Insurers ripping off victims

I couldn't believe it when I read this in the news yesterday http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/industries/4601859/Quake-hit-home-insurance-rip-off. If it isn't bad enough that some 3000 homes in Christchurch are in for the skittle as far as being unrepairable are concerned - but it seems the victims insurance companies what them to continue paying the previous premiums - and in at least one known case, they've increased. Excuuuuse me?

When insuring something, you have a couple of choices. You either insure it for the market value at the time, or insure it for full replacement value. In the former instance, that's what you think the market thinks it's worth - and usually less if the insurance companies have to pay out. In the latter, you do get replacement value - but in terms of a home, I know we'd get something built to the 130sqm home we have today - but certainly not using the beautiful rimu and matai timbers this solid house was created from. No insurance company is going to pay to source that, so the 'replacement' is an anomaly anyway.

To tell anyone that their property insurance has to stay the same or increase after such as event as the November 'quakes is not only ludicrous, it's absolutely unethical. To be blunt, it's sheer theft.

I do not believe for a minute that no-one who has been faced with this has not said to their insurers, "Look, I insured my home for the value of x amount of dollars. It's now not worth a quarter of that, so I need to adjust the premiums to reflect what it is now worth." Just in case, of course, the fence does happen to fall onto the neighbours place and cause damage as some pea-brain from IAG was quoted as saying. These days, the cost of the excess would be more than the cost to repair the fence, so using it as an example was more than a bit precious.

For those homes that were crumpled to non-entry status, what is the point of continuing to insure it? It is not useable for the purpose for which it was built, it has to be demolished - and any materials from it do belong to the insurance company, not to the owner, same as a written off or pinched car. Land doesn't need insuring - it either is there, or it is not. And if not, well, the EQC supposedly look after that.

So what bright spark with a criminal mind came up with this idea? Whoever it was, I've got one thing to say... are you sleeping well at night?

Lessons not learned from previous SOE sales

The news that National is seriously considering selling up to 49 percent of shares in our state-owned enterprises shouldn't have come as any surprise. It's what this political party does, after all. But I have to shake my head at the sheer short-sightedness of such an action.

When Muldoon started off on his megalomaniacal Think Big projects, our national debt ballooned out to considerably more than it is even today. It left David Lange and Roger Douglas coming into power as the Labour government in the unenviable position where the country was days away from bankruptcy. They had no option but to sell off some of the family silverware and I remember as a young voter, hearing Roger Douglas' words, "This is going to hurt." It did too; we'd just got over a two year forced freeze in wages and rental costs for a property we owned - had gone to Aussie to try and make a way for our then young family that was not happening here at the time. Coming back four years later, New Zealand was still feeling the devastating results of a finance minister who should never have been allowed to become Prime Minister in Muldoon.

So, SOE's were sold because they had to be. Since that time, the privatisation of three examples of what were sold has been a picture of a telling failure. The Bank of New Zealand had to be bailed out hugely. Telecom took its jobs offshore and happily let go of the reputation it had built up as being the most progressive and technologically advanced telecommunications firm in the world. New Zealand Railways... well, what worked well back then is still hobbling along on crutches today.

How hard is it for people in government to understand the primary basics of SOE's? The bottom line is they provide jobs - which injects money into the local economy. This, along with the company tax rate, provides taxation for the government to include in their budget. So if you sell these things off, what happens? The profits go overseas instead of being set into the government coffers. Then the powers that be decide they need a much bigger pay increase, so to offset that, they take the vast percentage of jobs, as in Telecom's call centre, offshore to where what's little better than slave labour costs a damned sight less. So, not only do profits go offshore, the economy drops because jobs have been lost, the taxation drops because the money is no longer here - yet Government expenditure goes up because, strangely enough, we now have more people without work.

What happens then is that other employers look at the large pool of unemployed we now have and know perfectly well they can keep wages down because demand is far exceeding supply. And our politicians say they want to see a wage parity with Australia? How do they think that is going to happen is they keep doing things like this?

To me, all this is basic Household Budget 101. Selling off our SOE's should never happen and the reasons for it are glaringly obvious.

Instead of continuing to borrow $250 million a week as they currently are - and selling our SOE's isn't going to change that, but it will drop our international credit rating because we no longer have the assets to back it up - they need to seriously look at changing the way we spend money. The welfare system needs a major overhaul; we are one of the few countries in the world that actively encourages a paid baby-factory mentality.

I'll be blogging on the subject shortly, but suffice to say, it shouldn't take a committee years to work out how to change the system so that money is saved and those savings spent where they should be.

All I can say is John Key is an ex-banker. That should have alerted voters to what was possible way back then.

What are police doing?

