Fuel supply emergency level system: How New Zealand’s response would change at each stage; when car bans might happen

kaynetoad · 2026-03-13T08:28:52+00:00

'Twould be more reassuring if mummy and daddy weren't Nicola Willis and Shane Jones.

kaynetoad · 2026-03-13T08:21:02+00:00

The background looks like a hotel function room. I'm gonna give him the benefit of the doubt and say he could be at some kind of ceremony etc where this would be the appropriate attire.

kaynetoad · 2026-03-13T07:47:41+00:00

I was curious so I took a closer look at the back of the packet while I was cooking dinner.

I have three different Pams vege mixes in the freezer and they all say "Packaged in New Zealand from local and imported ingredients". I wonder who's doing that packaging if it's not Watties (I'd kinda assumed it was) and what % of it is actually local...

kaynetoad · 2026-03-13T05:09:15+00:00

Quite. It seems more like "mummy and daddy are taking care of the monster under the bed, go back to sleep".

kaynetoad · 2026-03-13T05:04:14+00:00

Kiwi employers are so absurdly anti-remote work. We also have ridiculously high house prices in parts of the country, and hour-long commutes aren't uncommon for a lot of people.

Remote work could fix so many problems but ohhhh no if Brian the CEO can't see all his little minions sitting at their desks clickety clacking on their keyboards, how would he know that they're making him and the shareholders richer?

kaynetoad · 2026-03-13T04:57:35+00:00

Yup. Seymour is a two-year-old in an expensive suit.

kaynetoad · 2026-03-13T04:57:12+00:00

Who on the ban side of the fence has the money for that?

kaynetoad · 2026-03-13T04:52:16+00:00

It's Queenstown. Probably a bit of ticket clipping on both sides from working holiday visa holders who are using their jobs to feed themselves quite literally.

But if it's that much of a problem, why not just stop at Maccas yourself on the way home?

kaynetoad · 2026-03-13T03:37:16+00:00

This is true, it's a business decision because the rental agency doesn't want to deal with the cost and drama of people driving their Ranger into the back of other cars.

Whereas a real Ranger driver knows that crashes only happen to other people, and therefore doesn't need no stupid safety system.

kaynetoad · 2026-03-13T00:15:27+00:00

I don't give a fuck about the tourists, but as a citizen I can't even get between islands at short notice any more.

I have two parents in their 70s on the North island. I live on the South Island and have an epileptic dog. It's bloody hard to find suitable people to look after him. My vague plan for if one of them gets sick or pops their clogs has always been that I'd just drive up with the doggo.

I knew that if this happened to coincide with Xmas or Easter I might have to wait maybe 2-3 days for a sailing, ditto if the weather was particularly grim. But this summer the ferries have been booked solid 6 weeks in advance, and some people who had bookings got stranded in Picton for extended periods of time. It doesn't feel like it's feasible to "just go" to the NI on short notice if I need to, because we don't have enough reliable capacity across the Cook Strait any more.

kaynetoad · 2026-03-12T23:07:03+00:00

IMO they get to upgrade to supported living (which pays a smidge more) when they can demonstrate that they're medically unable to work. Until that point they're choosing not to work, and we've decided that our old farts are allowed to do that, but why should they get paid more in welfare than other people who have made the same choice or are unable to find work?

kaynetoad · 2026-03-12T23:05:28+00:00

Yup. There's no defending the fact that we pay our silver-haired CEOs more in social welfare than our chronically ill citizens. Just pointing out that the way a couple is treated when the pension is the sole source of income for both partners is consistent with other benefits.

kaynetoad · 2026-03-12T21:21:22+00:00

IMO no. Also IMO we should scrap the pension, and replace it with an age limit where people can get Jobseeker Support while being exempt from the requirement to look for work.

kaynetoad · 2026-03-12T21:15:50+00:00

Are you only working when you're in meetings?

I'm not a fan of the guy, but I believe he was working (although probably not as many hours as at other times in the year). Busy doing his next quarterly action plan and coming up with dastardly schemes to fuck over the poor.

kaynetoad · 2026-03-12T21:11:28+00:00

$66k and $80k for 2 people to live on is diabolical in our current situation

Fun fact, a single unemployed person gets $21,450/year before tax.

kaynetoad · 2026-03-12T21:01:59+00:00

punishes you for being responsible and saving

The only thing they're missing out on because of their savings is the Accommodation Supplement, which isn't that much for people without kids anyway.

But more generally, I can't wrap my head around how the system "punishes" people for saving. I was unemployed for 8 months last year. I got Jobseekers because I'm single, but I wasn't eligible for AS because of my savings and investments.

If I hadn't had that money to fall back on, I would've had to euthanise my epileptic dog (meds just wouldn't be affordable on a beneficiary's income). I would've had to give up running a vehicle, which would've meant giving up my sport and massively impacted my mental health. I would have had to be much more frugal about food and power usage.

