The middle class Left’s obsession with identity over class has left the entire movement politically flatfooted when it comes to the true demarcation of power in a capitalist democracy – the 1% richest plus their 9% enablers vs the 90% rest of us.
Rather than solutions to the cost of living crisis and the economic sovereignty of our state and the economic settings in a degrowth Capitalism, rather than argue to lower the cost of living by taxing the mega wealthy, instead of the things that make a material difference to peoples lives, rather than that debate we are locked into Culture War cul da sacs over identity that we can’t win!
We require a regulated capitalism, instead we have free market crony capitalism that benefits the political donors, not the NZ economy.
Labour rules for capitalism, National rules for Capitalists.
Here is the latest reminder that our under regulated capitalism is at fault…
A big reason why New Zealand is so expensive
If there is one thing all New Zealanders agree on, it’s how expensive life is. The latest Consumer survey had cost of living as our number one concern – by far.
Examples of our high cost of living are everywhere. For a roof over their heads, 25% of Kiwi families pay more than 40% of their household income in mortgage payments or rent. That makes us one of the most expensive housing markets in the world.
And while food used to be cheaper, our average weekly supermarket spend is $238.
Rates never used to be that expensive. But now they are, with forecast increases of up to 25% this year.
And insurance used to be a relative bargain. Two decades ago, most homes in New Zealand could be insured for less than $300. Average premiums in Wellington are over $3700 this year.
The only thing that seems to remain relatively cheap is cars. Because we import cheap second-hand cars from Japan, New Zealand has the highest car ownership rates in the world, with 869 cars for every 1000 people.
So how did life get so expensive?
…starter for 10 – my answer – deregulation and the creation of trans national corporations using NZ as a monopoly rental and the malfunction of regulated Capitalism to prevent duopolies, oligopolies and monopolies…
There are many reasons, and it would be wrong to pin it on one thing alone, but to my mind, one long-term trend has certainly been increasing our cost of living – poor regulation. And like frogs in a pot, we have simply become used to the consequences.
In the past, a lot of our regulation was politics, because the government was the dominant or monopoly supplier in industries like telecommunications (the Post Office), electricity (the NZED), banking (the BNZ), insurance (State Insurance) and construction (the Ministry of Works).
This was sometimes a bad thing. Power cuts were more frequent, there were fewer choices overall and credit was scarce. Older readers will remember carless days and foreign currency regulation.
But because governments owned many of the key businesses that sold us the necessities of life, there was a political brake on big price increases.
But Rogernomics in the 1980s brought a new belief that the market could provide more choices at better prices – we could have our cake and eat it.
The choice certainly arrived, but prices started increasing too. And the companies raising them – and the politicians – could now blame the rising cost of living on “the market”.
And as usually happens with business, given the opportunity for cartels and oligopolies to form, they did. And politicians were no longer accountable, or in control.
…BOOM!
Nothin but net. 3 points to the Blogger they call the Postman, because he always delivers!
That’s right, the 40 year neoliberal experiment has never been challenged and the debt straightjacket settings locks us into neoliberal orthodoxy so we never can invest enough into our collective social infrastructure.
This is where Labour and the wider Left are utterly missing in action, Identity Politics is easy, challenging the neoliberal hegemonic structures of the economy not so much.
Most of the middle class woke are great for ‘Free-the-nipple’ Militant Trans inclusive cycling mummy bloggers reading Emily Writes aloud protests, not so good at countering free market capitalism.
Unfortunately for the Left, Economic class based political resistance is the only game in town that gets us collectively to the 51% required to rule.
Pure Temple woke dogma is great for hashtag clickbait, not so great for building solidarity and we need that solidarity to be able to respond to the enormous challenges in front of us.
Slashing the State when we should be building it up is insane, especially when it’s to ensure the richest landlords get tax breaks and unaffordable tax cuts.
Andrea Vance is scathing of this…
This is the safe word that absolves politicians of blame
When is a consequence not a consequence? Why, when it’s operational.
As the Government scratches around behind the public service sofa looking for spare change to fund its Budget tax giveaway, the human cost of this economic shock therapy is becoming clear.
