Hundreds of people in Nelson in Aotearoa New Zealand’s South Island spent the night out of their homes and a state of emergency was declared after the Maitai River burst its banks.

Occupants of 233 homes near the Maitai River were evacuated and cordons put in place at Tasman and Nile Streets.

Soldiers have been patrolling the streets to keep an eye on evacuated properties and all residents are being asked to stay home if possible.

The country’s largest insurer, AIG, said building in flood-prone areas had to stop.

IAG has released a three-part plan to try speed up efforts to reduce flood risk from rivers.

It said climate change was having an enormous impact on the insurance sector, and there needed to be simple, practical, concrete actions quickly.

IAG has released a three-part plan to try speed up efforts to reduce flood risk from rivers.

There have been 10 major floods in the past two years with total insured losses of about $400 million, while the wider economic and social costs extend into the billions.

People in 160 homes in low-lying parts of Westport were been asked to leave so they would not have to be rescued if their homes were flooded.

On the West Coast, the Buller River levels are dropping but civil defence remains on alert with more rain forecast.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Evacuated Nelson residents wait to discover extent of flood damage https://t.co/wTXwBuWJor

— RNZ News (@rnz_news) August 17, 2022

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The government’s latest scheme is a form of government unemployment insurance. Interestingly, both the anti-poverty groups and the neoliberal New Zealand Initiative think tank see this scheme as problematic, very much as a ‘solution looking for a problem’. In other words, its ideology. In this case it’s not capitalist ideology; it’s labourist ideology. Indeed the scheme has been cooked up with the collaboration of the CTU (Council of Trade Unions) and is fully supported by the E tū union.

Some history.

New Zealand and Australia both played key roles in the formation of ‘the twentieth century welfare state’. But different roles. In Australia, with a longer and more entrenched unionised labour movement, and with Labour Governments a generation before New Zealand, the dominant cry was for a workers’ welfare state. In New Zealand, on the other hand, where the debate was more informed by the realities of the Great Depression (1930-35), the call from the electorate in 1935 – and answered by Michael Joseph Savage – was for a citizens’ welfare state (universal ‘social security’). Hence the key phrase associated with Savage: ‘from the cradle to the grave‘. The citizens’ welfare state explicitly included women, all older people, the self-employed (many of whom were unemployed in all but name, in the Depression), and all others who for whatever reason were neither capitalists nor principally attached to the labour market.

Essentially, in the first half of last century, Australia got its workers’ welfare state, and New Zealand got its (universal) citizens’ welfare state. But the Labour Party in Aotearoa New Zealand always struggled with the concept of a universal welfare state, Savage notwithstanding.

In the years in which Robert Muldoon was Minister of Finance, 1967 to 1972, two major – but divergent – welfare reports were published: the Woodhouse Commission on workers’ compensation and the McCarthy Report on social security. The McCarthy Report was in tune with the times, in fully recognising the full citizenship of women; ie independent of their then secondary status in the workforce. In 1972, equal pay laws were passed. And, as a result of the McCarthy Report, the Domestic Purposes Benefit gave dignity to single parents.

The Labour Government (Dec 1972 to Nov 1975) was most interested in the earlier Woodhouse Report; the result was ACC (Accident Compensation) that explicitly provided benefits to workers, with higher-earning workers getting the lions’ share of those benefits. ACC conformed with a worldview full of masculinist assumptions about labour market roles. The major champion of such workers’ welfare was the then junior minister, Roger Douglas. Following in the same vein, Douglas introduced a contributions-based New Zealand Superannuation scheme (became effective, 1975) which fully followed this already outdated masculinist labourist world view, as a government supported workers’ retirement scheme.

Fortunately for the upholders of the citizens’ welfare state – of whom Robert Muldoon was prominent – this legacy project of the Third Labour Government was immediately abandoned in 1976, and replaced by the citizen-welfare-based National Superannuation (now called New Zealand Superannuation). Contributions to the Douglas workers’ scheme were refunded.

The Helen Clark led Labour government of the 2000s continued the labourist line that workers (and capitalists) were superior kinds of citizens to everyone else. This was fulfilled – for workers – in extended the Working for Families targeted income support, which built upon an earlier 1980s’ Labour Government policy (means-tested ‘Family Care’) to replace the universal (ie citizens’) ‘family benefit’. The universally-minded Child Poverty Action Group has always railed against Working for Families as a form of family income support that largely excludes beneficiaries.

The proposed Unemployment Insurance is simply this Labour Government’s tilt at this labourist ideological windmill; the workers’ welfare state.

