55% struggling financially + trust in public services collapses – it’s the neoliberal state, alienating identity politics and incremental centrism that’s failing you, not Universal Class Left
Voters to Labour: key govt services worse since 2020 – poll
Labour might be rolling out a phalanx of new election policies, but New Zealanders are sitting harshly in judgment of its delivery of core government services, according to a new poll.
With three weeks to go until Parliament rises for the term, a Taxpayers’ Union Curia Poll obtained exclusively by The Post paints a picture of voters deeply dissatisfied with five major government systems – which they say have got worse since 2020.
According to the poll, conducted from August 3 to August 8 of 1000 voters with a 3.1% margin of error, New Zealanders are scathing about the nation’s education, health, welfare, criminal justice and transport systems performance over the past three years
The results will deliver a challenge to Labour, grappling with a complicated Covid-19 political legacy and that is running more on leader Chris Hipkins’ new policies and direction, rather than on its second term achievements.
‘We live on bare basics’: 55% of New Zealanders struggling financially
New research from the Retirement Commission shows that she is not alone. It found 55% of New Zealanders were struggling with their financial situation, up 17% compared to February 2021, and the highest level since surveying began.
It comes as budget advisers say “middle-income” households are more commonly seeking support. Rent prices were up 4.1% year-on-year in July, according to Stats NZ, and some landlords said that might understate the extent of the increases happening.
Of those surveyed by the commission, 51% said they were “starting to sink, or treading water” and a further 3.5% said they were sinking badly.
We are trapped in an endless banal chatter about David Seymour blowing up buildings, to drunk driving Ministers, counter productive get tough on crime cheerleading, bilingual road signs, co-governance and alienating Trans rights rhetoric!
People struggling to make ends meet are not sitting around the kitchen table cancelling people for misusing pronouns!
The debt that many first time home owners are being strangled by as over heated house prices are now met with ever increasing interest rates is seeing people using their credit cards just to pay the bills and the cost of living feels like you are being mugged every time you go to the supermarket.
The woke middle class activists have been tricked into providing the right with culture war ammunition that is now being shot back at us.
People struggling to make ends meet are screaming for solutions and are voting against their economic interests for the Right when the political project of the Right is to underfund public services, complain about those underfunded services and then promote privatisation as the solution to those underfunded services!
The real power struggle in NZ isn’t Left vs Right, it’s between the Professional Managerial Class Consultants vs a self serving Public Service!
The Professional Managerial Class Consultants push to ensure corporate interests like their profit margins and dominant market share are always protected and woven into any watered down regulation while the self serving Public Service fight for more money to fund their latest glass palace.
We face an existential crisis in the form of the climate and the demand to radically morph into adaptation mode is far greater than any political party is currently envisaging.
Your anger, cynicism and fury at the political failures is legitimate but let’s be clear, a National/ACT Government is no solution to the problems we face, they will only exacerbate them!
Dear Kiwis – your debt and under regulated capitalism is what’s killing you, not co-governance, not bilingual signs, not alienating Trans activists!
Short term the Government has to be focused on deflationary spending, mid term economically we need radical climate change adaptation, long term they need to start navigating a post growth economy.
The best way to start those values is via the Public Service Culture and processes.
For essential state service workers like teachers, like police, like Drs, like nurses, like ambulance and Firefighter services, we can match the rising inflation in wages, but the focus needs to be on expanding capacity, expanding State responsibility and expanding quality of work experience.
It is insane that our Ambulance Service is privatised, and the State should nationalise it immediately. As first responders, their obligations and responsibilities will only climb as society continues to rock from the shockwaves of Covid.
Professional Firefighters must be expanded to acknowledge the danger we are under from climate change and fire seasons.
Rather than compete with inflationary wage rises, focus on better conditions, 12 weeks paid holiday each year, 4 day weeks plus housing projects where subsidised rentals are available for houses has to be the solution.
We can’t out-bid Australia on wages, let’s provide a better quality of work life then.
We also need to start bonding Teachers, Drs and nurses with free education in exchange for bonded work around NZ.