Wellington, the already stagnant capital, is ground zero of plans to cut thousands of jobs from central government.
Last week came the news that the that the ministries of health, social development and Pacific peoples will slash their workforce, plunging people with mortgages and families into financial and emotional distress.
It was swiftly followed by a high-pitched beeping from the Beehive. That was the collective sound of government ministers backing away from the real-world repercussions of their policies.
Shocked they were, reader. Who would have thunk it: that election-year rhetoric about cutting wasteful public servants would have brought about, well, cuts?
That shrinking budgets would have impacted services to vulnerable people, like the disabled, poor or mentally unwell?
Certainly not Nicola Willis, Shane Reti, Matt Doocey, Penny Simmonds and gang.
Thankfully, on taking office government ministers are supplied with a safe word that absolves them of any responsibility for the actions of the ministries for which they are nominally responsible. It’s operational.
Safe word, or weasel words. Sheeting the blame for your policy ideas back on the very people who must implement them and who are harmed by them, is a whole new level of cheek.
Morally, it’s also pretty monstrous. Politicians made public servants a punching bag during the election campaign in the knowledge that they couldn’t answer back. But also knowing that those same employees were operating in the permissive spending culture of the pandemic era.
Ministers set that culture, not bureaucrats, and yet it is they who wear the cost of a change in fiscal direction. The least politicians can do is own it.
Job losses and the accompanying negative headlines are the inevitable consequences of these decisions. It takes political courage to stand by them, and argue the case.
…the Political Left’s reliance on cancel culture means they are incapable of actually persuading Kiwis over to our way of thinking which plays into the Rights hands.
We on the Left must formulate a vision that creates the common ground between us and benefits the common good before voters will trust us again.
We were great on the rhetoric but failed to be transformative.
We fought covid but lost the peace because all Jacinda and Grant wanted to do was rebuild to where we had been rather than where we should be.
We sacrificed equally during Covid in an unequal society and the bleeding gums of our poverty and inequality have been exposed.
In the collective madness inspired by social media hate algorithms this country turned on Jacinda for saving 20 000 lives and vomited up a far right racist climate denying beneficiary bashing Government bound together only by their collective joy for crony capitalism and zeal to punish those their voter bases despised.
Renters, Workers, hungry children at school, Māori, Pacifica, the disabled and the environment are all being ruthlessly attacked by this Government so their donor mates and ideological stormtroopers can goose-step all the way to the bank.
We have a Government focused on their donors interests while using the petty bigotries of their rump voter base to mask the naked venality of it all
This is a Government for the rich, by the rich, ruling in the interests of the rich
The true demarcation of power in a liberal progressive capitalist democracy is the 1% richest + their 9% enablers vs the 90% rest of us
The sooner the Political Left wake up to that reality the sooner we win
We are witnessing a class war in real time where we are too frightened to mention or criticise the Capitalism driving it!
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Identity politics exists because there are groups in society that don’t get the same result from the political process as other groups. Particularly racial minorities. It will continue to exist while this institutional racism carries on. Class politics has done absolutely full call to preserve Maori culture for instance, although it did at some stage make them a little wealthier – but that went out the door with neoliberalism.
Identity politics got women the vote. Identity politics got political gains in the US for black people. And Martin Luther King practised identity politics before shifting a little to class towards the end of his career. Perhaps, instead of bitching about identity politics you could work to help minorities get better results from the system. Because until they do, identity politics is going to persist – and all the bitching is not going to help one iota.
Indeed. Any mention of Left/Right/class/identity politics by old white guys turns people off. It’s just so 19th century!
Yeah nah.
Housing is in crisis and cost of living increases mean working people are lucky if they can feed their kids. That takes priority irrespective of ethnicity or gender.
Just what I said at the ‘bottom’. Woke/identity is what happens in an unfair society. Martyn takes it as a barrier almost as important as the plutocrats. You’re as ‘solid as a rock.’
Neo-liberalism, Labour’s gift that just keeps on giving.
But the culture war IS a class war.
It’s the parasitic Professional Managerial Class punching down on the working class.
Identity politics is the method by which they exert control and derive employment making compulsory hoops for the plebs to jump through, and themselves indispensable – unless there’s a pandemic in which case they’re working from home, and workers are “essential” and have to face the pandemic.
