I believe that Verity Johnson is one of our best political columnists in Auckland. As a small business owner and cosmopolitan, her columns reflect educated Aucklanders who give a damn and who have to pay the bills, her columns recently have revolved around how damaging National have been to small business…
National has lost the small business vote, and that’s ominous
If last week showed me anything, it’s that National has unceremoniously broken small business voters’ hearts. And small business has resoundingly dumped its sorry ass.
Every so often, you write something deeply personal and it hits a universal truth, a tectonic faultline that runs deep beneath the plates of our national soul. In my previous column I wrote about the Sisyphean state of running a small business right now. Losing my life savings, working minimum wage 70-hour weeks, and still having to close.
That column caused an earthquake.
I’ve had thousands and thousands of likes, views, reads, DMs and 100-plus emails. All from fellow small business owners. All saying the same thing. “We’re down $8000 a week”; “We thought it was just us”; “Our sales just fell off a cliff”; “I’ve been doing this for 25 years, it’s all I’m good at and it’s all I know. Now I’m on Seek at 3am looking at working in Subway”.
And, loudest of all, ‘The Government doesn’t know what it’s doing’.
Small business (especially in hospo, entertainment and retail) is very much the exhausted canary in the coal mine of public opinion for any government. And it’s singing a deeply pissed-off song right now.
It’s an ominous one too – I last heard it in 2022 when I realised Auckland had fallen and we were about to kick out Labour. And honestly, we have every reason to be angry.
National preach small business morality while empowering corporate interests.
They preach to small business ‘you have to run the economy the way you run a household and only spend what you have’, but that is a lie because Government is NOT a business limited by it’s revenue because a Government can just make money.
National use this small business morality to eclipse the fact that they are beholden to corporate interests.
Labour is good for capitalism, National is good for capitalists.
What small entrepreneurs require from Government is stability and confidence.
NZ is 3 huge sparsely populated Islands, we do not have the population density that makes free market dynamics deliver the competition that drives prices down it has ALWAYS required the State to turn up as the foundation stone and that foundation stone generates the momentum of the Economy.
This Government is led by a feckless PM who has no capacity to lead and a Finance Minister who is a wide eyed NZ Initiative Free Market true believer.
Nicola BELIEVES as a matter of faith that cutting the state back allows the free market to step in and do the job cheaper.
So what has been the response?
The severe cut backs to the economy national adopted last year have cascaded into 201 Kiwis fleeing NZ EVERY DAY, 16000 jobs in the construction industry gone and a total of 50 000 jobs evaporating while we face 5.2% unemployment.
That kind of ideologically driven economic vandalism has enormous knock on effects to Retail, Hospo and the Service industry that Verity and tens of thousands of small business owners are all now facing.
Voters who voted Jacinda in 2020 and National in 2023 were hoping their house price would lift by 10%, they weren’t buying into a race war or extreme right wing economic fantasies, and they are bleeding out with every passing month.
The idea that the Government’s selling of citizenships will re-inflate the speculative property bubble seem to be held together by nothing more than snot and hope.
In their post-Covid bitterness towards Jacinda, voters angered by the incremental nothings of Labour voted in a hard right Government that noon read the fine print on.
That fine print is smashing them now.
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Yip…all so true…and…the worst is yet to come.
All this deluded bullshit corporate talk about ‘green shoots’ being just around the corner forgets that the economy, thanks to the, “i’m great with numbers” guy and big sister knows best, ‘Nikki No Boats’ Willis, is actually at the bottom of a cliff with no Ben and Jerry’s icecream or movie tickets in sight.
In N.Z.s history there have been very few examples to match this level of incompetence and reckless economic vandalism…especially when the warnings pre-election were coming thick and fast, from economists of all stripes, for National to not go ahead with their vacant-head hillbilly economic plan.
The ‘greenshoots’ talk is no more than a word salad to try and ‘stimulate’ the property market in the vain hope that ‘mum and dad’ ‘investors’ will re-enter the market again so their greedy real estate agent mates can start clipping the ticket again for 3.5 – 5% of every house sold.
N.Z. has to now accept that they have been duped by people like Mike Hosking and Fran O’sullivan who have bullshitted the populace for years now about the supposed prowess of the Coalition of Clueless Clowns now flailing around before our eyes on a daily basis.
Just like Ruth Richardson’s mother of all budgets, the damage they have caused in just 20 months is significant and will take decades to rectify.
N.Z. is, geographically, a stunningly beautiful country that wallows in a sea of discontent due to an impotent reluctant media not capable of asking the hard questions , thus allowing a simpleton, clueless, bland, ignorant, useless government to hold power.
Could we fuck our country up even more…i don’t think so!
I agree with all of that, except I don’t believe it’s incompetence.
I don’t believe Lutzon and No Boats even have to think or come up with policy, they just follow the orders of their masters in the NZ Initiative, Taxpayers Union and Atlas Network. They may be incompetent but what they want is being achieved as it is deliberate.
The problem is kiwis are too naive to see this government is worse for the country and misreads the people more than Liz Truss.
Austerity punishes the poor and ensure wealth flows up. That’s entirely their goal. Privatisation of health and education is now irreversible and if they get rid of or water down the Treaty then water will be next. There is no spending on infrastructure other than roads, and No Boats has no care that there are no boats.
Grant, Thanks for your thoughtful, factual post. How Luxon ever got to be PM is staggering – he is a ‘salesman’ through and through, without a clue how to govern and with zero leadership qualities. All he is interested in is running around the world having ‘photo-shoots’ for his ever expanding album. Most of our biased media would be better staying in bed every day. We get told nothing of significance with TV1, RNZ, Stuff and the horrible ZB troll farm dining out on the latest tragedy as it distracts from what else is happening out there. The only “Green” reference I can find is Greenpeace’s article that dirty coal imports to NZ were 650% over the same period last year! How horrendous is that for our country? This CoC cataclysmic failure has ignored our hopes for clean solar, wind and water generated electricity. Hope New Zealanders wake up in time to SAVE NZ. https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO2509/S00064/damning-mbie-report-coal-imports-skyrocket-power-prices-remain-high.htm
So, so many businesses both big and small have fallen under during this governments term. This government, it’s jettisoned in PM and unqualified finance minister are solely responsible.
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