We shouldn’t be looking to slash public servants, we need more!
ACT want to amputate 5 Ministry’s while Luxon is promising to slash 14 000 jobs!
That is ideological vandalism, that’s not an actual plan!
Covid showed us the need for a strong State with capacity to step in and with the climate crisis here, we will continue to need a strong State with capacity!
The Right’s never ending march to amputate and slice down the State is so that the people don’t get used to a well functioning public service and so will politically agree to starve it of funds via tax cuts.
Global free market capitalism is dead, hyper regionalism is here. We need a bigger State with actual capacity rather than the threadbare barely regulated joke that it currently is.
We shouldn’t agree to cutting public services, we should fund their capacity and infrastructure rebuild while making the working conditions for those there a better quality!
Where should we get that money? Windfall taxes on the corporations and banks!
We need better conditions for those workers and the values of working 4 day weeks, extra holidays and housing solutions are aimed at making better working conditions as opposed to never ending inflationary wage pressures.
We need a sustainable bureaucracy rather than 7 figure technocrats who see their own fiefdoms and glass palaces as the measure of incremental public policy achievements.
The enormity of the political gravity climate change adaptation and infrastructure resilience has created alongside the solidarity of a shared universal experience is materialising politically in a State that has to do things itself.
The 40 year neoliberal experiment in NZ cut the State back to the bone and the political project of the Right ever since is to tax-cut starve off revenue for the State so it can’t redistribute it in the first place.
What we saw with Covid and this latest weather event disaster is that you desperately need a State with capacity. So many of the problems we encountered was the shear slowness of an underfunded, under capacity public service.
With the economic recession, the geopolitical shockwaves and catastrophic climate change upon us, we must have a debate about the capacity of the State!
That is how the Left have to re frame 2023 – vote for the Right and get an amputation of the State, vote for the Left and build new capacity for the challenges ahead.
We need more Drs, more nurses, more teachers, more Police, more State houses, more infrastructure NOT LESS!
We need to debate for a bigger capacity State using the example Covid just gave us.
We need more Scientists, Drs, nurses, teachers, Police, more State houses and more infrastructure alongside policy that directly subsidises the cost of living like removing gst off food, free dental, free public transport, free food in schools and we will fund that extra increase through targeted new taxes to rebuild the capacity of the State.
The obviousness of our need for a Ministry of Works that actually builds shit is painfully clear to everyone by now.
Take Police in NZ, we have a pathetic 203 police per 100 000 NZers!
Compare that with 212 in England, 264 in Australia, 318 in Scotland, 349 in Germany, 422 in France, hell even Fiji at 227 has more Police per 100 000 than we do!
We don’t have the capacity to create a functioning State that lives up to our expectations in a liberal progressive democracy because we won’t tax the rich to fund that infrastructure!
We need to actually sell the 2023 election in those explicit terms – vote Right and amputate the State, vote Left and rebuild the capacity to actually face the challenges ahead.
These new taxes will be a sugar tax for free dental, a financial transaction tax to lower GST on everything, a bank windfall profit tax to build more State houses, a social media journalism tax.
Taxes aimed at speculators and the wealthy to fund services for the egalitarian country we want NZ to be.
Let’s have the courage to actually argue and win over our fellow citizens for solution based policy that actually builds the capacity to have the extra drs, nurses, firemen, police, and teachers.
Let’s champion policies that subsidise people’s cost of living by redistributing from the few to the many.
The voters of NZ are still waiting for the Transformative change we promised them in 2017.
We need a Ministry of Works that actually builds the infrastructure we desperately need.
We need the State to do this because the Free Market has failed.
There has already been amazing work on the creation of a new Ministry of Green Works…
Rising To The Challenge: A Ministry Of Green Works For Aotearoa
Two of the biggest crises of our times – housing and climate change – could be the target of a new Ministry of Green Works that would integrate important responsibilities related to safeguarding Aotearoa’s future, according to a report released today by FIRST Union.
