Salary increase not needed says PM... Yeah Right

Members of Parliament have been given a $7,000 salary rise by the independent body that sets their pay.

The Remuneration Authority gave MPs an increase of 1.5 percent, as well as a $5,000 payment to compensate for the international travel allowance which was scrapped in January.

The changes will see the next Prime Minister's salary rise from $400,500 to $411,510, while his deputy will get $291,800, up from $282,500.

The Leader of the Opposition and the Speaker will both get $257,200, up from $249,100.

Backbenchers will receive $141,800, up from $134,800.

Authority chairman John Errington said increases in recent years have not kept up with the rising cost of living and general wage increases.

Of course all of them get heaps of other perks, housing and accommodation, transport, air travel, health care etc. etc.

Prime Minister John Key said we was also disappointed with part of the decision to increase MP's pay. He said he was happy with the 1.5 per cent increase because that was roughly in line with what the rest of the country got, but he said there was little need for the $5,000 to compensate for the scrapping of the travel allowance.

Talk about jelly-beans and bullshit and media manipulation; we’ve just had the finest example of Hollywood style crap presentation and a thick brained idiotic acceptance of medias first rate clap-trap. Which was fed to readers and viewers in the name of democracy and freedom?  It’s the kind of PR driven crap which the NZ public consumes on a daily basis… The PM fed the media a line of bull so obvious that a ten year old would recognised it as such from a hundred yards. But our media stayed blind, deaf and dumb as well as being one eyed.

The PM didn’t want MP’s to get a salary increase…yeah right.

He waits until the commissioner is about to announce what the increase will be…the very day…and he goes to the media and says that he asked, no begged; the commissioner not to give MP’s a lift in salary…as the law requires him to do. He doesn’t have a choice.

The PM knows this but still goes through the completely bogus motion of pretending he is against the possible increase, and wants MP’s treated the way public servants are treated. And he pleas for the commissioner to do the decent thing…he says this as he wipes the self-induced tears from his eyes. He is the finest B/S artist in NZ maybe even the world…

The media simply love and adore his Hollywood style drama style ‘Queen’ presentation. National Party clones like…Paul Henry, Mike Hoskins and the NZ Herald absolutely perspire with delight at this display of frustration by an emotional PM as they offer him a tissue or two to wipe the invisible tears from his pink cheeks, this proves they say, that he is just one of the crowd…a good Kiwi bloke…yeah right…if you believe that then you’ve got rocks for brains. He could have simply turned up at work on Thursday morning and retrospectively changed the law…but alas he didn’t do that, instead he bluffed and huffed like a miniature Snow-white.

The PM knows full well that the increase will be granted…because under the law the commissioner has no choice. He does his crying leader act on a Thursday, a day on which he won’t be in the house to answer any questions on the issue [He almost never goes to Parliament on a Thursday, he needs the rest after two days in the house [Tuesday and Wednesday].

This last Tuesday and Wednesday have been like days from hell for the PM…he has ramped and raved, swore and stamped his feet, has bull-shitted his way around sending troops to Iraq without the support of Parliament, tried to explain his various falsehoods about the Sky City give away and the resignation of ex-Northland National MP and chair of the Law and Order Committee and super anti-family-violence campaigner Mike Sabin, who’s name cannot be mentioned in Parliament…and if you do that great protector of the PM the Speaker will leap to his feet and shut you up, yet the PM can call others, cowards, gutless, spineless, and the speaker always finds a reason to allow that to happen. I sometimes feel that the Speaker and the PM are in some sort of relationship…father and son, husband and wife…or some other variation on that theme, but it’s not hard to recognise which one is the boss…

A new way of recruiting CEO’s, senior management, and other positions paying more than the living wage is discussed in the following blog: 

https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=918672081160600879#editor/target=post;postID=5802655592119857641;onPublishedMenu=posts;onClosedMenu=posts;postNum=320;src=postname  

Another method that would be fair is never to pay increases other than in money terms rather than percentage terms…5% of half a million is a hell of a lot more than 5% of the minimum wage. What you do is always increase salaries or wages from the bottom up…for example if the bottom level got an increase of say 5% which equals say $500 per year…then everyone above the bottom point receives $500…this maintains the gap between positions. This would of course hold the gap that now exists between people.While new ways of reducing top salaries...as per the link above for example.