I had to deal with a very irate 30 year old daughter last week. She lives with her aunt in a not so good area of Rotorua and over the past two months, her car has been broken into twice and my sister’s home burgled and ransacked to the tune of in excess of $20,000 of goods and damage.

Once again last week, the number one daughter’s car was broken into and a ring she had in the glove box was taken. I spoke to a friend of mine who is involved in a civilian manner with the local police. It turns out there has been a huge increase in burglaries in the area, some 15 had been reported in the past two weeks. Yet my sister – who had someone closeby do a fair bit of digging and who found the names of the alleged toe-rags my daughter had interrupted during the house burglary and who had furnished police with the names – has heard nothing at all from the police about it. Nor has she heard anything from Victim Support, whom the police are supposed to pass on these kinds of things to. And this despite being front page news in the local daily paper for the burglary and page four on Saturday where the family spoke of feeling like they were being hounded out of the city. And even with that report I had to question the journalist’s line of thinking – there was not one comment from a senior police officer as to what the police were actually doing about the problem.

So – where are the police here? Where is the community constable even? Where is anyone from the force trying to track down the maggots responsible for this huge increase and to get around the small community and pick up the ante in encouraging people to keep an eye on each other’s homes and to let them know that many of these burglaries are happening in daylight hours? Police have descriptions – even the group offenders dog has been described. Yet not one of the three people I have spoken to whom this has affected in the past fortnight have seen or heard from police since the initial event. And not one of these people has had a call from Victim Support.

One wonders whether or not the fact that many of these people live in a low socio-economic area has a bearing on whether or not police place any importance on attending ‘routine’ events. I don’t buy that as being a good enough reason. If it was happening in Lynmore, Springfield or Baxendale, police would be in like Flynn – because these residents would be dancing up and down about it.

We’ve had no murders here in the past month. We would have had a number of family violence assaults, because Rotorua features highly in those stats – but the lines of investigation for those should be easily sorted within a week.

So…. what on earth are our local police up to?

Canning fast food near schools?

I know we are at a stage whereby the rules and regulations have to be adapted or employed every five minutes to cope with the ever increasing population.

But just because the same population is increasing girth-wise as well as number-wise, shouldn’t mean that we’ve all lost our marbles in combatting the problem of obesity of kids.

The story here: http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/4575807/Call-to-restrict-junk-food-sale-near-schools relates to a call from the Secondary Schools Principals Assn to restrict the hours in which dairies and the like can sell certain foods during certain hours. Now, excuse me – but that is going to achieve what, exactly? And who is any school to dictate to a business owner selling legal goods when they can sell those very same legal goods?

What our children are fed is not the responsibility of either the school or the dairy owner. It is quite simply the responsibility of the parents who are too damned lazy to make their kids lunch, or provide for them the healthy ingredients to make their own – and of government agencies who continually allow over-processed-to-the-point-of-zero-nutrition foods to be sold at all.

These days, who knows what is ‘healthy’ and what is not? I nearly fell over the other day to find out that the bagged salads I sometimes use when my own garden is in hiatus, in actual fact are bathed in a chlorine-based solution. To ensure it lasts, this highly posionous crap is happily slathered around on food I thought was ‘healthy”.

And I am concerned with what I eat. I can never eat avocados grown here in NZ – the only anser to a dreadful allergy I have to them is that we are one of the few countries who use the highly poisonous Hicane. Australia is no problem, I can eat those when there. But not even a lick from an avocado here without resulting in being a screaming heap on the floor in less than 20 minutes.

Many of us have allergies – and many are those from foods that never affected us before. So how much of what is put into or onto these ‘healthy’ foods is actually toxic to us in the long run? It’s not that many years ago that such things were not in practise – so who is toting up the longterm health costs? Smoking lobbyists would have us believe that these days, third-hand smoking is the reason one in three of us get cancer. Poppycock. A leading cancer specialist told me that over a third of all 360-plus cancers are caused by what we eat. Now, where are the lobbyists for that? Do I even hear of anyone in the media bringing this terrible statistic up for a look at the daylight? Nope.

I don’t disagree that there is way too much poor nutrutional standards in the food available out there. Every day at our local dairy, which services four schools within walking distance, you will see not only kids, but mothers with the pursestrings come in and buy ready-made packs of chips, softdrink, crackers and cheese (made in China) or pies to start them off on their daily learning curve.

My kids got sent to school with yoghurt, sandwiches and fruit. Simple, yet healthy. Two minutes to make. So what is it with today’s mothers/caregivers? I worked throughout my kids schooling years and some of the hours I worked weren’t pretty. But they always got fed and got fed well.

I’m not going to buy chips or ready-made packs; I have no need for them. But I dislike intensely someone telling me I can’t buy them because Big Brother has decided they are not good for kids to eat. Of course they are not – but pull the parents up by the short and curlies, not the rest of us.