A Ministry of Green Works for Aotearoa New Zealand: An Ambitious Approach to Housing, Infrastructure, and Climate Change is a policy report commissioned by FIRST Union from co-authors Max Harris and Jacqueline Paul that considers Aotearoa’s systemic infrastructural problems and how they could be addressed by a new governmental entity that builds on the former Ministry of Works and integrates several key departmental responsibilities to future-proof the country for significant challenges to come.
“From our experience in workplaces, we know that contracting is a broken model that has driven down wages and led to massive inefficiencies in construction and infrastructure,” said Jared Abbott, FIRST Union Secretary for Transport, Logistics and Manufacturing.
“As the report describes, the private sector doesn’t have the capacity to deliver on large-scale housing projects and inevitably there are now worker shortages due to poor conditions in the sector.”
“Finally there is insufficient coordination to tackle climate change under the current model – the public sector has limited powers to ensure green building standards in housing and infrastructure, and it’s not equipped to respond to other unexpected challenges, like quickly building managed isolation facilities, for example.”
The report argues that the right response to these problems will be consistent with seven values: honouring Te Tiriti o Waitangi; manaaki whenua, manaaki tangata; Indigenous innovation; collaboration and coordination; creativity; safety and accessibility; and transformation of our economic model. The authors note that any new Ministry of Green Works must learn from its historic namesake and considers twelve risks related to its establishment.
The report contains feedback and interviews with experts including Ganesh Nana, John Tookey, Rosslyn Noonan, Len Cook, Andre Brett, Matthew Scobie, Syd Keepa, Judith Aitken, Susan Krumdieck, Alexis Harris, Murray Parrish, Jen McArthur, Troy Brockbank, Brendon Harre, Joe Gallagher, Ben Schrader, James Muir, Patrick Cummuskey, Andre de Groot, Ben Ross, Huhana Hickey and Nick Collins.
The report is being launched as the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) begins in the United Kingdom over the upcoming weekend.
“Even with our best intentions to fix our housing, infrastructure and climate problems individually, we will miss the boat if we don’t consider their interrelatedness and set firm goals that integrate core functions of all agencies – this is where a Ministry of Green Works comes in,” said Mr Abbott.
“When the last Ministry of Works was cut up and sold off during the extreme ‘reforms’ of the 80s, we ended up a decade later with the leaky homes scandal and a lot of pressing questions – we can’t afford to wait for the consequences of climate change to set in before we act.”
…we have better solutions and we need a bigger State.
It is time to go beyond the neoliberal 30% GDP debt straitjacket and build a new State to build the infrastructure that a allows adaptation and resilience.
Bernard Hickey argues that even if we agree to the neoliberal Wellington Consensus of 30% GDP debt, we could still borrow $60Billion and remain within that absurd ideological economic straight jacket so where should that $60billion be spent on resilience and adaptation?
We need future proofing ideas, we need a Ministry of Works to do it, we need big ideas and we need big new taxes to fund those big ideas, we need to build in self sufficiency, we need mitigation and adaptation.
Unlike Covid, whose worst was avoided, this Cyclone damage is real world and physical. The magnitude of what is required from the State politically resets National and ACT’s small Government agenda.
No one wants to hear about amputating the State when they are running to the State for protection.
This was the exact same mistake the Right made last time with Covid.
The Rights usual slash and burn of the State simply isn’t sustainable in face of how invested the State is going to have to be in the rebuild.
Let’s ensure taxation is targeted at the corporates and the wealthy while subsidising the costs of the poorest.
I present the 10 point Left wing Economic Justice Plan for Aotearoa New Zealand.
1: Feed every kid in NZ a free nutritious and healthy breakfast and lunch at every school using local product and school gardens with parents paid to come in and help.
2: 50 000 State Homes for life built using the best environmental and social architecture standards using the public works act to seize land and immediately start building satellite towns using upgraded public transport hubs.
3: Free public transport plus vast infrastructure upgrade for climate crisis.
4: Doubling welfare payments and student allowances minus any bullshit claw backs from MSD plus Living Wage universally adopted as minimum working wage plus implementation of all WEAG recommendations.