The gap between the bottom and the top has been growing at a massive rate and a 50 cent increase in the legal minimum hourly rate for those over eighteen years of age, workers under that age could be paid as low as eleven dollars.

If we fail to take action then we should expect a violent reaction sometime in the not too distant future…    

Palmerston North Police use 'weird' interrogation practice,

“A very dear friend sat on his sun porch and pondered his adventurist past, looking back he realised that many long years had passed by, in fact many of them had been very exciting, especially since he had been at the forefront of the very meek and virtually non-violent [by today’s standards] Terrorist movement in Scotland…who were seeking justice from their English long term slave masters.

He was of course young back then, but he had a love for Scotland, his much loved highland home. And he shared willingly in a little nationalistic mischief behaviour… and was in the end forced to depart the local scene.

He headed to Europe, Germany in particular and started an adventure which included working for the American military and that in itself was just a little ironic he thought…from there he ended up in the United States and after being educated at university he commenced working amongst the world of books, a librarian no less.

This saw him slowly but progressively edge his way south until he crossed the massive Pacific Ocean and end up in Palmerston North.

He had left a country where the police were a mixed bag, in fact it was often thought and portrayed in movies that they were more corrupt than the local bad guys. He had arrived in a country that he thought held police behaviour to be non-corrupt and he preferred this belief. But was or is his belief correct?

This man was also one of rare breed of people who understood what the word politics meant to people in their everyday activities…in fact besides being employed in various roles ranging from Massey University to editor of one of our local papers his participation in community collective activism continued to grow. He believed in justice, real justice not pretend justice.

But by now he he was paying dearly for a childhood living in the shocking and disgusting damp slum housing of Scotland. His life up to this point had been both exciting and sometimes emotionally rewarding but alas, his past health problems were catching up with him.

But when in December 2014 a couple of police persons paid him a call…and asked him to give a hand writing sample, for It would appear that someone had sent threatening messages to staff, or someone at the PNCC, and it would seem they must have brought the matter to the attention of the local police, who in turn had somehow or other linked the hand written letter/note/ to him. I don’t think he was ever told the actual connection..

Our gentle and unsuspecting suspect, which is what he must have been for the police to have even connected him to the ‘threatening’ message…somebody must have brought up his name, and this appears to have turned this very gentle and unwell person into a suspect of the highest order. We all know today how easy it is to brush others with the broad and misused term ‘terrorist’ or some such other equally stupid title. While the police behaviour may not be actually stupid in this case it must come close...

But the strangest part in this police exercise in 'weird' interrogation practice, was what they asked him to actually do…which was to write a ‘confession’ confessing to the writing of the letter to the council’, now I know that is hard to comprehend, but according to him that is exactly what took place. [It's looking more like stupid as we learn more.]

Naturally he was taken aback by this most unusual request from the boys [and girls] in blue, in fact he was so shocked by this outrageous behaviour that he wrote to the Independent Police Conduct Authority to lay a complaint about what he considered the shocking and illogical approach and practice of the local police.

He saw this strange behaviour as simply a process of possible entrapment by collecting so-called dummy confessions’ under the guise of collecting specimens of peoples handwriting for investigative purposes. And I must admit I was inclined to agree with his point of view.

His letter of complaint to the IPCA brought a response and the local Police in the shape of a Detective Senior Sergeant was dispatched to talk about the complaint to see if he would be happy to accept the Police Departments explanations of its behaviour. He asked me to join him in this discussion and I willingly agreed. That took place on the 23^rd of December 2014.

