As The Daily Blog has been pointing out well before it suddenly became an issue on TV, there is a deep divide between those who have and those who have not and that divide is generational.
Let’s spell it out – a user pays culture based on 30 years of neoliberalism has replaced the cradle to the grave universalism the boomers grew up in. I don’t begrudge any boomer enjoying the fruits of that universalism, I am merely demanding that universalism is extended TO ALL GENERATIONS!!!!
Gen Xers and Y pay for their own education, leave with massive debt, flee overseas to pay that debt off, try to save for a deposit in a property market bloated because of boomer investments and overseas speculators and now we are also told we need to save for our own retirement.
We need renters rights, we need the same state housing support, we need free education, we need an allowance to live on during that education, we need free public transport – just like the boomers get with their precious gold card and we need a Capital Gains Tax to help fund these things.
Boomers demand cradle to the grave and have benefited from universal state subsidisation of their entire life, they now want to pull that ladder up and because they are such a vast voting block they get to skew the political landscape totally for their benefit.
Challenging this privilege and politically vested interests generates fury from boomers – that fury highlights the near impossibility of change. Gen Xers and Gen Y will need to TAKE power from boomers, because boomers will not share it.
There were 864,100 New Zealanders aged over 60 in September last year and 87 per cent of those voted in the election.
There were 743,200 aged 18-29 who could have voted in the election and who will have to pay the taxes to cover the $100b in pensions by 2060, yet only 49 per cent voted.
…Gen X and Gen Y need their own political movement because the current monoliths won’t do anything to frighten that older generation. Hence Key’s refusal to discuss superannuation and Little’s review of the capital Gains Tax.
It won’t be until Gen X and Y organise that these politically vested interests won’t be challenged.
What was JK saying about Winston’s old supporters??
Eventually they die…
Martyn, we have Muldoon to thank for the mess that the younger generation face.
If it weren’t for his mad decision in 1975 to abolished the compulsory New Zealand Superannuation Scheme which was initiated by the previous Labour Government.
It was abolished on the 15th Dec 1975 and now would be worth more than $250 billion dollars.
Currently our national debt is $92.2 billion so you can see how much wealthier the NZ economy would have been without Muldoon,s interference.
It was economic sabotage.
But the National party do not learn, now it is Kiwisaver that is played with, to all contributors disadvantage.
The National Party always sabotages the economy so as to prop up the rich.
Fair taxation is required.
A Financial Transaction Tax (FTT) would be like GST for the financial sector.
In NZ financial services do not currently incur GST. FTTs collected via the electronic bank settlement process would be impossible to avoid.
NZ currency is the 11th most traded and accounts for 1.5% of all volume, which was most recently $3.98 trillion.
A rate as low as 0.5% on 1.5% of $3.98 trillion would resolve the seemingly insurmountable problems – without the need for income tax.
“In 2008, prior to the global financial crisis, world trade in various financial commodities was 74 times higher than global GDP.
Daily turnover for global currency trade as of April 2010 was $4 trillion ($1,460 trillion a year). This speculative activity is destabilising the world economy and creating speculative bubbles that ultimately hurt grassroots people.” – The New Economics Party
Cause and effect !
Nearly 1 million Kiwis didn’t vote in September 2014, and I can relate to that perfectly. What frigging party do you vote for? Because the 2 major parties are but different shades of the same corporate business party. No other parties seem to have the savvy and political gumption to rally all Kiwis and articulate what it is like to be the citizens of a country where we practice civilised politics, take care of EVERY ONE by paying our fair share of the taxes, put people ahead of rapacious business and corporations. Iceland and Greece are showing the way how it can be done. Would the next Michael Joseph Savage please step up to the plate for the sake of the nation?
No.
The alternative parties have been there all along, Alliance, Green, Mana, New Labour etc.
The sheeple have simply refused to vote for them.
Too lazy, too apathetic, too preoccupied with: mind numbing trivia ( lotto, casinos, reality TV, cheap consumer and DIY products from China; fear of the known (beneficiaries, working poor) and unknown (immigrants, terrorists under the bed); lack of quality public discourse; and now even lack of quality information with the remaining rump of information sources being in general, disgracefully biased.
The right wing have total carte blanc to do as they please and every year it’s getting easier for them .
Absolutely Spot On..