5: GST off food and essentials like tampons, toilet paper, condoms, oral health.
6: Free Dental services for everyone through public health.
7: Debt cancellation – student loans, welfare overpayments, beneficiary debt, easier debt cancellation.
8: Renter Rights – (rent freezes, end accomodation payments, long term tenancy arrangements)
9: Buy out houses that can’t be saved, look at universal insurance for climate change events to cover those with no insurance, survival packs in every home, solar panels on every roof, vast increase in Civil Defence equipment, social licence of essential service resilience.
10: Properly regulate capitalism and ensure duopolies, oligopolies and monopolies don’t form.
Don’t tell me we can’t afford any of this because we can if the wealthy are taxed!
There are 14 Billionaires in NZ, and 3118 ultra-high net worth individuals, let’s start with them, then move onto the Banks, then the Property Speculators, the Climate Change polluters and big industry.
There’s no point making workers pay more to rebuild our resilience, tax the rich!
-Sugar Tax
-Inheritance Tax
-Wealth Tax
-Financial Transactions Tax
-New top tax rate on people earning over $3000 000 per year.
-Capital Gains Tax
-Windfall profit taxes
-First $10 000 tax free
The Reserve Bank Governor is clearly telling us to raise taxes to pay for the rebuild, if Chippy’s Bread and Butter politics is to mean anything, he has to tax the rich to pay for the rebuild.
The reality is that climate change will force us to adapt whether we want it our not.
Brothers and Sisters, it’s the neoliberal state, alienating identity politics and incremental centrism that’s failing you, not Universal Class Left!
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While I support your intention to provide for a better society you have neglected a major cause of the problems that exist. The rise of parasitic industry over productive industry. It is easier to make a dollar by taking it from someone else than by doing something useful that creates wealth & for some reason society honors those who have found ways to enrich themself at the expense of others. While the tax system is an obvious way to change that situation it is unlikely to happen when the greed is good attitude is dominant within society.
Give it up. We have already lost and lost badly and what do you expect. Broken promise after broken promise. The average bloke on the street can put up with a lot but he bristles when he realizes he’s been played for a fool. As we all have been.
You have described the problems very well…but…the very organisations that should be leading the way out of this mess–NZCTU and NZ Labour Caucus/party–are silent, trapped in an awful 39 year long neo liberal Parliamentary consensus along with embedded Rogernomics and Ruthanasia dogma.
That is partly what confuses people. IRD exposed the skewing of the tax system in favour of the wealthy, but Labour refused to do anything about it. The Greens and TPM put up some wonderful policy–basic income, wealth tax, free dental–but Cap’n Chippy cannot and will not go there…
So a new political movement is needed for 2026 election–note I say movement not party–the totally inevitable danger of course is that Act and Natzos will have destroyed so much in the next three years it will be hard to come back from.
The so-called neoliberal state is merely an extension of the ruling class (aptly named unfortunately). It pervades all throughout the Western world (and not just tiny NZ) and its goal is to suck the wealth out of the West (send riches flowing upwards leaving crumbs for everyone else) to help off-set the decreasing wealth being extracted from the non-Western nations. Trillions has flowed upwards, just in the last few years alone, while we, the entire Western world, at least, and all the institutions that we have built up since WWII, they/we are all crumbling.
We are in a class war, always have been, but we don’t know it because we have been hoodwinked into following political sides that diverts our attention away from the actions of the ruling-upper class.
We believe that our political side will see us right, but the neoliberal state exists to see that all we really get are the crumbs that this rigged political system is set up to give us. More and more people are living a crummy existence, granted most of us are not, but unless we stem this planned for trend, then a crummy existence will soon find us all.
We are in a class war, the ruling class has control of the political system and unless we understand that this class war is thee problem we all face, then struggle street will find us all.
Wake up folks….
AO. And now that these fascists are dictating that there is only one way, the state way, to teach maths and literacy, they must be booted out of the corridors of power and never allowed back in.
