Threshold Raised

The repayment threshold for student loans has been raised to 17,784 per year. This is only $342 a week. Now I pay rent of 119, phone of 5, power about 13, and internet of 10. thats a total of 147 without counting food and/or travel, I think most people would struggle to survive on the amount that the government thinks is a fair wage, and every dollar over that you don't only lose 20%+ to tax, but also 10% to your loan, and then add on if you have a job on secondary tax, that is then 33% + 10% of every dollar earned so for a second job you pay 43% of it to the government, there really is no incentive to get ahead in this country, and these students when they are studying also receive less money than those on the dole, and their parents are mean tested til they are 25.

I don't see any fairness in this!!!!!

Oh and to compare it to Australia, over there the repayment threshold is $37,355 New Zealand. This is ludicrous, no wonder so many students bail and head overseas.

Play to Win

Former Hawke's Bay and Wellington representative Edward "Jim" Newbigin couldn't hide a wry smile this week as debate raged over Brendon McCullum's controversial run out of Sri Lanka's Muttiah Muralitharan.

Jim himself was involved in a similar situation many years ago and believes that it is all part of the game, he thinks that kids need to be taught to play to win. In Australia this is the case, but here in New Zealand it seems that they aren't. I remember when they decided to stop scoring at Primary school sport, now this is ridiculous they should be taught that you play the game to win, and this is the same in life, why bandy around and play at good sportsmen and women when this is necessary and a part of the game, but sport is about the winning and this is exactly what McCullum was doing.

Good on you McCullum, play to win.

Personal Freedom

Ok so NO sugary drinks in school from 2009.
Ok now while on the surface this may seem fine, yeah it cuts back on tooth decay and obesity. Well no how does it do that?? Banning something does not work, look at Prohibition.
And then to top it off you are punishing everyone because the few can not control their diets and exercise.

I am totally against this, how about an education set-up to educate people how to live properly. or start with the parents 90% of the problems we have these days extend from the childs early years and a lack of discipline etc, or bad habits introduced by the parents.

Don't punish the many to help the few.

IRD "Interest Free" Student Loans

Well here is a breaking story for all of you. Did you know that IRD charges us to make our loans interest free...??? Yup you heard it they whack on a certain amount every year as they write off our interest so its not free no matter what they try to say this is Bull, if they are going to call something free doesn't it have to be free according to the Commerce Commission???

LIOT Part IV: Education

Our Education system as it is currently stinks. NCEA has made a joke of everything, no longer do you fail you get a not achieved oh and they don't even appear on your final grade paper so you don't have to worry cause noone will see them in the future anyway. This is pathetiuc and then to top it all off our Tall Poppy syndome has extended into the class room, the top students are being punished, while yes they can get excellence if they got one easy question wrong, like I know I did in my days at school chances are they could fail the whole paper even if they get all the excellence and merit questions right, this is ludicrous and if they can use those ones as credit for lower marks then they lose the excellence that they should've got.

There needs to be a full overhaul of our education system NCEA does not work, and guess what, the one thing they said it would remove would be scaling, well it didn't even fix that they still have to scale marks...and then there are people who can get into university with pass grades in Work studies, Life Studies and "Communications English" what a load of crap. I personally think a drift back to Bursary/School C would be great, but noone would accept that so my idea is to hell with all the New Zealand Exam systems, lets use the Cambridge international exam systems...

Liot Part III: Helen the "Great" teacher

David Farrar has a great post on Learning from Helen and now I suppose also from Winston as his staff have burned all copies of the leaked Brash emails as they were worried about an ongoing police investigation, this is exactly what Helen's staff did when they heard about the painting forgery issue.

Now in Part II I discussed positive role models for our kids, these two are an extremely bad example of this not only did they break the law in the first place, but then they taught out youth that the best thing to do when the cops turn up is to burn the evidence or find some other way to destroy it...

And these are supposed to be the leaders of our country, great work guys.