"Caring about NZ"

That's the title of a webpage Jim Anderton has set up. It is also the headline on a FULL page ad in my local paper;

Typically the statements are highly questionable;

The Government hgas done a lot to help out. Working for families has helped lift more children out of poverty than at any time since the Great Depression. Income related rents for state houses, cheaper doctors visits and much more have helped thousands of families. The minimum wage is up by $200 a week for the very poorest workers. And best of all, around a thousand jobs a week have been created every week for the last eight years. That’s 330,000 more jobs.

For a start 52,000 jobs a year for eight years would be 416,000 jobs and the obvious typo is not mine. The only jobs governments create are those of bureaucrats and public servants. The rest are created by the private sector.

And lifting "more children out of poverty than at any time since the Great Depression"? Even people firmly on Jim's side of the political spectrum would argue with that. For instance,

....an Auckland University public policy lecturer and former Children's Commissioner, Ian Hassall, said the Working for Families package had probably helped reduce child poverty by at least 10%. But he said with possible job losses in the predicted economic downturn, many of these gains were likely to be lost.

And my own response is that it was Jim's lot that was responsible for creating the latter day 'child poverty' with the DPB. It's a bit rich to now be skiting about moving a few people sideways from the DPB onto an In Work payment. And to compare that with the recovery from the Great Depression is just ludicrous.

Interestingly for the newspaper ad the wording has been changed from, "The Government hgas done a lot to help out," to "There has been a lot done to help out."

Is this to avoid creating the impression the advertisement is asking for votes? Has it all been paid for by Parliamentary services? Did we all pay for this bunkum?

I tried sending Dear Jim the following message but the fields have also been set up incorrectly resulting in a failure to submit.

Government gets in the way of people caring for each other by taking tax for so-called 'welfare'; by 'applying Christianity' on behalf of individuals. It is your political allies that created the DPB, that in turn created latter-day child poverty. If you would just stop 'caring' we would all be better for it.