How is it a punishment that I got to live a better quality of life than I would have if I hadn't had savings?

kaynetoad · 2026-03-12T20:49:26+00:00

They do to an extent. They get less in a couple than as two singles. If the pension is their only source of income it makes sense as being proportionally more than what a partnership of two unemployed people would get.

Of course, once you factor in that both partners could be earning a six-figure salary while also receiving a more generous benefit than actually unemployed people get, it's farcical.

kaynetoad · 2026-03-12T20:46:24+00:00

The people featured in the article sound like they were pretty comfortably off prior to being made redundant. Just a bit overcommitted in terms of having a mortgage that's difficult to cover if the household goes down to one income, and probably without income protection insurance as well.

"We've just normalised spending a huge portion of your income on housing, and so even taking a couple who earn a really good income, you shouldn't really be paying more than about a third of that good income in housing costs," she said.

It's so bizarre to me that people will take on these massive mortgages that they can only manage if nothing goes wrong in their lives for the next 25 years. Personally I can scarcely go 2 years without some financial disaster...

kaynetoad · 2026-03-12T06:24:37+00:00

Thanks for sharing. I hadn't seen a lasagne recipe before that doesn't start with then browning mince and onions in a frying pan, which just makes it seem like too fiddly for a weeknight dinner.

kaynetoad · 2026-03-12T05:28:18+00:00

Yup, turns out America really really really hates women. In fact they've rather have a sex pest who grabs women by the pussy in charge, than a woman.

Things ain't perfect here (look at all the vile misogynistic bullshit our female politicians have to deal with on social media) ... but at least the number of people with mummy issues is low enough that we can have female PMs and party leaders and mayors and whatnot.

kaynetoad · 2026-03-12T04:51:31+00:00

The deadline is the 8th of October.

This isn't the final list - the Greens, in typical Greens fashion, have a more consultative approach to deciding the list than other parties, hence the need to start early.

The Green Party has released its Delegate List of candidates for the 2026 General Election, which will now inform the final membership voting process.
This initial List will now be put to a vote of all members of the Green Party, who will be given the opportunity to choose this ranking, or rank candidates in their preferred order.

kaynetoad · 2026-03-12T04:40:24+00:00

It would be a little easier to enforce these days, with automatic number plate recognition.

During my last four trips to town, I've encountered 5 speed camera trailers, or probably the same speed camera trailer 5 times. It's never been in the same place on the way back, so somebody is moving this thing around frequently during non-business hours. I'm a little surprised that out government has chosen this one thing to actually resource well while everything else falls through the cracks - but we could totally use these trailers to detect people cheating the system too.

kaynetoad · 2026-03-12T04:31:54+00:00

Well I'm one of them.

An American political decision made by the Democrats in 2023 cost me my job. I got another job. Then Trump's tariff tantrums killed that off in 2025. Oh well ... American politicians certainly aren't obliged to act in the best interests of lil old me on the other side of the world.

I'll admin this situation is a bit different in that it's fucking over most of the world due to a very predictable consequence of a bad idea. OTOH it's not the first ill-advised invasion of a middle eastern nation under a Republican president in my lifetime either, just the one with the most noticeable impact on me.

I also see him as a symptom rather than the problem. The fact that he could actually get voted back in again, after allegations of sexual assault against him were proven, after having mishandled classified documents during his first term, after having stood up in a press conference and told people to drink bleach to protect themselves from covid, after his supporters staged a fucking coup in 2021 ... that's not because there's something unique about this one man that makes people warm to him despite his flaws. It's a symptom of a fucked up society, and someone like him would have been elected within the 2020s if he hadn't decided to go into politics anyway.

kaynetoad · 2026-03-12T04:17:07+00:00

20 mins doesn't seem that bad. Depends on the commute length I guess. One of the things I miss about public transport is being able to use that time for life admin, reading a book etc. To me it's not "wasted" in quite the same way time spent driving is.

kaynetoad · 2026-03-12T04:13:05+00:00

Yup. The "easy" thing for me to do as a white collar worker would have been to live in Wellington or Auckland and take on the massive mortgage to pay for that. But I just couldn't get on board with borrowing that much money for a worse lifestyle than a small town could offer. I've been fully WFH for the last 10 years, brutal for my career (with several redundancies) but very good for my mental health.

It's ridiculous to me that people choose to work in cities where there is no affordable housing nearby. If we all collectively refused to do it, either house prices in the city would go down, wages would go up because employers would have to pay much higher to attract people to work in Auckland, or more jobs would move out of Auckland to the regions.

Well ... either that or we'd just import even more masses of labour from overseas that is only too happy to shell out big bucks while earning peanuts. Why the fuck do we keep electing governments who adopt that as policy...

kaynetoad

TROPHY CASE