Introduction

I plan to use this blog to comment on issues affecting not just kiwis but people around the world, so here goes for my first blog.

I didn't vote in the general election. In the back of my mind I knew National would get in. I've never met John Key and personally, I'm not sure I want to.

There was an item about some shares he had which implied a conflict of interes, at least, according to the story. As a journalist myself, I view these things with a certain sort of cynicism. I'd like to hear the real story, not just in the context of the news. Anyway, I doubt whether our new PM will knock on my door and say, here's the real story.

We journalists tend to get a bad reputation when it comes to politics. At worst, we can be accused of sensationalising and mud-slinging. Some journalists do tend to look that way, but to me, being a journalist is about trying to tell the story as honestly as I can.

I have to say that if I had voted, I would have stayed with Labour. Don't get me wrong. Labour has had its problems in the last few months, but again, I have to be the sceptic here and think - what was really going on behind the scenes? How much of what was said was mud-slinging and how much was the real truth?

Anyway, one of my personal issues in the political arena was the Student Loan Scheme. The whole thing is a bit of a con if you ask me. And I should know. I ended up thousands of dollars in debt because even after I earned my degree, and this was more than 10 years ago, I was never earning enough to be able to pay the interest, let alone the principal. Yes, it is a personal bugbear with me. But I do wonder how many others like myself end up in the same situation, where our degrees still earn us less than we're worth. Having incentives like the interest write-off and a repayment bonus are all very well, but when you had no choice but to borrow in the early years of the scheme if you wanted to go to university, those things are too little, too late.

I also take issue with many of the financial problems of today. It is no good blaming one person, or one party for the country's financial woes when it is an international problem. We are in a recession - wake up people!

Here's my suggestion for this new government which is in its infancy - and something I would like to quote from a more famous writer than myself - I believe it was Hemingway, who was paraphrasing from another famous person - "those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed forever to repeat it". The world fell into the Great Depression and millions of people ended up without jobs, and homeless because of one simple thing - credit! If I learned one thing from my years of study, it's that we are repeating the same sociological patterns of the intervening years between the two world wars. This needs to be rectified before we all suffer the consequences. We have become a throw away society where nothing lasts as it used to and it has become too easy to borrow money. We're all losing because of it. I'm no financial whiz, and I don't have the answers. But I do see the problem and we all need to take some responsibility for it.

This is my comment for now.