How Chippy fights (and wins) the cost of living crisis

ByMartyn Bradbury

The latest polling is good and it shows how successful the toxicity campaign against Jacinda was, but ultimately voters are still waiting on Labour’s 2017 promise to be transformative.

The looming economic recession is going to be far more damaging than most appreciate and Chippy has to give Voters who are struggling on the fringes real promise of actual change which will demand a level of policy courage from him that Jacinda was too cautious to attempt.

Here is how Chippy fights (and wins) the cost of living crisis:

Free Breakfast and Lunch in every school: Apart from an enormous reduction in the cost to parents each week, it will do more to counter truancy than any other policy.

Free Public transport: With the petrol tax going back on next month, the cost of transport will surge and everyone will need to look at alternatives. For most working poor, a quarter of their wage is taken up with public transport costs

Smash the Supermarket Duopoly: The changes that have been made so far would work if things were normal, but they aren’t normal and they won’t go back to being normal. The Government must smash up the Supermarket duopoly by backing a third player to generate real competition.

If the spending is targeted, that ends up being social justice and misses anyone who doesn’t get the diversity tick, but if the services are universally subsidised and provided, that is economic justice and benefits a far larger group.

Putting more money into lifting benefits doesn’t work because WINZ and MSD claw so much of it back, funding universal services is the solution to winning over the majority and ruling for the many and not the few.

 

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15 Comments

  1. Not saying they are bad ideas but there are some practicalities that stand in the way.
    I know in Chch the half fares caused an increase in public transport but it quickly fell away as the bus company was so unreliable. Lack of drivers poor fleet maintenance and lack of covered bus stops soon had people back in their cars .
    Free school lunches sounds like a great idea but what happens when there is no school and is it fair on teachers to have yet another role to fill .If parents cannot afford to feed their children why are they parents .I know circumstances temporarily change up this is why we have a welfare system which should be adequate to feed the children.
    NZ is a small country so there is always going to be limited competition that services all areas of town and country

    1. The problem is not that these things aren’t possible. The problem is that the economy is so unbelievably weak, it has become unable to support basic infrastructure — it has been on a downward spiral ever since the disastrous policies of the 1980s (which are still in place).

      In the 1950s, there was an enormous railway, tramway and trolleybus network. Milk was being given away for free in the schools (with school cafeterias being the obvious next step).

      This was all possible because the economy was diversified, and becoming increasingly advanced as it became more industrialised. The economy today is the opposite of this.

      1. The Neoliberals stripped the Country’s Assets in the 1980’s and we have never recovered.

  2. You have distilled the list down Martyn, and good points. On RNZ today sounds like Mr Chipkins may keep the half price public transport and fuel tax reduction, but we shall see. Baldrick on the same programme would not say he supported those measures! Amazing.

    The supermarket duopoly requires a good knee to the nuts, they impose oppressive trading terms on smaller suppliers and rip everyone else too. I predict weight loss across the nation–have seen people literally shake their heads when they read the price tags. $20 for a kilo of tasty cheese is here.

    We buy vegetables from markets at Kaitaia, Taipa and Mangonui these days. Affordable, fresh, not half rotten like at Pak’n’Save. In Kaitaia there is not even a duopoly! And we grow some of our own food which we are ramping up.

  4. Cost of living crisis,Nationalize the electricity market,nationalize one bank Kiwi, regulate the property rental market,and bring back the true balance of inflation and its exploit, Compulsory Unionism.

  5. We are a country of Have’s and Have Not’s. The wealthy are the top 5-10% who are fucking creaming it and the other 90% are struggling to make ends meet.

  6. The way to make things better is to stop deliberately making things worse. Giving every wage earner an 11% per year pay cut (the average since 2005, but much more at the moment) by deliberately creating more money will create a cost of living crisis. Stop doing that and stop lying in the stats, so other governments can’t reverse the policy, would go a long way to helping.

    If we keep focusing on how governments must ‘fix’ things we’ll let them off the hook for breaking stuff.

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