Even with the normal expectations and earning possibilities etc.
If you’ve been advertising a job at a certain rate and nobody has applied, then either the location, conditions or pay are not meeting the market. You can’t change the location for a business like this, so you have to change the conditions and/or pay. ie, the true hourly rate for any given job is what you can hire someone to do it for.
There’s lots of interesting stuff in your reply, and I don’t have a lot to add, but I thought maybe context around my interest in coastal shipping.
I’d never really given it much thought at all, but coincidentally in 2 months i’d been to the maritime museum in Auckland which has models of all sorts of coastal ships that used to ply their trade around New Zealand which made me interested in the subject.
Then I read a post somewhere talking about how changes had been made around the late 80s early 90s designed to crush NZs maritime union power that would supposedly have replaced our coastal shipping effort with international carriers bringing their large container ships down here and then doing pickups & dropoffs as they bounced around the various ports. Apparently that never really happened, or at least didn’t take off much so the net result was that we killed most of our coastal shipping and were left with road and rail.
In & of itself, road and rail probably seem like a good option because we had ferries linking both networks and around the time those changes had been made was a lot closer to the heydey of NZ Rail. Of course in hindsight we can see that the neo-liberal reforms that sold off the railways led to massive under-investment in the rail network, lines closing, being unmaintained, worsening rolling stock and in the end we went from 3 modes of freight transport to 1.
But what really made me think again about coastal shipping was the impacts of Cyclone Gabrielle and the likelihood that they will happen again, sooner than we thought 20-30 years ago, and more often thereafter. Gabrielle (briefly) entirely cut off the northern half of Hawke’s Bay over land in all directions, North, West & South. Even when things were opened it was initially via a single road route to the south and took a long time to open the crucial Napier-Taupo link and even longer the Napier-Gisborne.
Smaller settlements around Tairāwhiti were cut off even worse as their roads & bridges between each other meant towns were isolated from each other as well. In the end because the road between Napier & Wairoa was so damaged a temporary shipping link was made from Gisborne port to Napier port.
So long as port facilities survive then the most resilient transport for freight & aid for coastal provinces after a cyclone will be coastal shipping. If we have a thriving network then its possible we don’t notice the impact anywhere near as much as we might.
Personally i’d go back to the future a bit and look at reverting the 2014 changes to reduce weight and thus damage. I would also start providing a similar amount of subsidy to coastal shipping as road freight gets and build the coastal network back up. I’m a huge fan of rail freight, and would like to see it used more as well but most of the existing infrastructure around that is ok for now.
With a strong coastal and rail freight networks we can then start putting restrictions on road freight distances again - with a carve out for time critical / refrigerated going to either domestic market or air freight routes.
If we can reduce the speed & weight of trucks, plus the amount of them and the distance travelled then in theory (to a pleb) our roads aren’t as expensive to build, and don’t suffer as much pot-hole damage so the maintenance costs are reduced. For mine, the National Party’s all in on road just sets us up for huge ongoing cost maintaining ever bigger and more expensive roads, with a huge emissions cost compounding the whole problem.
Well, given the road freight companies pay a fraction of the true cost of the wear and tear they cause on the roads, and the elevated cost of building roads that can safely cope with how large National let trucks get in 2014, they do get benefits that other forms of transport don’t. But yeah if the point is to unlock regional economic gains then it should be paid for as a public service.
And in the comments section this popped out from someone - which with the benefit of hindsight we can see was not true in the long-term.
3. The supposed costs of “upgrading” Picton were massively over stated and were in fact only actually 50% of the supposed cast in stone costs given by some consultancy company in 2012, so Picton is actually the cheaper option.
This is a really good write up of the last time the Clifford Bay plan was canned; includes a map of the route and a summary of the economies of it all.
Oh I don’t disagree at all, but the problem is the National Party scupper any public investment in these services, eg:
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/interisland-ferries-to-stick-with-picton/POXPKGCRWSTJ6HAOXGNQKJG3YI/
There’s been so many proposals to do that, and they’ve never managed to get into proper planning phases before getting canned for one reason or another.
Your last sentence made me wonder, is there any example of the private sector wholly planning, building, and running a road in New Zealand ever? Or is it just one of those things that’s so obvious that without the coercive power of legislation for road building, and massive subsidies from the state that roads are not in any way an economic proposition?
When I look at PPPs such as Transmission Gully it really seems more like a broken outsourcing model where the Government took on all the risk, paid for the whole thing and then was going to let the private company toll it to extract rent from it until that became unpalatable so instead they’re just paying directly for the management of it.