The ‘state way’ as you call it is simply the ruling class determining how the State should operate. The problem is the corruption of the State. The actions from the corridors of power will not change until we acknowledge, then address this corruption…remembering of course that said corruption permeates through the entire Western world.
In respect of “judgment of its delivery of core government services”, poll…
Its not neo liberal. Its a bunch of hopelessly ill equipped inexperienced in life kids pretending to be adults in government. Chippy couldn’t even count in parliament on day one of the Arden government. That was a portent of things to come.
But fear not, Ginny tells us we feel safer. When a minister is reduced to gaslighting, you know they’ve hit rock bottom!
“55% struggling financially + trust in public services collapses…” MARTIN BRADBURY
One of those public services in which trust has collapsed, is the tax service.
New Zealand’s millionaires pay lower tax rates than cashiers – it’s time to fix the system MAX RASHBROOKE
….The report shows that New Zealand’s 311 wealthiest families pay just 8.9% of their income in tax – less than the rate paid by a minimum wage worker (10.5%) and less than half the rate paid by the average Kiwi (19.7%).
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/27/new-zealands-millionaires-pay-lower-tax-rates-than-cashiers-its-time-to-fix-the-system#
The Hipkins Labour government reverting to its trickle down theory neoliberal (Roger Douglas) past, has refused to address the injustice in the tax service.
When the Public Health system and the Cyclone Gabrielle recovery are being starved of funding, tax injustice is likely to cost the Labour Party the election, handing the country to the most right wing administration in a generation.
To save the Labour Government from themselves, TAX THE RICH
What is required is a revolution not rewarding Labour for it’s incompetency, it’s failure to make a difference to working people and it’s embracing of woke dogma.
Maybe it has to get far worse for a new party that actually champions the real left to emerge as a rallying cry against what is going to be a waking nightmare of an ACT/National government.
Labour has shown it is not able to do this even when they have control of the house.
The public system has been attacked by weirdo woke thinking that seems to be based on some imaginative echo chamber thinking, much of it spread by other woke. Sadly too late for many workers (like in the health system) who are not allowed to think anything science. Even biology has been turned into a farce!
This madness has been spread from overseas woke.
Labour is desperately backtracking from this self-ID mess
The party is trying to dig itself out of a hole as Humza Yousaf pushes the SNP further into it
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/labour-is-desperately-backtracking-from-this-self-id-mess-jf2phnw5s
“It was the most extraordinary case of policy capture in the history of devolution. A handful of Scottish government-funded trans charities, backed by the LGBT lobby group Stonewall, managed to persuade Scottish political parties, the civil service, the NHS and much of the media that humans can change sex simply by an act of the imagination.
Trans women are women, intoned the first minister, Nicola Sturgeon. Get over it. Biology is for the birds. Women aren’t women any more, they’re “menstruators” or “people with cervixes”, said the NHS, since people with penises had now to be regarded as female. Anyone who disagreed was a “transphobe” and likened to racists by Sturgeon. There was to be “no debate”.
She dedicated the energies of Scotland’s government to her Gender Recognition Reform (GRR) bill. This enshrined the doctrine of self-ID: which allows any man to change their legal sex simply by making a declaration and living “as a woman” for three months. The bill was backed unthinkingly by the Labour opposition, whose leader, Anas Sarwar, now says he has “reflected”.
The madness of self-ID only became apparent to him and everyone else in January when a double rapist, Isla Bryson (Adam Graham), was placed on remand in Cornton Vale women’s prison after he self-identified as a woman. Sturgeon could still not bring herself to admit that Bryson was a man even as she ordered the Scottish Prison Service to move him, and other trans sex offenders, to a male jail. This fatally undermined the first minister’s credibility, already stretched by the failure to deliver that independence referendum. She became the first casualty.”
Capital Gains Tax needs to be introduced. Generational wealth is creating a massive divide with voters let alone the inequity – AND we are one of the few countries to not have it.
