"rewards work and savings"

This is a National line to justify their tax cut packages. I just read it again from Nikki Kaye in the latest Broadsides column.

There's a fundamental flaw with this approach - it assumes the work is there to be done (and secondarily that it pays enough that someone doing it has something spare to save). This is the same assumption behind eg re-introducing youth rates - that the work is there but it's somehow not important enough for an employer to spend the current minimum wage on.

Of course "accessing" a plethora of jobs which are "not important" is no way to actually lift the economy or living standards. These jobs will just disappear again when things get tight(er). A policy that results in a mass of jobs paying no more than the benefit but no hope of advancement is of little help.

(I'm not necessarily saying that the preceding Labour government was any better, but going into this election they have at least announced a procurement policy to keep/create jobs in NZ.)

A true job creation policy would look to the medium-long term - developing jobs designed to lead to more jobs both vertically (individual career advancement) and horizontally (entry level/expansion intake + growth of support industries).

Fireplace renovations

Tuesday I had the fireplaces taken out in preparation for a new one. I was going to share the full Picasa album but fucking Google now won't let me share it by any means other than Google+. So here are just the before and after pics uploaded to LJ.
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Edit: Resolved - needed to manually change the "Visibility" option from "Limited" (which google "helpfully" set it to when I shared the album) to "Limited - anyone with the link". At which point the options for generating links reappeared in the sidebar.

Not a satisfactory resolution until google stops hiding those links from the album owner at all.

Full album
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( before/after )

This isn't an EQC job - the earthquake has only hastened a planned renovation by rendering the current woodburner temporarily unusable (cf just declared illegal by ECan). EQC would rebuild the top of the chimney - there's no point when I was planning to do this in the next couple of years anyway.

The full process is probably going to take another couple of months. So I'll have the new fire for -next- winter.

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Edit2: And the addition of an excess weight charge from the rubbish skip company makes this over $2k worth of hole, with the estimated total pushing towards $7k.

Christchurch, we have a vision #eqnz

The Christchurch City Council today released the draft plan for the post-earthquake recovery of the Central City, an outcome (partially) of the Share an Idea program.

The Press put it online at issuu.com but it's pretty unreadable in that format - if you don't want to register an account there to get the pdf I've re-uploaded it here: http://lts.cr/KQQ

Edit: or get it from the council website: http://www.ccc.govt.nz/homeliving/civildefence/chchearthquake/centralcityplan.aspx

I've skimmed it pretty thoroughly but I'm not going to make any detailed commentary until some of it has sunk in and I've made another pass or three. First impression is that it contains pretty much everything that I could have asked for and more besides - I saw nothing to disagree with. And that's why I'm going to describe it as a vision rather than a plan - it aims high and the hurdles to be overcome in achieving it are walls made of flesh. There are a lot of other stakeholders who need to buy in and stump up before even a fraction can be achieved.