Photo/Hone Whetstone

Message from Lowell Manning
 

Tēnā koutou,

Much has happened since our last newsletter so it’s a good time to do a round-up of our recent efforts.

Overall, there is a lot of interest in  basic income once people get to hear about it, and though the media is covering basic income from time to time we still have a way to go to reach critical mass where the media come to us rather than the other way around. Raf Manji’s National Radio with Jesse Mulligan on 14th November was valuable publicity especially as the interview was repeated.

Roadshow: We completed several weeks with the roadshow in September starting in and around Rotorua and finishing in Auckland. We spoke individually to about 2000 people, attended a lot of meetings and met a lot of people who want to help out, including young people. In addition we’ve made contacts at some of the Universities. We’ve used about half our first pamphlet printing. Our Auckland team was Te Rangikaheke Kiripatea, Malcolm Holt, Iain Middleton and myself with help and support from others. Our Rotorua team was Melissa Selwyn, Mark, Iain, Te Rangikaheke and myself also with help and support from others. We visited several schools to speak to senior students and posted stories and reports from the roadshow on out Facebook page and website.

Thank you to all those who contributed financially towards the roadshow. We can’t make those substantial commitments without support.

While in Auckland we had a lengthy discussion with Susan St John from the Child Poverty Action Group to check out common ground. CPAG supports basic income in principle but there are some differences in focus insofar as CPAG is concentrating on reducing child poverty. Susan St John prefers an extension of tax credits to the Kids’ basic income we launched in Auckland, which would go to all children under 18. That’s because our primary BINZ objective is to promote basic income rather than extend the  current social support structures.

BINZ Activity Since Roadshow: Since the roadshow we have also spoken to a group of honours students at Victoria University and to several senior opposition politicians. We are welcoming a new interim committee member, Riceman Wee to represent the South Island members especially those in Dunedin and we have Malcolm Holt as our liaison in Auckland. Meanwhile, Karl Matthys (karl@waspnet.co.nz) continues to do great work with our Facebook page and Michael Kane (michaelpetrekane@gmail.com) has got a twitter account going.

At the organisational level, we made quite a few decisions at the Committee Meeting in Wellington on 16th October. One of those was to start work on revising the website including a Te Reo Māori translation of ‘Basic Income New Zealand’. Te Taura Whiri i te reo Māori kaumatua, rangatira, koroua Wiremu Kaa (of Ngati Porou) provides the translation for us. Wiremu Kaa is a respected Māori elder and leader. Prior to his retirement about 20 years ago, Wiremu worked all of his adult life in education. It is an honour for BINZ to have such a person translate our name and an even bigger honour as Te Taura Whiri i te reo Māori (The Māori Language Commission) as ngā kaitiaki of Te Reo Māori have national authority to designate Māori names. BINZ owes Te Rangikaheke Kiripatea a lot of credit for organising this and helping make BINZ a project for Aotearoa New Zealand. We will announce the name after our meeting in January.

We have also reduced the membership fee nominally to 10 cents (we have to have a membership fee of some sort), so in practice that probably means a gold coin for a membership plus donation (we have nominally put ‘gold coin’ donation on the website). Everyone who paid a membership last year is covered for this year. We’ll let you know when your membership comes up again. A donation each year will automatically include ongoing membership.

The committee has discussed a more extended branding exercise for BINZ with Tom Brian’s help. Tom helped design the pamphlets and has already developed some fantastic logo concepts. We’ll send more information on that as we get further on with it. I’m also working on a development plan for the coming year(s) looking at how we train speakers, build a research unit and a media unit as well as developing a funding proposal among other things.

BINZ Handbook: We have refined and simplified the draft BINZ introductory handbook. That has gone out for external comment. We will post it on the website as soon as the edit is finished.  The handbook is a general introduction to basic income but it also makes two important arguements. The first is that  basic income is fiscally neutral (relative to existing redistributive mechanisms). The second argument is that basic income should be introduced in stages in order to ensure its successful implementation.

The handbook includes an illustrative example of a full basic income package based on $10/person/week (to bed-in the basic income administration) + a full fiscally neutral basic income + an extra Kids’ basic income of $30/week needings total funding of only $4.2 billion/year.  That’s enough to relieve a lot of (but not all) child poverty and would provide a basic income to a family of 2 adults and 2 children of $37440/year. It is a step-by-step solution to implementing an effective redistributive basic income in New Zealand.

It also shows that we could implement a full and redistributive basic income by simply distributing the Government’s proposed tax cuts a bit differently! World-wide debate of basic income has been distorted by looking at the cost in gross terms, when it should be looked at in net terms. I’m hoping to present a paper about this at next year’s BIEN congress in Portugal.

Our next meeting will be a two-day meeting in Wellington on 28th and 29th January. All members are more than welcome to come.

The next newsletter will be in early February after the January meeting. There should be a monthly newsletter after that. In the mean time we are having a little informal get-together at Gaylene and Iain Middleton's in Tawa on the 11th of December. Give Gaylene a call on 021 155 7084 if you'd like to join us.

I wish you the best for Christmas and the new year.

Nāku iti noa, nā

Lowell Manning
BINZ President