New Zealand is falling to pieces, we need a radical rethink of our neoliberal experiment Part 2
In Part 1, I pointed out that the 35 year neoliberal experiment has failed us.
In Part 2, I argue what we need to replace it with.
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. 11 weeks paid holiday each year, 4 day weeks plus housing projects where subsidised rentals are available for houses.
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 public policy achievements.
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As we struggle to comprehend the impact of climate change in front of us, it is clear we are in desperate need of legislative regulation.
Here are some immediate ideas:
- REGULATE 2DEGREES, VODAFONE, SPARK:
The Government must immediately look an an omnibus of legislative change as we rapidly move to adaptation and one of those new focuses should be on the Telecommunications industry and force them to spend to upgrade the resilience of our communications network.
They managed to build a cheap network, addicted us to their services and then failed completely at our most critical time.
Instead of building resilience into their systems, they have a mere 4-8hours battery system.
Not one Radio tower was knocked out. Not one!
2Degrees was making $30million in profit in 2020 before the made a Billion dollar merger with Orcon!
Vodafone turns over $2billion a year while Spark tuns over almost $4billlion, yet these greedy fucks can’t build resilience into a telecommunications network they have addicted us to!
They all pay lip service to resilience but have built their empires off the back of the cheapest network possible and it has had real life real world consequences.
Regulate them now!
- STOP COUNCILS FROM BUILDING ON FLOODPLAINS:
The Greedy Developers and the lazy Councils have sold tens of the thousands down the drain!
This was the following statement from National Party Candidate and former Auckland Councillor Cameron Brewer in the wake of the Auckland Floods:
Last decade some Special Housing Areas were built in pretty marginal places, but it seems to have got worse since the 2016 Auckland Unitary Plan and the latest residential building boom,”
“We were all promised the Unitary Plan was more about going up than out, but in the past few years it has been mostly ‘greenfields’ development on the outskirts of Auckland, and some of it in totally unsuitable locations.
“We got rid of the Auckland Regional Council in 2010 because many thought they were too litigious and a drag on development. Much of their work and warnings, however, are now being borne out.
“In 2009 the regional council published some amazing fine-tooth mapping of the entire region identifying rapid flood hazard areas. Alarmingly in the intervening years, some well identified risk areas have been built on and in this latest event many sadly endured flash flooding.
…Auckland councillor Shane Henderson, representing West Auckland where there was a lot of flood damage, says “We have locked out people from building on the best land in the city. We have to confront this.”
He is right.
We can no longer allow intensification to be dominated by those with the wealth to keep the poor out.
Bypass this nonsense, cease the golf courses under the Public Works ACT and build State Housing and owner occupier affordable housing on them while building the infrastructure to them.
- New Drainage rules for small companies:
Chippy needs to refocus 3 Waters on drains and promote more work to be done by small drain layer companies by ensuring 15% of drain contract procurements go to independent/small Drain companies.
Currently the large players choke off the small companies and the work doesn’t get done!
Once again the under regulated drainage industry is allowing price gouging and that means we won’t get the repairs done.
- FORESTRY SLASH:
The Greedy Forest owners have had it too good for too long. Not only do they get to kill workers while paying them remarkably cheap rates, not only did they get the weight lifted on trucks to damage our road so they can hock logs off to China but they also get to destroy our infrastructure with slash!
It’s time to get medieval on these pricks with vast new costs to clean up their mess!
- Emergency Management Bill:
Right now, the Emergency Management Bill is stalled in Parliament because the Labour Government are concerned the co-governance elements in the Bill that will enable and resource Marae will be seized upon by National and ACT as another dog whistle to spook the electorate…
Emergency management generally garners cross-party consensus in Parliament, but the Government’s effort to legislate for Māori participation in emergency management governance in the bill promises to be politically fraught. The Opposition has routinely attacked Labour’s work on co-governance between the Crown and Māori.
…this concern for political narrative may be strategic, but tactically it has left Marae without the agency to face the very challenges they are now enduring.
Many Marae are located in places because of very specific culturally important factors. Moving them would be traumatic. Where we can, Marae should stay where they are and get repaired with extra resourcing to ensure they are points of resilience in those communities.
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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 30 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 find 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.
Universal Left
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 funded public broadcasting with TVNZ advert free and merged with RNZ alongside properly funded journalism through NZ on Air with more money for the Arts and Science. If you can’t have good public journalism, the right wing media will destroy these other 9 advances.
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 $250 000 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.
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You understand that each year that passes now will get worse or remain as starkly bad as they are now right?
You get that it doesn’t go back to normal after this right?
The extreme weather will get worse and worse.
More extreme than these extremes now.
Consider this baseline extreme normal now.