Because the PMC don’t actually produce anything except inhibition to work and progress, adding more of them is the exact opposite of what we need. 50 million to not build a cycle bridge? Billions to buy ferries when millions should do?
We saw the public service massively bloated under Labour and all important metrics got worse not better- housing homelessness, poverty, truancy, gang numbers.
Very provably the PMC make life worse for workers not better.
That Labour only now represents the PMC against worker interests shouldn’t surprise anyone.
Labour wiped prescription fees, built more state housing, increased benefits, put the minimum wage up, gave us a new public holiday, stopped closing hospitals, and made sure everyone who wanted a job, got one.
But I guess you resent all that,
Labour also increased our Police numbers gave them more tools to do their job and offered them a slightly better pay offer with more back pay.
Capitalism has put humanity on a roller coaster to war and climate collapse we can’t get off.
There’s no Left or Right. There’s just rich, sociopathic scum bags taking advantage of we, the meek and weak.
We don’t have politics anymore. Roger douglas erased our political nuances with his parasitising of old Labour to death back in 1984-ish and since then we’ve had capitalism bordering on, or perhaps fully embracing, fascism.
Look at weasel lips seymour? He’s the rogernome of Labour Rogers ACT, now imagine him in a Gestapo uniform complete with jodhpurs and a whip. ( Be still your beating heart @ Grant Robertson.)
If we don’t get our arses into gear by asking for crown intervention until we can sort [this shit] out we’ll become Australian which is, by default U$Anian. Ask how that worked out for the First People of Australia and the United States?
Taking into account that tiny annoyance that’s global heating I think that, ultimately, we’re fucked.
Where’s Ground Swellings when you need a pack of idiots? Where are all the Jonksters with their shovels ready? Where are all the greedy loony Right wing when we need piss and wind instead of ball-cupping pocket ready hands? On a multi million dollar yacht heading back to the penthouse on Fifth Avenue with your money, suckers.
[They] knew this would happen but they went ahead with their scams and cons anyway to build their vast fortunes at our expense.
Plainly writing, we Kiwi’s have been ripped off by con artists and that’s why I think the Crown should get involved. If street level criminals commit crimes the police get involved and the Police are a Crown entity. The reason the police are not involved with the crimes the rich are, and have committed is because the criminals mutated the laws to enable them to commit crimes then walk around the scene and away with our money. Lets keep it simple when talking about what’s happened to us. We’ve been ripped off by 14 multi-billionaires, 3118 multi-millionaires and four foreign owned banks. They took advantage of an opportunity afforded them by our politicians then they freely helped themselves to our money. And still do. Honestly, it’s that simple and we must stop it from continuing but also, and perhaps what’s most important, we must demand our fucking money back! We must NOT let them walk away with our money. We have to say goodbye to forty years of blatant and arrogant neo-liberal greed but we can never get that time back, but by fuck we can get our money back and they can go to prison. Invercargill has an excellent prison. Big grey stone walls, razor wire, cold and miserable. A perfect holiday home for the fuckers.
An attractive prison in central Invercargill — you could talk to the prisoners through the wire as you walked by. Raised both parties’ spirits. Much more depressing to me during my time there was in winter watching sheep chow down on suedes in misty fields, as a diversion
I’ve worked for many large corporations in NZ over the years and can tell you one of the main reason this country is so expensive is because the domestic market is used to subsidise the export market.
So Air NZ makes all it’s profits from the domestic business unit and nothing from its international unit. Fonterra makes 80% of it’s profit from the domestic market and 20% from exports markets.
This is why it is often cheaper to fly internationally than from welly to gizzy, why a leg of NZ lamb is cheaper in London than Canterbury, and why a block of NZ tasty cheese is half the price in Brisbane than Palmerston North.
So even though export markets make up 95% of NZ production in general, they make 5% of the profits and we, us kiwis, pay through the nose to ensure shareholders get an acceptable return, as management are too useless to negotiate good deals with overseas buyers and too useless to add value to the goods we shunt overseas.
And that’s all before considering the stuff sold in NZ is often the stuff that cannot be shifted offshore as the quality is so low.