Around the middle of February my friend received a reply from the local area commander for the PN region. It was a very interesting letter firstly it states that the process of obtaining hand writing samples that the police take is not entrapment…in their view, they give no legal opinion. But the letter writer agrees that senior-management [police] will look at the process, to ensure that entrapment cannot occur…lastly the local commander gave an assurance the the process used was properly followed. He based that on what a police person wrote in his/her case notebook.[One assumes that what was recorded was correct and balanced, how does one check?]

Nowhere in the police reply did they concede that the language used was in the form of a confession…this of course was the main basis of my friend’s complaint. In fact they avoid reprinting exactly what was said during the interview by the two visiting police officers on the 8^th of December 2014 other than to talk about the notebook entry.

The purpose of this blog is to seek feedback from those in the legal profession about the process used by the police…and to answer the more serious question about the police behaviour and that is “how can you seek a handwriting sample without somehow informing the person involved of why and on what grounds you selected him for this style of weird questioning used by the police and lastly could this evidence be used in a court of law.

So if you have an opinion please get in touch via my blog site or email me at wheeler@inspire.net.nz

The person involved has agreed to this blog being posted and has read the content before doing so..  

Wendy's Management rip off staff.

Wendy is such a sweet name, it makes one visualise a picture of an innocent young woman like the sweet innocent character out of the Peter Pan stories. It’s a PR concoction used to create a sort of heavenly image and to install in people a dream vision of a loving character who couldn’t harm a fly.

The users of the name ‘Wendy’s’ to head a fast food outlet have really gone overboard to prove how rotten management can become in this day and age.

Respect, honesty and fairness and trustworthiness, these words most certainly don’t apply to Wendy’s fast food outlets…because Wendy’s is run by super-mean, super-heavy handed and super stingy people who care little about their mainly young and very low paid [if paid at all] employees.

In fact it is difficult to consider this chain of fast food outlets actually employees anyone. You see they operate what are known as ‘No hours employment contracts’…Now most honest human beings would have a hard job coming to grips with the weird concept of ‘No Hours’ employment contracts.

I mean how you can have an employment contract that doesn’t define ones working hours and conditions of work beats me… A one way contract that gives the employer the right to decide at the time you turn up to work [each day] whether they will let you work that day or not.

Could you survive like that, seriously folks how you could pay the rent, the power, pay off your student loan if you didn’t have some certainty about the amount of money you could earn on a weekly basis. And remember the government considers that you have a job if you’ve signed one of these weird one way contracts.

This is Act Party economics gone mad…yet Wendy’s a kindly fun-loving staff rip-off employer who sells fast food to an innocent public, actually gets away with this inhuman rip-off behaviour on a daily basis. In real terms it is criminal and Wendy’s bosses should be jailed for their behaviour, but I bet you that Garth McVicker overlord of the Sensible Sentancing Trust won’t be pushing for their imprisonment.

Seventeen Wendy’s no hours contract staff at Wendy’s Rangitikei Street operation are saying enough is an enough. They want their present contracts squashed and the no hours element tossed out. They also want a day in lieu of working on public holidays to apply to them as it does to other fast food outlets run by more progressive companies.

Bonita Belworthy is a ‘Unite Union Organiser and more than half of the staff at the Rangitikei St Wendy’s operations, belong to the Unite Union, and Unite is the fastest growing union in the country and the reason is obvious. They actually do something! Many other organisations simply and meekly accept the employers and governments bullying, and fail to stand up for their members and others working rights. Those who do nothing are like rats departing a sinking ship. It would certainly appear that Unite has no plans to give up the fight. You the reader can help, we you vist a fast food outfit ask if they have ‘No hours contracts’ and if their answer is yes…go somewhere else to buy your food.

You can help also by sending a message to your so-call MP telling him or her to get off their fat backsides and do something for those Wendy’s workers who are being ripped off.