u/Glum-Platform-5701

SLP (supported living payment, the main benefit for the long-term disabled) is by definition a disability benefit. It makes absolutely no sense to reroute disabled people back through MSD, a service hostile to them, because of early-initiative budget blowout (arguably this is a bipartisan problem, government's pointing to set up costs as excuses to reverse changes they dislike). That was done by NACTFIRST this term.

Even if the review of Whaikaha spend did find egregious irreconcilable mismanagement of disability supports resulting in blowout (which I don't think ANYONE is suggesting, even this bunch of lying con artists) the correct solution was to provide them the resources/people from the MSD layoffs rather than switching the function back to MSD. The fact that it was an ideological change and a political promise was obviously the driving force behind this, and as a result this has become another beaureacratic inefficiency, largely hidden by the system because the reversal comes at the expense of the deliberately underemployed (beneficiaries/the disabled) as well as a direct, accounted expense to the system.

It is cruel, it is callous, it is calculated or careless or complacent or whatever you want to call it, but it is also just the cost of the system and of taking the system in a particular direction. And that's why Whaikaha was set up with this assumed bipartisan mission of bettering disability services and the delivery of them. Labour can make MSD as nice as they want but it will always be a harmful agency because of its mandate and history and those forced to deal with it because of disability (and any other reason) will have trauma from it. As in, disabled adults will turn 18 with MSD trauma (no matter how mild) because of how their parents are forced to interact with it. And if their parents haven't received ANY disability support at all, they will soon accrue it, it's just guaranteed by nature of them being a disabled person of such severity they need state support.

But also Whaikaha is being damaged by the same MSD bad cop/good cop cycle playing out from the political puppet masters-- non-political people don't see changes in government, they just see an agency being/becoming harmful, or worse, malicious, which undermines much of the social good the agency purported to serve. So when Lifelinks suddenly pulls back funding without offering needed support to replace it (like they might have under the previous administration who had allowed for a growing budget while need was assessed for the disabled as a community), people don't see that National had changed things, they see just another govt agency pulling back. And ironically parents see the political reality even less than disabled people do, because their interactions with these services/departments are usually briefer.

TLDR the political cycle and optional austerity enacted on the poorest and worst off in society undoes the good that previous spending was explicitly accounting for in why it was set up, and why it continues to exist. Making state departments swing wildly between benevolent and intractable is frankly schizoid (idc I'm reclaiming that or something, bite me), and when it is dealing with people who have no choice but to be clients of them, it's abusive and counterproductive and deliberately wastes social credit expensively accrued by previous government spending.

This reality has to be acknowledged if we are ever to change the futility of the political cycle.

End rant.

Election year. The Prime Minister is sweating, Winston Peters is smirking, and rich men are throwing tantrums and threatening to take all their money out of the country if their party doesn’t win. They’re afraid Labour will destroy (take) all their wealth (even though they’re too neoliberal to actually have the guts to do that) so they’re going to destroy it and take it themselves first, all the way to Australia. That’ll show us!

Oh no!

But a tweet shared on this sub a few days ago has had me wondering — what does that actually look like? I thought it would make an interesting case study.

If Tim Wood, founder of ihug and burger wisconsin, leaves here to escape a Labour government, what does New Zealand actually lose?

To answer this, I first went to the companies register to check out what he actually owns. Turns out, none of those things he’s well-known for — Good Shepherd charity now own the holding company that owns Burger Wisconsin, so we’re not getting any tax from that anyway, and iHug was sold and disappeared years ago. Despite those brands still being attached to his name, he is not a current owner of any franchises or retail businesses.

Here is what he does own:

Mirage Property Investment AU (1000 shares)

Genesis Pictures (20 shares)

He’s also the company director of:

Bondi Beach Retail Holdings

K road holdings no 2

York Street Carpark Limited

Prime Sydney Retail Holdings

And a couple of others. But that’s the gist.

So his business in New Zealand is owning a property investment company (that is already deregistered in Australia) and serving on the boards of a bunch of kiwi companies.

This guy doesn’t own capital here, he is being paid to manage other people’s capital here.

But let’s say he really was a kiwi capital owner (outside of his Queenstown house, which is not a productive asset and actually takes up space actual Queenstown workers could live in). Imagine for a sec he actually owned a burger chain and held minority shares in a bunch of businesses. What would his capital flight actually look like?

He can’t take his burger shops with him, to start with. They stay here, earning him income, while he sips a martini somewhere, presumably on a Bondi beach. But the running costs of these chains eat up most of the revenue, and that remains here to be distributed to workers and supplies, who are, by necessity, local, and cannot be taken.

Nor can he take his other interests with him. These businesses go on making profits, sometimes posting losses, and he takes that money out of the country and the economy. We don’t lose his tax money, of course, because that is tied to NZ, and is unaffected by this change. Yeah he’ll go spend his wealth somewhere else, but tbh he is not so rich it will be noticed, and a lot of that overseas spend would have happened anyway because, even if rich people didn’t go on expensive holidays and spend their money in foreign places, this is clearly an international man who already has business links to Australia. Much of his spending — housing, retail, etc — is probably already split between here and the other countries where he spends his time. The idea that all his capital is destined for New Zealand currently is a lie.

Okay, so maybe he sells up shop. Clean break, owns nothing NZ and so pays no tax here anymore beyond tax for the business sale. He takes his profit-slash-capital and books it, never to be seen again.

Good riddance. But also… not much of an issue for us. Yeah he’s taken some money out of here, some low millions of dollars. But he’s crucially left behind the means of making money in future. The shop premises where he sells his goods still operates. The means of production (the commercial kitchen) are still operating and generating profit for someone else. That person still pays their taxes. They may even continue to spend their profits in NZ, if they are a local. The business still flourishes — or doesn’t — within our domestic market. No capital has been lost or gained, and no capital is ever “lost or gained” unless capital is sold to entities outside New Zealand. And that has nothing to do with rich pricks selling up their businesses to avoid unfavourable administrations, because it happens every day without it.

Meanwhile if he continues his directorship work, he’ll still pay tax on that. But more likely he’d have to give that up due to not being based here. Given how little he owns, I’m betting this is significant income for him and not actually possible. He is not an asset owner in this country, he is a labourer, and he’s more able to take that labour out of the country than he’s able to take his assets.

Capital flight is not a myth, but it doesn’t occur when rich people leave. It occurs when rich people sell to overseas buyers. And that happens all the time. Most of our capital has already flown the coop. If businesspeople sold up shop, they would probably actually HELP those of us who remain here rather than hurting us. A huge reason the Germans were so passive to Nazi dictatorship was that they benefitted from the Jews leaving and being interned because they got to step and buy their businesses on the cheap. A NZ in which all our businesses go on the market at once due to an ideological exit is not a crisis, it is a fire sale in which kiwi investors and future owners would stand to profit.

This guy is threatening the businessman equivalent of a very young child running away from home. And he’s threatening to take the family silver and sell it. Except you look in his bag and he’s got nothing. And you know he‘d never get past the end of the street and be back home by 5pm anyway. Meanwhile we get some nice peace and quiet and can finally watch the TV that’s always blaring cartoons.

Let them throw their tantrums over putting parties they haven’t lobbied into submission in Parliament. They’ll never leave anyway. Unfortunately.

Feeling some Tui-level frustration as multiple times this week I’ve taken time to write something I really don’t have time to focus on rn and it gets removed for very marginal “curation” reasons.

Feels like anti-left-wing bias maybe, especially when mods don’t respond. But using the old adage of never explain by maliciousness what can better be explained by incompetence… it feels like bad modding.

&gt;.<