Catch-22

The New Zealand Goverment continues on its farcical march towards becoming Milo Minderbinder's "M&M enterprises", in which "everyone has a share".

Kiwibank, Kiwisaver, Air New Zealand, Vector, Transpower et al. all are increasingly pointing towards this Governments absolute goal of the Kiwi collective ownership of everything via their benevolent and enterprising Government.

My own catch-22 now lies in how do I continue to help and support a country and people to whom I am increasingly drawn to despise?

EPMU vitriole wins the day

Hattip: Scoop / Scoop

Unfortunately it looks like the EPMU et al. campaign of lies and hyperbole has managed to convince enough people that Wayne Maps Probationary employment bill is an "attack on their rights". And so the Maori party have decided to withdraw their support for the bill meaning it is likely to be defeated rather shortly.

Workers need to wake up and realize that initiatives like this are *not* an "attack on their rights" but are attempts to actually bring realistic responsibilities back to those rights that they possess. The current climate of repealing employers rights and making the employee ever more powerful and legislated will continue to drive New Zealand down its path of foreign ownership and small business ownership.

Those people with enough entrepreneurial spirit to start their own businesses will continue to trend towards being single proprietorships, possibly expanding to partnerships, and then typically moving offshore for expansion - if that isn't where they started already. It is ludicrous that it is becoming increasingly less risky and orders of magnitude cheaper for someone to move into a partnership agreement than to hire their first employee.
Only large multi-corporates are likely to continue with the increasing hassle of employment, only they can continue to take the risk and employ the legal / HR teams that are required to deal with actually having employees. If workers think either of these trends are in their favor then they are severely mistaken.

We have already seen a number of our businesses start to replace staff with machinery due to their increasing costs - this is the one positive side effect of these moves. New Zealand needs to increase its labor productivity if we are to regain any kind of comparative standing in the OECD. However it would be nice to be able to have a domestic manufacturing segment rather than watching them all (Jack Links et al) slowly collapse and shut down, it would be nice to continue having a domestic clothing market, car assembly - in fact almost anything other than food and aluminum would be good.

As we continue to make this less of a reality for ourselves, as we punish the entrepreneur for the lack of vision, lack of risk tolerance, and lack of intellect for their workers we will see ourselves continue to decline until we are that prison colony at the end of the Earth that Gene Roddenberry predicted.
Tags: nz, politics, employment

Pay it back - IRD style

"A payment is late if it is posted or delivered to Inland Revenue after the due date. If you send in a payment after the due date, you will be charged an initial 1% late payment penalty on the day after the due date.

A further 4% penalty will be charged if there is still an amount of unpaid tax (including penalties), at the end of the 7th day from the due date. Every month after the due date, a further 1% will be added to any unpaid amount (including penalties)."

Thanks to Insolent Prick for his discourse on the situation: link
However the biggest disgust that I have had over this entire episode is that politicians in general seem to think that just "paying it back" would be restitution enough (those that you can get to admit a theoretical guilt from).
However there is nowhere else, and no other party that can play by those rules.  In particular the money that was spent from the public purse is coerced under the penalty structure above. 

Note that it is worse if you were avoiding tax - this is just the penalties for not paying on time - which includes if you didn't know you had a bill to pay.  Which can occur up to 7 years after the fact.  Even if it takes a court case to establish some unclear portion of tax legislation which you could have justifiably thought you were in the right over.

What really needs to happen is for all political parties who abused the parliamentary services funding and electoral spending caps to be treated in the same way as every person and business in the country.  They should be audited for the last 7 years and made to pay for every cent spent unjustifiably, with penalties and back interest.

This is the threat that they as politicians and political parties have created.  It would be nice to see them see what that feels like.
Tags: IRD, tax, political, nz, parties