I’m trying my best to be optimistic!

What if we GENUINELY made NZ into the place talent wants to live?

What if we had organisations that were flexible and adaptable enough to support people in finding their own unique pathway into seniority and shaping their own role, rather than narrowing power and compensation and status into a contest of ruthlessness and boys club favours?

We rightly lament the abject mediocrity, deviousness, sexism, entitlement and abusiveness of NZs managerial and political class, but rarely connect this social problem to the ‘brain drain’.

What if we saw young people as future leaders who could do better, instead of driving them to Australia?

Next, the way we talk about young graduates and unemployed youth alike in this country right now is borderline dehumanising. In media and politics, they’re being reduced to expendable economic units, statistics, potential taxpayers. Their hopes and aspirations are irrelevant.

Couple of branching thoughts before I move on.

As long as we continue to view management and leadership as about control and status laddering, rather delivering results and elevating those around us, we will continue to incentivise unsuitable and sometimes downright broken people to cling to power.

If anything comes close to being a monocausal explanation for those disgusting things mentioned at the start of this thread, it’s those two big words demarcating social reality: wealth and power.

And we DEFINITELY cannot have that as the explanation.

As I often talk about, there are too many confounding factors to narrow it down to a single explanation, but people will still try. There’s nothing NZ right wingers and talkback social theorists love more than a monocausal thought-terminating explanation for something that makes them uncomfortable.

The “young men crisis” is excuse-making for the very real mental problems stemming from growing up in atomized car-centric suburbia with no community. Childhoods being stolen by dangerous streets, surveillance and adult control, and a pervasive visual/tactile environment of hypercommodified slop.

The men who refuse to accept this is a systemic problem and who believe there’s no such thing as society are always the first to whine and grievance troll about NZ schools being too female dominated and blame society for presenting men as toxic.

Could go on, just search for name suppression and court cases on any major NZ news site.

We don’t even need to talk about the proverbial pigs rotting from the proverbial head to know that something is wrong here.

The govt press secretary Michael Forbes collecting intrusive photos and secret recordings.

The failson of a prominent NZ family business empire amassing a horrifying collection of child abuse and snuff films.

Who’s writing about class these days, outside of the NZ Journal of Sociology?

I’m sorry, people are defending this?

The assumption companies and industry sectors should be able to self-regulate and individual directors should be able to self-manage conflicts of interest is a big part of NZ’s institutional problems.

McSkimming intervening in employment arrangements was corrupt by definition. The coverup is what they are saying isn’t corruption. The public won’t see it that way though.

I guess Roche will skip over that part as he’s on the line in media because of the Coster vetting process. But the dishonesty issue with Coster and referees is entirely related to the coverup of that.

There’s always huge implicit financial gains in terms of pay packages, board appointments, etc.

That would be the Transparency International CEO Julie Haggie, responding to Brian Roche telling NZME that McSkimming was a bad apple.