Bruce Bisset say a third of all of our food gets wasted. Photo / File
Bruce Bisset say a third of all of our food gets wasted. Photo / File
By chance I intersected with one of our local politicians walking in the park the other day, and without naming names, I'll just say he's a solid Labour man.
I said something about Shane Jones and his "shovel-ready" projects being all about infrastructure instead of change, and his first reactionwas to say, "yes, but we need jobs for the workers".
And I thought, no, that's not what we need. We need a whole different way of working.
We need to change the way the world works so that jobs are a choice, not a chore, and so that whether you work or don't work, you still get supported.
Sure, that sounds crazy at first glance, but look around at all the gewgaws and gadgets and sheer utter crap that we consume, for no good reason. Do we need that stuff, or the jobs that manufacture it?
And if your work isn't actually valued, do you need that job? More to the point, if the job isn't valuable in terms of supporting a sustainable future, does the world need you doing it?
Here's a snapshot: A third of all the food we produce gets wasted, either because it's not bought before it blemishes or passes its use-by date, or as preparation or unsold meal waste. A third.
Yet we have families struggling to put a half-decent meal on the table, locked into a poverty trap where even with two fulltime wages they can't properly care for themselves, and the stresses and strains cause domestic violence and diminished intelligence and disease. And the generational cycle that's been set up seems almost too cast in stone to break.
Bruce Bisset
Instead of keeping those people half-alive on minimum wage, how about uplifting them to be fully alive through not necessarily having to work at all?
This is where the idea of a universal basic income (UBI) comes in.
Crunch the numbers in terms of health and crime and education and social responsibility and any number of other actual measurable impacts, and I'm willing to bet you'll find it would be no more "expensive", and perhaps less so, to pay the poor a UBI than to keep them in the trap they're in now.
Especially when you then add in all the opportunity benefits uplifting the poor gives rise to.
Smarter, healthier, more motivated people. Who are more community-minded, so more likely to be there to offer help to you, their neighbour, when you need it.
Yes, there are plenty of arguments for and against instituting a UBI, and it's certainly not the only step-change we need to make.
But the point is what we most need to invest in is people. As, surely, this pandemic has shown, especially in regards to who is "essential" and who isn't for keeping things ticking over.
Instead, what is the Government doing? Fast-tracking resource consents for big projects, so you (the public) get no say, while Jones runs around telling people to get the Greens out of government so extractive industries can run rampant through the DoC estate.
That's not a "return to normal", that's a return to 19th century abnormal.
Sure, there'll be jobs, but they'll be lousy jobs at minimum wage. It's the poor who make the profits that feed the rich.
If nothing else, what the Covid-19 crisis has underlined is that money is a fiction that can be turned on, or off, at will.
Our "economy" should be measured by the health of the people and their environment. Let's make jobs around that.
Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet. Views expressed are the writer's opinion and not the newspaper's.