Explain how CGT would work and implement it. We WILL lose the election as the perception is that the ‘small’ guy is going to lose out anyway. Sadly. Labour voters will now throw their votes to minor parties in disillusionment, and hand the Nats and ACT an election win on a platter if ‘radical’ taxation policy change is NOT announced NOW, BEFORE the election.
Additionally, adjust taxation thresholds as they’re well overdue to address the imbalances of wealth and poverty. It’s totally unacceptable that the bulk of Kiwis have to accept these inequities as normal, as it’s clearly not. Many Kiwis are brainwashed into thinking that EXTREME generational is just good luck through birth right. It’s not. And why not tax massive passive growths? Thresholds again…
The future of NZ will be dismal if we lose this election and life for a lot of Kiwis will deteriorate significantly .
At this critical moment Labour needs to be brave and make meaningful taxation changes with urgency.
Sorry they were given 6 years and have done nothing to help any of the sectors they said they represented.
They will lose then the sectors will fight and the different factions will argue about why they lost
and who was at fault . After a few years they will take the helm from a tired 3 term National government and history Wil repeat itself.
No Sugar Tax. Everything has sugar in it. It won’t prevent the obesity and Aged Care crises.
Sugar is an ideal thing to tax, we don’t need added sugar so it is easy to avoid the tax and our health would improve. Unfortunately people are addicted to sugar so there will be distress for some as they adjust to the higher price or learn to live with a minimum of sweet treats but it will be in their best interest.
The Fourth Labour government’s reform of public administration in this country was the most radical and penetrating of all western democracies. The neoliberals’ brutal imposition of economic rationalist dogma on our public service surpassed even the most daring of Thatcher’s reforms in the UK. The changes here have been sustained well beyond their obvious failures by vicious ideological prejudices about the public sector and taxes – prejudices held by both the political left and right. The sector is being made to operate as though it’s a corporate in a notional profit-focused marketplace for its ‘products’. Public services are not products produced for profit any more than Kiwis are customers. Governance by managerialism compounds the distortions and internal dysfunction. It sucks the energy and talent out of the sector by subordinating its practising experts to ideological architecture which is entirely unsuited to the imperatives of public service. Most Kiwis don’t understand that this is why our public service is not functioning as we expect. Of course, the neoliberal ideologues most eager to demonise the public service for poor performance are the very ones who have crippled it all along.
Brilliant post Basil, I hope Bob reads this, he may finally learn something about economics.
The chickens have been out there a long while, roaming around and getting into mischief – now they have all come home to roost – but the perches gone, sold to private speculators!
Chicken Run…..!
Reaction with vim- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xgUm0plA8w
Escape- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTj4aSPwTBk
Corruption, decadence, innovation- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUIpLr1lkkE
Calm and cheer yourself – listen to Because by the Beatles – it doesn’t solve or explain anything, because… but just uplifts the mind briefly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bdqdO5LAIA
Mainstream media have been sucking up to National (once they smelt blood they were like vultures) while putting the boot into Labour they are looking after their job’s bloody mongrels.
Party donors to National are well and truly getting their money’s worth through N.Zs right wing media. Every media format has National party advertising flooding the election campaign trail.
The survey is correct. IMO Labour deserves a spell in the wilderness not re election in 2023. Even if both Labour and National are “evil” neo liberal parties those with a few years on the clock recognise things were much better under National. Key did produce a rock star economy cf. Labour who have crashed the economy. Labour and the Greens had an outright majority so yes the “Left” have failed. I don’t buy this they are all neolib business. To me the current Left here in NZ is just incompetent. I liked some of Jacinda’s vision/promises/aspiration back in 2017 but in hindsight we would have been better off with Bill English!
c’mon – the world is in overshoot – the graphs have only been going in one direction since the 80’s – what gets me is how everyone looks to government to fix shit. the govt. is part of the problem.
People are sick of the control the Maori caucus has over policy.
c’mon – the world is in overshoot – the graphs have only been going in one direction since the 80’s – what gets me is how everyone looks to government to fix shit. the govt. is part of the problem.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/171564126882442/permalink/1246776696027841/
I will say no more.