If someone repairs your house for dole payments? Skilled tradesmen are being robbed of their service model and by often untrained rank amateurs, who spend twice as long doing half the work, that often needs redoing? What the unskilled untrained unemployed could be doing is intensive under glass market gardening that produces often otherwise extremely expensive nutrition. I've just had my gutters replaced by skilled trades I paid for out of my pension and via a modest personal loan. And as such available to any pensioner! Under glass (polycarb) intensive cultivation needs only recycled water as taped underground irrigation to support any continuous above ground vegetable (salad vegetables) or fruit (berry) production. And a better investment of taxpayer generosity! That then keeps on giving for years! And only needs several trained bookkeepers to keep each other and the books honest! Least one or two welds too much economic power, nepotism and favouritism inside a non-monitored non-mentored community? Alan B.

Sorry Big Nana, but as a tax payer I strongly object to paying useless bludgers to pick p their own litter, fix the window in their free house, that they broke last week, or repair the hole they punched in the wall last month in a drunken temper.

I even more strongly object to paying for materials, & for the labour involved in making artefacts, that those paid to make them, will then sell for a profit. All bleeding heart stuff.

Time to say, do this stuff, or be kicked out of the village, with no welfare.

Using cliches like “zero-sum game” doesn't change the fact that nobody should be getting paid money for doing nothing; and the idea that those working for the dole would be doing the jobs of qualified tradesmen is absurd.

Hi Joe. A travelling library could also function as a touring tafe, landing here or there for a few weeks/months to set up a local branch that could then be supported by something like the old school of the air, only with video and computer links etc. And the education could be two way, with traditional medicine and language being exchanged for 21st century upskilling? All of which could be digitized and shared for centuries with any who are interested or involved in survival training etc. One imagines the travelling library/touring tafe, would also be digitized and computerized and stay within a particular circuit? Cheers, Alan B.

Hi Joe, grew up on a soldier settlement dairy farm and note the seven days a week twice daily milking routine isn't for everyone! Particularly when it interferes or prevents drinking time! Metres deep topsoil is something many of today's farmers can only dream about. However, under glass production, as practised by the Israelis has a lot to recommend it as is cultivation that can even be accomplished in arid desert regions, or with salt water, i.e., bananas coconuts. And there are a number of food-producing natives that are salt drought and frost tolerant. like some wattles that produce a high protein flour from copious seed. Or native wisteria that produces both biodiesel and high protein meal. Harvesting the wattle seed similar to the macadamia. Shaken but not stirred. Cheers, Alan B.

Hi Alan,

Yes, indeed, those projects could work. Just add them to the pile of unutilised suggestions in with the others :)

Actually, my last paying job was in a new dairy on my wife's community. Her brother was the dairy manager, very hard-working and dedicated, a former teacher. Me and him, two middle-aged graduates, getting up at 4.30 while the young blokes in the village caught up on their beauty sleep. As the local saying went: eyes shut, arse open.

That community, with 12,000 acres, good soil, but with small patches of salt lakes, payment-free, rates-free, and unlimited water licence, all there equipment it would ever need, AND blokes paid to do two days of work each week (seven blokes = equivalent cost of two blokes full-time) - what other expenses were actually paid for ? Electricity, insemination, some feed, etc., nothing major, and the dairy turned over $ 1.5 million p.a. My rongi had a bad accident and couldn't work the dairy, so the council closed it, after four years of operations. Self-determination.

But thanks for that GREAT IDEA !

Cheers,

Joe