The Workforce as it Actually Is

For a brief period from the 1950s to the 1980s, the predominant model of work (in New Zealand and in the world) was that of fulltime employment. The feminist solution to this initially masculine reality had been for women to join what they couldn’t beat, and this century a typical salaried worker may indeed be a white collar working woman, a demographic that the CTU and the Labour Party now strongly represents. The workers’ state only became inclusive to women once they took the Hobson’s choice to embrace it.

In Guy Standing’s seminal work on the twentyfirst century labour force, the key distinction is between ‘the salariat’ and ‘the precariat’. The present Labour government makes policy for the salariat, just as the second (late 1950s) and third (early 1970s) Labour governments made policy for a male unionised labour force.

In history – and not according to Marx – labour has always been dominated by either a precariat (not a proletariat), or (as in pre-modern times) a forced-labour workforce (slaves). We still don’t understand the Great Depression of the 1930s, because we still want to know what the ‘unemployment rate’ was; this concept cannot be applied, meaningfully, to the precariat. (In an important sense, and following today’s definition, the unemployment rate in the depression was zero. Many people – especially ‘married women’ – were deemed unavailable for work; other demographics were precariously self-employed in huge numbers.) The middle-middle-class salariat is largely a product of the twentieth century post-war world.

Since the New Zealand Employment Contracts’ Act of 1991 – and similar directional shifts in other countries – the salariat has been progressively dismantled in favour of fixed-term labour contracts, variable-hour contracts, and the ‘gig economy’. Ask any young person.

The reality of the labour force is that it is a spectrum from permanent fulltime salaried (or waged) positions through to ‘free-lance’ self-employment. Various parttime options come within the spectrum – options sometimes favoured by workers, but more generally suited to the flexibility requirements of employers. Generally, those people we use to call workers we now call contractors.

It’s further muddied by the new reality that much of the new salariat – eg managers in larger corporatised organisations, and the smaller ‘nimble’ professional organisations that provide services to these large organisations – are in fact the beneficiaries (in the original sense of the word ‘beneficiary’) of the new capitalism. Labour has become capital.

(Just watch the brilliant Australian satire ‘Utopia’ on Netflix to get a sense of the productivity of the new entitled workforce.)

Nowadays, old-fashioned workers have become the cost-accounted precariat. And the remaining salariat are their bosses and managers.

Unemployment insurance is a new benefit that will mainly be paid to the salariat; that is, the new beneficiary salariat.

It will be largely funded by the precariat. In this respect the new social insurance levy will be like the unemployment tax that all working women and girls paid during the Great Depression, even though they did not quality for the benefits. Another analogy is the taxes paid by New Zealand working denizens in Australia; taxes that fund benefits only payable to Australian citizens. For the new scheme, many precarious levy-paying employees will not qualify for payouts; their work will not be structured in a way that allows them to qualify for benefits. And those low-paid workers who do quality will receive only a small share of the total paid-out benefits.

New Zealanders have to focus – and focus hard – on how to redirect welfare policy to a citizens’ path (with citizenship broadly defined), and away from its present workers’ path (with workership narrowly defined). The new salariat can and should find their own market-based income insurance.

————-

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Unemployment Insurance Will Mean More Tax – NZ Initiative Report, 11 November 2021

The Labour Government’s Proposed Social Insurance Scheme Will Entrench a 2-tier Welfare System, Auckland Action Against Poverty, 2 Feb 2022

Next Steps for Social Unemployment Insurance, E tū Union, 2 Feb 2022

Social Insurance Proposal Would Likely Bake-in Existing Inequities And Drive Inequality, Says Anti-poverty Organisation, Child Poverty Action Group, 2 Feb 2022

The Wage Earners’ Welfare State Revisited, by Francis Castles (1994)

A Decade of Confusion: the differing directions of social security and accident compensation 1969 – 1979, by Margaret McClure (2003) [Victoria University of Wellington Law Review]

Fiji police have warned that any attempts to destabilise and cause instability will be investigated and dealt with, reports The Fiji Times.

The warning came from Acting Commissioner Police Rusiate Tudravu yesterday in the wake of two major fires in Ba and Raiwai at the weekend.

He claimed some Fijians were quick to use the two fires to incite violence and rally more support against the government, claiming they were linked.

He said people instigating movements of violence and instability from overseas or hiding behind “fake profiles” on social media were selfish and self-centred because any acts of violence would only lead to more suffering.

The fires destroyed the Central Arcade in Ba and Tappoos warehouse in Raiwai, Suva, on Sunday night.

Talebula Kate of The Fiji Times reports that the Ba blaze is a major loss to the affected businesses during these challenging times.

