Having a go at listening live to The Bradbury Group;
Firstly, there's no way to tune in to this online talk show without using one of a grab bag of corporate platforms. The embed on their own website is the FarceBook version 🤦♂️
Must contact them about offering an OwnCast option.
NZ Labour finance spokesperson Barbara Edmonds asks what can be done from Opposition other than tap the sign with the election date. This is emblematic of everything that's wrong with Labour under Hipkins.
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The answer to Edmonds' question is simple; what the Greens do!
* talk publicly about the problems the country faces, in ways the average kiwi can get their heads around with reading a library worth of books first
* state simply and clearly what your party would be doing right now it was running the government
* expose what the current government is doing - especially the bits they're not talking publicly about - and how it's making problems worse instead of better
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Hooten repeats his talking point that a) public subsidies to support workers' incomes during COVID lockdowns were free money for businesses, and b) inflationary. I call bullshit on both. The first bit is obvious.
On b), increasing the money supply is only inflationary if all available goods and services can already be bought (eg housing). Those wage subsidies were targeted at people who spent it on products and services that would otherwise have gone unbought.
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If it wasn't for the COVID wage subsidies, either employers would have;
a) just fired all those workers. Certainly corporate franchises and ACT supporters would have.
b) been trying to pay wages while spending was shrinking, due to a bunch of a) happening. Many would have gone bust and the workers would have ended up jobless anyway.
Either way, money spent on wage subsidies would mostly have been spent on benefit payments instead. Without keeping businesses going for the same spend.
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Strypey