PONZI IN A COUNCIL DISGUISE

I found myself in conversation on the island with people who had emigrated to New Zealand and granted a residency visa. I remarked that that must have meant dealing with the Department of Immigration, which is a pig, pig, pig. They agreed. And they described the long list of information they had had to provide, and the things they had to do to get their visa, and that one of the latter was that they had to invest $1,000,000 in Auckland Council bonds, for at least five years.

Before the conversation had reached that point I had told them that my rates had multiplied by 10 during the time that inflation had only multiplied by 1.54.

They said they were very pleased with the return they were getting on their million-dollar investment in the Council bonds, and one very pointedly said, 'That explains why your rates have gone up.'

In a Ponzi scheme you invest in an outfit that makes glowing promises but is actually in perpetual debt (as is Auckland Council) but you get a very nice return from money constantly being put in by others. This Immigration/Auckland Council setup looks that very like a Ponzi scheme nicely disguised by some creative re-labelling, and, worse, one enforced by Immigration's wickedness.

Auckland Council's webpages for investments shows that security for investors is indeed provided by rates.

And its glowing blurb makes it look as if the money is being invested profitably--e.g., backed by Auckland's contribution to GDP. That is misleading advertising.

This is a scam, this is corruption, all done in the name of the people by a 'democratic' local government entity and enforced by a government department. So much for New Zealand's claim not to be corrupt...

MANAGERS AND MANGLERS

People are not managers just because they have 'Manager' on their office doors and business-cards. A true manager is someone who knows how to manage. And why.

The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu (sixth century BC) put it well:

'A leader is best when people barely know that he exists, not so good when people obey and acclaim him, worst when they despise him. Fail to honour people, they fail to honour you. But of a good leader, who talks little, when his work is done, his aims fulfilled, they will all say, “We did this ourselves.” '

The worst managers are despised because they mangle, not manage; they are incapable of managing. They are blind to the truth of the situation, they are vain about their views of it, and they are determined to impose their false notions on everyone under them (and those under them heartily wish they were not).

The primary Mangler for the bus service on Waiheke Island, as this blog has pointed out over and over again, is the worse-than-incompetent entity Auckland Transport--the networks division, led by that self-declared 'expert' Colin Homan, who has yet to manifest any expertise on Waiheke.

Compounding the situation, as was mentioned in an early posting on the Waiheke bus shemozzle, is the new head of the Waiheke Bus Company, who is another mangler.

He and Auckland Transport, for example, have waxed lyrical about preventing fatigue amongst their drivers. Which sounds good and laudable; it sounds caring; it sounds safety-conscious. Until you see what they have done.

Waiheke drivers have been banned from working more than forty hours in a week, so their hours and their income have been significantly hit. They were happy to work ten hours in a day, but they were not happy when their hours were cut from fifty-five to forty, because that chopped $200 net out of their week's wage. Nor are they happy when they are rostered to a shift that stops at 22:00 one day then starts the next day at 07:00. That gives them a mere nine hours, minus travelling-time, between shifts--imposed by a mangler who then pretends to care about fatigue and is applauded by worse-than-incompetent AT. Manglers of feather feed on the same carcasses of vanity.

Over on the mainland drivers may work fifty-plus hours, so they can earn far more by staying there and not spending time coming over to work on Waiheke. Then the manglers at AT bleat about the driver-shortage on the island, the shortage created by their manglement. But they cannot see that through the fog of their vanity, stupidity and worse-than-incompetence.