerk reaction to reports of the death tolls overseas. We looked at the numbers, whereas Churchill’s advice would be to look at the facts behind those bald statistics.

These are that the majority of deaths were concentrated in areas with high population density, where air quality was poor, that the virus affected mostly the very elderly, the vast majority of whom were already very unhealthy. Our statistics, generally, bear this out.

Given these facts, the advent of Covid19 was merely the strain that broke the undertaker’s back. By locking everyone up we have denied some critically ill patients the treatment they need to survive.

These, plus those whose occupations are destroyed, may yet prove to be the greater casualties from this virus.

Philip Lynch, Upper Hutt

Printing money

Amanda Vickers of Social Credit (Letters, May 25) argues that, as banks already create credit, it must be all right to create more. Nonsense.

She cites banks’ granting loans as an example of printing money safely. For her information, banks grant loans on the security of property and the cashflow of the borrowers.

Printing money without limit is a stupid and dangerous policy, as Germany in the 1920s, Argentina under Peron, Venezuela under Chavez in the 1990s onwards, and Greece during the early 2000s found to their cost.

In those countries, people took a wheelbarrow filled with paper money to the shops to buy bread.

I grant you there has not been massive inflation yet in countries that have practised quantitative easing, but any policy where money is created at the whim of a government without genuine production (or some other solid substitute to back it) risks social chaos as people lose confidence in their own money. Then they resort to barter, theft, extortion and other devious means to get by as has happened in all of the above countries.

If that is a Social Credit future, she is welcome to it.

John Bishop, Karori