Greg Moore
It‘s always difficult to remain positive when everything that surrounds you seems to be taken away from under you. Today I am having one of these moments.
In the Queenstown southern lakes area where we are, there were 19,345 people on the payroll at last census. Despite Finance Minister Robertson’s taxpayer-funded, generous and most appreciated wage subsidy, it simply isn’t going to be anywhere near enough to move forwards when our customer base has disappeared.
Last year these 19,345 people in Southern Lakes District brought to the economy $2.97 billion (with a B) of export dollars.
Out of 19,345 workers, in the last two weeks around 6,500 have been told they need to start to look for something else. And the carnage hasn’t even started yet.
Despite running our own business and employing people since 2012, we’re one of them too.
Our last employee has been paid out in full in advance for 12 weeks and that has left us enough to last four more weeks.
Realistically, our business can’t restart without customers, and we can’t employ anyone without work for them to do, but according to our self appointed “one source of truth” the Prime Minister, our jobs and business are “not essential”.
Every single job is essential. Quite how someone can make an arbitrary decision without seemingly giving the slightest care or even the slightest knowledge that their decision is going to leave tens of thousands on the scrap heap, and in genuine poverty for the foreseeable future, is just astonishing.
Sitting here in lockdown looking around the house it is the most god-awful feeling knowing we will only be here for a few more months. We don’t want to go. I really don’t want to go. Moving to a new place is mostly something we all look forward to, but not this time.
We can’t even get in contact with a storage company, or a moving company. We can’t do anything.
This week when we go to level 3.8, according to our smiling Prime Minister, speaking to us all as if we were four-year-olds sitting in a circle on the mat at pre-school, we will be able to order KFC and Macca’s online! Maybe I should ask her and the Commissioner of Police if it’s okay to order some “cardboard boxes and sticky tape” online so we can start to pack our life and business up, and am I permitted to drive to “click and collect” them?
The Labour-led government did not create this problem one little bit, but their dithering and sheer incompetence handling the fallout, solely to promote their world media-dependent smiley face “leader”, aided and abetted by a simpering sycophantic mainstream legacy New Zealand media, who as of last week are on a $50m handout, has cost tens of thousands of jobs. Few of them theirs.
The government in their bubble, all still on full pay and allowances, may think their actions or lack of were worth it, but in time the voters, and the inevitable Royal Commission into their response, will decide if it was. But that can never roll back the damage of their complete, and one could argue, deliberate politically motivated malfeasance.
So where to from here? One thing is certain even at this early stage. The government is not the propulsion, they are the anchor. The solution will be as always Kiwis looking out for, and looking after each other. That’s the way we roll here.
He tangata, he tangata, he tangata.
It is people.
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