Finding that person seems to be the hard part as it seems these days all aspiring Politicians think about is what is in it for themselves.
The days of the likes of Fraser or Kirk seem long gone.
And no point looking to National to come up with that person, it is not in their DNA.
Snarl! Statistics and damn’ generalisations.
But also true…
I am a baby boomer, formerly working until my health stopped that one and have existed ever since on the government’s generous support for those unable to work. I don’t have savings (or a property) because of a divorce at the time this all happened. So I’m facing trying to live off $250.00 per week in ChCh after next year.
I’m not asking for sympathy but I do wish you’d stop generalising (and yes, I generalise all the time).
Yes there are baby boomers who have saved and invested and developed property interests as well as business people but not all baby boomers are like that.
One size does not fit all in the expression “baby boomer”.
Aside from that your blog is bang on Martyn.
The problem is not the baby boomers, or gen x or y, the unemployed, the beneficiary women churning out offspring like sausage machines, legless and armless beneficiaries avoiding work, nasty little children wanting more stuff (remember John Campbell saying “It’s not their fault they’re hungry”), muslims, protestants, jews, roman catholics, buddhists, shamanists, new age hippies, or any other category your prejudice can dream up.
The problem is this creepy blue-grey fog that has always hung over NZ; its endemic conservatism. Look to your history; grabbing land over indigenous rights, banning the use of that indigenous language, sending your kids to fight overseas wars, that disgraceful episode in 1951 of totalitarian government, the backwardness of NZ education, the lack of unified social policy (“Aaargh! Communists!”) and the speed and greedy hunger with which brain-fart neo-liberalism was embraced.
Oh yeah and add the complete fucking indifference of the masses to creeping totalitarianism, corrupt police, an ineffective judiciary and a dear leader who is a straight out liar.
Which brings me to your last point Martyn.
Action.
If talking and protesting with the road block doesn’t work then the populace is fully justified in rising up with violent action. If you deny that then you deny the French Revolution, The American Colonists Revolution, the Russian Revolution as well as a truckload of revolutions courtesy of Arab Spring.
There is a time when talking stops.
There is also a time when conservative ho-hum is no longer useful.
Now where can I find gunpowder for my flintlock…
J S BARK – stand up , take a bow and listen to the standing ovation.
Absolutely correct.
Absolutely succinct.
And absolutely telling it how it is.
Cheers.
We cannot stop property speculation – the main contributor to growing inequality in New Zealand. If it wasn’t for property speculation, we all would have lived a completely different life. There is a way to give young families a chance to succeed in life and own their own home, but it requires significant investment in New Zealand’s regions, where housing is still affordable, to give these people jobs. Housing crisis only affects major urban centres, primarily Auckland and as we say it’s not made of rubber, it cannot accept both internal and external migration and this points to one thing that stops people from getting where they want to be – lack of political will to invest in the rest of the country or lack of incentives for private investors.
We need to look at a bigger picture here. The point of the new right revolution was to suck money out of the middle and working class for the benefit of the investor class and we all know the result: A young couple can no longer raise a family and pay off a mortgage on a single income, and living on the pension, while still possible, isn’t what it used to be either. Don’t forget the private pension schemes of the 90s turned out to be something of a con as well.
Most of the people I know who have gotten into speculative property action have done so because they could see that they would need to do something different if they wanted financial security when they were old. While greed is part of the story it’s also true that a lot of people are reacting to the world they find themselves in – a world created by the investor class to benefit itself.
I’ve told my parents that the wealth they have built up over their lives needs to be preserved because it will probably be the only means by which their grand children will ever own their own home.
Appealing to Baby Boomer’s desire to care for their grandchildren is a much better way of bringing this issue to their attention than threatening them with an inter-generational war. Even though they appear to be benefiting from the current mess they’re not the ones who created it.
For their part I’ve also told my kids that getting a university education and associated debt is probably a bad idea too. I’d rather they developed entrepreneurial skills, or at least the ability to be flexible and couple that with the skills to grow their own food.
Clearly the aspirational lifestyle is not going to be an option for them either 🙂
Wasn’t that what the Internet party was supposed to do? Be a voice for the young. That 51% of 18-29 year olds didn’t vote, is pretty damning – has pop-culture become the Mogadon of the masses. Why are there very few protest movements coming from the universities? Is it all just apathy? Is it only the children of the rich who go to uni and vote these days?
“Is it only the children of the rich who go to uni and vote these days?”
Kind of. The universities were a major source of anti-neoliberal resistance in the 90s (remember the ’96 registry occupation at Auckland Bomber?), so the powers-that-be have put all sorts of mechanisms in place to make sure that students are either too privileged, too exhausted (studying and working), or too beaten down (studying, broke, underfed and cold) to be involved in public activism.
That’s not to say that people under 30 aren’t interested in politics. Many of the people in that age group I talk to just agree with the anarchists (and Russell Brand 😉 that whoever you vote for the government wins, and that any energy put into political activity would be better spent on new, more radical (dare I say revolutionary?) forms of deep democracy.
The key question, and the one that keeps me up at night of late, is how to move beyond just *talking* about the potential for deep democracy, workplace democracy etc and get broad agreement on some specific implementations to start working on. Also, how to defend any deep democracy platform from sabotage or suppression by the elite interests it potentially threatens.
I have more in common with my father, grandfather and son than I have with most of the wealthy of my own generation. I am the only one of the peer group I grew up in to have a degree, and only knew two people who did an OE. To attack another generation is not just to miss the point, it is also to be played for a fool by the toffs. It is their wealth cornering which is to blame for the inequality in our society.
And as to the right wing idea that there is not enough money to pay the pension so it must be means tested/reduced/age raised, how did our country afford to educate and deal with health issues of the “boomers” in the first 16 years of their life when they were “just a drain on the economy”? It’s not about the cost it’s about the flow of money.
“To attack another generation is not just to miss the point, it is also to be played for a fool by the toffs”
Exactly.
That’s what I was trying to say above but you summed it up perfectly.
Yes, the Boomer politicians who have voted for policies of “pulling up the ladder behind them” are disgusting traitors. But they have consistently done this against the wishes of the majority of Boomers, who would have preferred retiring in a scandanavian-style social democracy to a US-style corporate dictatorship. As I mentioned last time you took a cheap shot at the retiring generation Bomber, the real issue here is the class gap, not the generation gap.
Most of the upper working class and lower middle class Boomers I know (my parents and in-laws included) have adult children living at home, or are using the equity in their own homes to help their children buy a home. The children, those of my generation and younger, never get to become economically independent, and it seems to me that it is precisely this lack of the promised economic autonomy that creates the resentment against the Boomers. Yet the fact that our Boomer parents never get to stop subsidizing us, and that this dependence eats up the wealth we could otherwise inherit as a freehold family home, doesn’t really benefit them any more than it benefits us. The gen x and y children of the wealthy however, do just fine under neo-liberalism, for reasons Thomas Picketty (amongst others) have explained.
You’re assuming that university is a way out; at least that’s the carrot that’s being dangled; but remember, the once independent universities are now part and parcel of the neo-liberal dream (or at least one of its tools of control).
A degree from an NZ university is quite literally not worth the paper it’s written on!
I wish I could just walk into a job like the baby boomers could, and be able to walk into another one if I wanted to leave.
I would give up all my mod-cons to be able to do that.
they gave up their mod cons to do that.!? They didn’t have any,nor a bunch of foreign rich nicking the skim of everything either…and by and large the graft was hard.Greedy bastards dominated bank ,finance systems then,as now…its just the numbers that have changed and the british imperialism has changed to American imperialism under a capitalist shroud. Ignorance levels have changed however,as have moral and family values. We have morphed into a country of ill informed ,socially dysfunctional ,consumer led and divided easily led and deceived morons who obviously cannot tell the difference between morally corrupt wankers ,greedy selfish lying bastards,and sociopathic pricks…..because its exactly those types of people that we elect into positions of power and prove the point. If baby boomers had it so good,its because they were represented by those who made it so. And despite our massively increased dollar export income productivity,our country obviously has elected larger and bigger bastards to ruin it. So rather than blaming baby boomers for a problem caused by those running us into the ground after the fact,perhaps we could actually start looking at who actually is responsible for it right now and work our way backwards. ie ..get the bankrobber who robbed the bank today,then when hes been nutted,go back and look at historical robberies. Keys puppetmasters are raping today…deal with that ! then get on with hanging the neoliberalist pricks through history perhaps.
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