Again a full day including a meeting with a member of the House of Lords who should be on the stage!
A second meeting with officials in the Consumer Affairs area prior to the commencement of official proceedings was very helpful. A White Paper covering a whole range of issues will be released in the next week. There is a high level of understanding that in tough economic times consumer protection becomes even more important. Possible changes include establishment of a Consumer Advocate role and the possibility of taking class actions on consumer issues. There are a range of avenues for consumers to seek assistance, possbily too fragmented. Consumer rights are often enforced at the Local Government level – not the way I think we would want to go. Despite this there seems to be more concrete support for consumer rights.
A visit to the Olympic coordinating office was interesting and the useful learning for me was around how deliberately the legacy aspects of the Olympics are being pursued. A specific example is the deliberate use of such a large, substantially publicly funded project in upskilling local workers particularly from the 5 surrounding Boroughs which are among the most deprived in London. We should do such things with publicly funded projects in NZ – how about the Rugby World Cup! Sadly of course the skills areas is one of the most ignored by our Government with no new initiatives in this area in the recent Budget depite the benefits for individuals, communities and our economy.
There is unsuprisingly some emphasis on reform and modernisation of the political process here. One particular area is how to encourage greater engagement of people in the political process . One idea that was mentioned yesterday which I am interested to hear more about is citizens initiated debates. Also our briefing papers show some clear work in the area of young people and politics. So today I will seek to find out more for tomorrows report.