Just the first steps of a private company to try to find a “profitable” route, and then buy or lease a right-of-way through undeveloped land seem entirely ludicrous. I suspect that the boondoggle of more and ever bigger roads in the late 20th, early 21st century may well be come to seem in a couple hundred years to be as daft as tulip mania.
Nactional Fist have (over the decades now) campaigned against “Wellington” interfering with the regions. But in practice they are the group that most commonly restricts local democracy. ECAN is one of the most obvious examples but more recently its things like taking away 3 Waters funding, and then in campaigning mode arguing that the answer was they would hold local councils to account for water failures.
They have the corrupt-adjacent fast track legislation reviving zombie projects that locals had already fought and defeated, sacking boards and replacing them with a crony commissioner and now attacks on elected councils. Wellington City Council may well have problems but it is for the people of Wellington who elected that council to do something about it. Not more interference from the Fist.
I can’t see the 3 replies below, I have no idea why that happens quite a bit with Lemmy.
Anywho, while I recall National campaigning on building a lot of roads of notional significance, and very dubious cost:benefit ratios - I don’t recall them making much mention of tolling them. And presumably if they did it would have been in the context of new roads, not long overdue replacements for a vital state highway that was closed years ago.
Let’s also not forget how much money National & Act raised from the Real Estate & Transport industries this election either.
Both of those are already being rewarded with the payment for their donations. Hell of an investment for the landlords really, a few mil to elect Luxon and Seymour, and in return be given a multi-billion dollar tax break.
Same advisors as the austerity obsessed UK tories, so no surprise there - nor is the result much of a surprise but to the economically illiterate english literature grad.
From what I found reading up a bit about this a few months ago, central banks almost always overshoot when trying to trigger recessions to control inflation and in NZ its even harder as our major metrics don’t update monthly like they do in other countries so there’s a lag in seeing what impact interest hikes are having.
Couple that with austerity, and tax cuts to people who don’t need to spend it all and the economy stagnates. I guess I assumed wrong that this was standard material covered in an English Lit degree ;)
I’m very left wing so obviously my opinion is very biased in that direction, but I think Key gets a great deal of pump up from the political commentary classes because he did the politicking part of running a government successfully. He was able to keep the National party on message, was able to fudge away a bunch of different controversies without getting tarred by them and is still probably the most popular National leader of the last 20+ years.
However, if we look back at what Key’s government actually did its pretty clear to me that the outcomes of their policies are bad, are being felt now and will be felt for a long time to come.
As one example, tax cut obsession, plus austerity during and after the GFC downturn has seen a huge degradation and under-investment in infrastructure. The only reason they “balanced” budgets is by not putting money in where it was needed. That’s why Dunedin, Nelson, Hawke’s Bay etc are so desperate for new hospitals and why they are so expensive now.
Its a bit of a blunt exaggeration but the infrastructure you build today is almost always going to be cheaper than what you build tomorrow. And then the infrastructure they did build, such as Transmission Gully, was done as a PPP, which in the long run basically always costs more than doing it ourselves. Massive over-investment in roading and under-investment in rail & coastal shipping also locked in (and now Simeon is doubling down) transport emissions for decades.
Like a whole lot of the decisions of this government, its campaigning. Political theatre to play up fears & misconceptions of a segment of voters.
What sort of vessel are you travelling in?
I was so impressed with the quality of the Bronco that I bought one of their Rambler’s as well. I use that when I just want to grill a couple of steaks for dinner, but my partner also bought be one of the Espeto Sul rotisseries, and I use that with the Rambler as its just about the perfect length for it. I got my brother to fabricate a baffle which lets me hold the lid open, but still keep the box closed for proper air draw & whatnot - its been great for chicken roasts!
I’m quite keen on their offset smokers too, but part of the deal with buying the Bronco was I had to get rid of one of my other BBQs (sold an old Weber Kettle) so I doubt i’ll get the thumbs up to add another even bigger one to our collection!
Naturally, and with this government we’re not going to get Aussie style protections around work hours any time soon - but if your employer is going to say, you must be in office bc contract says so, the response should be ok well contract also says work hours are x-y thank you very much.
I wonder if this mini-saga is illustrative of the government in general. Willing to block, obfuscate and generally be a bit bully-ish when they think they can get away with it. The question for me is why it (presumably) took one of their PR consultants to get them to pull their heads in on this one when it was clearly a dumb idea from the start and guaranteed to get some play in the media as soon as they blocked Smale.