Museum, town hall undamaged
Minister of Local Government Premila Kumar said the National Fire Authority (NFA) fire-fighters were quite responsive and managed to save the museum and town hall.

“There has been no damage to these facilities. Despite the windy weather conditions, the quick and efficient effort by our NFA team is appreciated,” she said.

“The outstanding continuous work by our firefighters is commendable, as the impact of the fire could have been extremely detrimental.

“Unfortunately, the cause of the fire is still unknown at this stage and the cost of the damage is yet to be determined.

“Out of the eight shops in the arcade, six shops had tenants and were occupied.

“The arcade accommodated a fish store, a saloon/billiard room, a second hand clothing store, an electrical appliance shop, and two restaurants.”

Eight market vendors were also housed at the arcade.

Handicraft vendors
“These vendors were situated at the SME Market at the arcade and were selling curios and handicraft for their livelihood,” the minister said.

“It is rather disturbing to note that all their stock was destroyed by the fire.

“The number of fires in the country is alarming and becoming a concern. As per the statistics from NFA, there have been 57 fire incidents from 1 January to 1 August 2021,” Kumar vsaid.

“Fifty five were residential fire incidents and two were commercial fires, including [Sunday]’s incident. Sadly, there have been four deaths in the residential fire incidents so far this year; three in Nadi and one at Tacirua.

“We would like to reiterate that we need to be responsible and keep our homes and commercial properties fire-safe at all times,” the minister said.

The Ba Central Arcade Building was a 17-year-old structure and was insured after a valuation of the properties carried out in 2020.

Nevertheless, the Ba Town Council has a loan of approximately F$1.6 million (NZ$1.1 million), which needs to be paid off.

The council has been directed to work on practicable strategies to pay off the exorbitant amount of loan considering the difficult times we are in right now.

Republished with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

A leading New Zealand newspaper has branded the knife-edge US presidential election as a “nightmare” scenario in response to fears of civil disorder and a tarnished global image.

“The very face of the American consumerism was forced to mask up,” said The New Zealand Herald today as the nation “hunkered down and waited for the new President to be elected”.

“Crews arrived on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, armed with sheets of plywood to board up each of the 70 boutiques and properties lining the high-end retain strip.”

A similar scene was playing out across the US on anticipation of strife, as former Vice-President Joe Biden held a narrow lead as the final result deopended on six crucial battleground states.

“At the time this edition went to press, it was too close to call with incumbent Donald Trump defying predictions to put in a strong showing,” the newspaper editorial said.

“US retailers hard hit by the covid-19 pandemic have already been hammered by public disorder peaking after the killing of George Floyd, a Black man, in police custody in Minneapolis which fuelled protests, some violent, across the country.

“US businesses have suffered property damage and theft worth an estimated US$1 billion in insured losses this year, according to conservative estimates from the Insurance Information Institute, making this year’s protests “the costliest civil disorder in US history”.

Display guns and ammunition removed
“A week before the election, Walmart removed all guns and amunition from display, fearing that items would be targeted by frustrated supporters of the losing candidate.”

The Herald said the election was largely a referendum on Trump’s “handling of the virus”. However, while Trump had insisted the nation was “rounding the turn”on the virus, Dr Deborah Birx, coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, had this week joined “a chorus of Trump administration scientists sounding the alarm about the current spike in infections”.

President Trump has overseen the pandemic in the US “reaching world record numbers – 9.42 million cases and still climbing”.

Outgoing US Ambassador to New Zealand Scott Brown said that no matter who won the US election, it would have no impact on Washington’s relationship with Wellington.

If you just woke up, here’s a recap of the US #Election2020 results so far ? https://t.co/UOESbTBEZh

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) November 4, 2020

The Herald reported that Brown had said at the US Embassy’s election day party, his country had an “amazing” democracy.

“It may not be pretty, but it’s definitely vibrant,” Brown said.

Herald political columnist Audrey Young called on reelected Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to “take charge” of New Zealand’s relationship following former Foreign Minister Winston Peters who had managed this role in the last term.

On Al Jazeera’s Inside Story programme last night, presenter Imran Khan asked could the US global reputation be repaired?

The tight race for the US presidency was matched by falling global trust in American leadership.

Americans and much of the world were waiting nervously to see whether Biden would be the next US president or Donald Trump extend his stay at the White House.

The US president is often regarded as the most powerful person in the world.

Changes in American foreign policy could benefit or hurt millions of people.

Trump has upended diplomacy in the past four years while Biden has promised to restore some of those ties.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz