In 1989 I was filming a documentary about Peter Blake and his family during the Whitbread around the World Yacht Race. One of the ports of call was Fort Lauderdale in the USA and when I went to the car hire rental depot I was struck by the fact that the people washing the cars and doing the manual labour on the site were all senior citizens.
Now curiosity is in my DNA (at least that’s my excuse for being a documentary maker) so I asked the guy doing the paperwork on our rental vehicle…
“ I can’t help but notice that a lot of your crew are quite old”
“Yep” came the reply “ we’re mostly in our 70’s.The oldest just turned 80 last week”
“Why’s that?”
“You don’t work you don’t eat. You don’t work you don’t have a roof over your head”.
In short these people were cleaning cars because either they had no pension or one that was inadequate to pay their bills.
Back then it seemed so different from anything from what was accepted in New Zealand , the land of social security and pensions at that time.
Yesterday I went to the garage fill up the car. The forecourt attendant was a man who would have had to have been in his late 60’s. The woman cashier looked to me as if she was also late 60’s, she was rocking from side to side and her face clearly showed she was pain.
She was polite but spoke in a tone that told me she didn’t really want to be standing behind a till asking me if I wanted to buy a coffee with my purchase.
“Are you OK?” I asked
She winced.
“Oh it’s my knee. I can’t walk very well and standing all day is painful. I have to have it replaced but that’s not going to happen anytime soon. ”
How have we become like America in 1989 where the aged and unwell have to work to pay the bills?
The answer isn’t simple but a lot of it has to do with the fact that five years before I filmed in Fort Lauderdale the Labour Government of the day embraced Neoliberal Economics as the theory that would drive our economic decision making.
In a nutshell it is the idea that the State should not be in business and should not own anything . That stimulating private enterprises will create jobs and wealth will trickle down to the poor.
It hasn’t worked. The rich get rich by holding on to their wealthy not releasing it. Corporations work to deliver profits to their shareholders not the general population .
Neoliberalism has benefitted the few – such as those who have been able to buy up land and housing and profit from sitting on their assets – not the many.
I’ve been very disappointed in many aspects of the current government’s previous budgets because they have shown a reluctance to pull all the available levers open to them to close the ever widening gap between the rich and the poor in our country. (By and large, for example,they rejected the recommendations of their own Tax Working Group).
My hope is that in the upcoming budget we will see some evidence the cabinet has asked themselves the question “What is the purpose of our economy?”
Is it so that a few people can get extremely wealthy at the expense of the many? Or that it should produce the greatest good, for the largest number of people, over the longest time?
Bryan Bruce is one of NZs most respected documentary makers and public intellectuals who has tirelessly exposed NZs neoliberal economic settings as the main cause for social issues.
“I’ve been very disappointed in many aspects of the current government’s previous budgets because they have shown a reluctance to pull all the available levers open to them to close the ever widening gap between the rich and the poor in our country.” AND a reluctance to pull all the available levers open to them to reduce or wipe out exploitation in all its forms. AND a failure to recognise the senior ranks in our public service are not only interested in preserving the status quo, but are the biggest handbrake on transformation and kindness. AND the preoccupation with marketing and massaging the message (aka bullshitting) instead of doing stuff and things – which as you say, they have all the levers at their disposal
And its for those reasons I can’t party vote Labour after a lifetime – even if it means tolerating woke Greens.
I suspect there are a few others thinking likewise. 2023 will be interesting
Yep, I’m done with Labour. Given a mandate & they do nothing substantive. Not enough votes? …”we can’t do it, we don’t hav a strong enough mandate!” Get a clear majority & it’s …”we cant do too much, we don’t want to startle the horses. All things to all people ends up being nothing to no one.
They’re pushing cultural leftism but basically still wedded to economic neo-liberal rightism. In the political compass I was 83% TOP, 82% Green, only 78% Green & even NZ First got 68% support from me coz though somewhat culturally right/conservative they seem to be a bit more economically left than given credit for. We need Left Nationalism, Self-Sufficiency efforts. I’ve always split vote Labour Greens but now I’ll go with splitting between Greens & either NZFirst or TOP but really I wish there was a Libertarian Socialist Party here.
What idealist trash you write. The state has no wealth- it only has the collective tax take of all the tax payers. If you have more tax takers than tax payers your society will fail. NZ was broke in early 1980s so it had to change.
Well that depends of course on levels of taxation not numbers of people being taxed. And since the 80s, the taxation arrangements have meant a few have ended up with the mostest of stuff and things (usually useless stuff and things they usually only have to feed their egos and what they perceive as their status) while the rest struggle.
It won’t end well. Humans, like viruses and most forms of life have this inbuilt instinct to want to survive – a bit bloody inconvenient if you happen to be at the top table with all the treats and trinkets (like flat screen TVs in the karzi) with all those plebs after a piece of the action.
Well yes it does, even if that wealth is gathered in taxation. It is the duty of the state to use that wealth for the common good of the majority. Also the state/crown is ultimately the sovereign owner of all land, minerals, coal, fish in it’s sea-limits etc. Freehold is not absolute in itself it is a grant to a citizen to ‘freely’ hold that parcel of land, ie not encumbered by required mandatory military service/or supply of others to fight on behalf of that ‘owner’. The state can gather wealth from it’s resources & the allowing of citizens/companies to farm, mine, fish etc. Taxation is the price paid for those exploitation rights. There is no sane reason on Earth that Govs can’t cut out middleman parasites of usurous bankers by ‘printing’ own money thus no need to borrow or tax incomes. There is no sane reason on Earth that states can’t themselves engage in capitalist endeavours, own shares, invest, and/or mandate that every company that wants to trade within a state’s borders be owned partially by the state. Gov can receive dividends from companies, not just rely of taxing them & citizens & use that wealth to benefit the whole society. Capitalism abroad, socialism at home … The only reason this doesn’t happen so much is that Bankers/Capitalists have too much power & have cowed the states.
They had plenty of time to save.
No Sam, you are wrong.
No one knows what is going to happen in our future.
Divorce, poor health etc can strike any of us, and we don’t plan for these things to happen.
But they have great potential to upset the best laid plans.
If a couple divorce in their sixties, which is quite common, then they will never catch up to where they were as a couple.
And poor health limits the chances of work as well.
That’s there choice 🙂
Poor health is not always a choice Sam.
You have a rather strange sense of logic.
People with good health typically do what humans have done for hundreds of thousands of years which regular and vigorous physical activity. Do I have that correct or nah? Genuinely interested in your alternative theory of good health, yknow the type of good health that is unrelated to physical activity, choice and human history. Yknow, logical stuff, here’s your chance to educate me. Give it shot.
I believe you are uneducated in so many ways that you are a lost cause.
Bad language is always the backstop for those who cannot formulate an intellegent arguement .
Life throws you curved balls . I hope when you grow up there are too many come your way.
Yup, you’re pussy.
The purpose of the economy is to allow financially wealthy and morally impoverished people to loot and pollute the planet and exploit less wealthy people, enjoying the spoils of their various looting and exploitation activities with other members of the loot-pollute-and-exploit club.
In order to prevent immediate revolt, the members of this club allow sufficient ‘breadcrumbs’ to fall off ‘the table’ into the hands or mouths of the masses.
To ensure the system continues, they control the minds of the masses via advertising, fake narratives in the mainstream media and corporatised sport -another source of revenue for the sociopaths at the top of the financial-social pyramid- and get the masses to vote for sycophants or members of the loot-and-pollute-and-exploit club every few years so the ignorant masses think they have some say in what goes on.
The up-coming budget is make or break time for Labour; with no NZF as an excuse they need to show what side of the neo-liberal fence they are on…..
Trouble is, when you get to a situation where a wealthy few control everything, revolution has the common way out. Problem we have today, is how to storm a Cayman Islands bank account
Revolution is a “common” way. You don’t need all this creative accounting or some bullshit equivalent special kindness. You just need to be willing to die for what you believe.
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