NZ needs to regulate 5-10% of production has to be retained in the domestic market so kiwis do not need to compete with each other for a few scraps of mouldy cheese.
Bend Dover that’s complete rubbish,don’t comment on issues you clearly no nothing about.
Oh Bob the first you really do have you neo-liberalist double blindfold on.
Countryboy is correct.
THE DOMESTIC MARKET SUBSIDISES OUR EXPORTS>
He is also correct NZ exports are cheaper overseas than on the domestic market.
That has been complained about ever since 1984.
New Zealanders are being ripped off by the exporting corporations and the buying policies of the supermarkets.
For instance why should a supermarket be allowed to take 6 months to pay a supplier.
You cannot give everything to the rich and not expect to be poor
Giving people more money doesn’t increase resources in the economy.
Hence is inflationary prices go up.
Wealth inequality is a cancer
” The true demarcation of power in a liberal progressive capitalist democracy is the 1% richest + their 9% enablers vs the 90% rest of us ”
” The sooner the Political Left wake up to that reality the sooner we win ”
When the political left and LINO is the problem and not the solution than we have already lost.
Right now there is no alternative to unregulated capitalist market driven policies.
None and if there is one out there then it will never be debated or implemented.
The power in this country has shifted into the hands of a number of powerful groups and individuals who will never cede any control ever and are supported and protected by most of our elected officials.
This current governing junta will do as the last two Nasty Nat governments have done , continue to entrench the power of the plutocracy and those with financially lucrative salaries and wealth that are untouched by the economic hell the rest of the population endures.
In the past this kind of government would have been resisted at every level by a unified movement opposed to the ruling class just as ruthless as this current one is.
I can’t see anyone stepping forward who can take this system on and bring Kiwis together in a common cause that is determined to offer something better.
Seems like fear has won.
Yes to what you say going back to the 70s and 80s the public would have been out on the streets.
That community sensibliity was killed off by the employment contracts act and the more or less destruction of the unions and the massive importation of south and east asian workers etc with a different political mindset that allows neo liberalism to thrive because they have no idea of the power of a collective workers / community action power in action.
It is good to see the CTU stepping up.
It the good old nz mindset that “you can’t do that” stops all progress and speed at getting things done
Had a night in Brisbane round the clock construction going on next door
Brisbane to Gold Coast not one bloody road cone counted full of traffic.
The whole get a kiwi to get the job done is bollocks
Ask to do a job and get told by petty minded little pricks that
“You can’t do that”
The article doesn’t explicitly address the biggest item, accommodate costs and doesn’t at what factors are at play there. For example, how much do “land and property banking” and speculation play a part?
I’m middle-class Left and both are alright with me. How did ‘woke’ make Labour ineffectual in their last trajectory? What made them ineffectual was their unwillingness to confront rich-rule.
We are kiwis, our home debt, who we dare stand up public, eh!, our text line, shallow, or even, he! us gutless kiwi, stop work tomorrow, all our care. What a knowing, care to do.
Tenant, have you a brain to understand our cost care of your home, eh!, landlord or other clone, we our brain, is not open to exploit or abuse.
So oversees, landlord, who are you dare question our care for your property, as those you choose to care look, at their cost, they deem, your rent cost.
Okay, about this false class politics/identity politics dichotomy. Yep, I’m gay and hell, yeah, I’m a socialist. So, let’s tackle this. Maori and Pasifika trans people are disproportionately subject to homelessness, educational and employment disruption, and the neoliberal attack on housing provision directly affects them, as does the intensification of institutional racism and reinforcement of colonialist institutions under the current regime. Most gay men are quite aware of what happened during the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the United States because hardline neoliberalism there stifled the existence of a comprehensive public health system. Most socialist feminists are aware that if abortion is prohibited, it will be impoverished women and women of colour especially who will die from backstreet abortions. Newsflash- the resistance to neoliberalism does not wholly consist of straight pakeha male working-class industrial workers and it hasn’t for quite some time. In order to dismantle neoliberalism, the left needs to create its own anti-neoliberal hegemonic project. Read Gramsci, read Stuart Hall. It’s not rocket science.