Sure the war run Ukraine is hurting food prices, but that’s damage on the baseline reality of a mega drought that has interrupted the agricultural calendar of major food producers.
The radical adaptation required to get us ready for what’s coming will splinter the political spectrum whether we like it or not.
Why shouldn’t we have our own basic pharmaceutical industry?
Engineering industry?
Industrial industry?
The supply side shocks caused by Covid and war are not going away, and they are being compounded by catastrophic climate change.
Free Market Globalisation is dead, hyper regionalism is here. Supply chains in China are no longer safe and must be brought back to friendly supply chains which imports more inflation.
Radical adaptation and communal community resourcing alongside a Big State approach to lynchpin infrastructure for basic self-reliance as an Island country facing enormous economic shockwaves is the only means to build the muscle mass to respond to the ever intensifying external disruption of late stage capitalism.
The need to increase military spending to 3% alongside the new costs for this infrastructure must be funded via new taxes aimed at corporations and banks.
A financial transaction tax and windfall profit tax would take the yoke of taxation off working people and place it upon the shoulders of the wealthy.
National and ACT see mass immigration as a means to create fake growth at a time when we should be focused on de-growth.
Climate Crisis is here and adaptation is now.
We need to start rethinking Isolationism as a strength and Think Big as Economic Sovereignty.
The geopolitical shock waves are only getting more intense.
If you think being carbon neutral by 2050 is the solution, you are the problem.
Post growth capitalism with true sustainability calls for Autarky on a burning planet that can’t take anymore globalism.
The tyranny of distance has always been our malaise but on a burning planet of constant external shocks the Shire of NZ is looking very good right now.
‘Build that wall’ will soon become ‘defend that moat’.
In 1980, the time between billion dollar climate destruction events was 3 months.
It’s now 18 days.
There is a point where the next destructive weather event strikes before you can rebuild from the last one.
Fortress Aotearoa is coming whether we want it or not.
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Unfortunately the proponents of NLC say it does not exist. Include anyone benefiting from it in that group. See anyone in that little group if you can’t see it then it cannot be fixed right. It think that’s the basic logic from that group.
Rather than CBA: cost benefit analysis, we need a social benefit analysis on order that all people will have a life worth living.
The problem for you, all of us, is, that the architects of neoliberalism (aka, those with the money to bend the ear of politicians) never stop thinking or planning for their benefit. And neoliberalism isn’t ours, its a policy foisted upon the world by the upper echelon of the moneyed class.
As it is, what you seek isn’t anywhere near to being in the same ballpark (level of importance) as neoliberal economic policy, hence, I dunno why its headlined here.
What you seek are mostly local issues (that won’t be universally adopted by the wider world) therefore big money will not stand in your way. Now its up to you to do a lot more than just write a few words…..
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/the-house/audio/2018882885/keeping-the-flow-the-use-of-te-reo-at-parliament
It is hard enough to work out what they are saying and actually meaning in Parliament at present. Te reo is still not widely used even by Maori, and to change languages suddenly is farcical. English is understood, Maori terms understood, but a whole conversation, even a sentence?
Talk about posturing – it is all so middle class both by Pakeha and Maori, pushing this forward. It is a bit like the Catholic church speaking in Latin as a pure language for centuries, but not understood by the peeps.
We are having to get used to the fact that mega rich people have taken over the world and they are the sort of people who can be like Stalin or the Chinese or… and rise above famines in their countries; or like the British, mostly English, who let people die from the second Irish Potato Famine because they couldn’t have their nice legal and monetary plans disturbed.
The last 3/4 decades have just been a warm up, so all of us need to make an effort to understand everything we hear and see. Maori to learn what they can do and not just make gestures. We can’t sit back and watch people who have been infected with moneyitis and self-importance follow their whims and gather assets ostensibly on behalf of others. Pakeha need to realise that their own pale interpretation of democratic reality is a lot of self-grooming and expectations of inheriting good times without sweaty effort or thought.
It’s time to get a soul and practice Lent and brush up your religion and air your mouldy self-importance and satisfaction. Try and do something kind each day to remind yourself that we live in a community and will be lucky if we can die in a caring community, that enables us to be productive workers earning sufficient for a satisfying life and coping with misfortune
and brou with out hahas before we die, and after.
NZ is a Dino and can not change when they need to, as people are now too centrally managed by incompetent, missing in action, people. A lot of experts have left NZ as good people now don’t want to work here as the incompetence is from the top.
New Zealand’s flood devastation: Homeowners left to fend for themselves
https://www.oneroof.co.nz/news/43278
“Kiwis hoping for advice on how to make their homes more resilient to the next round of floods and storm damage will have a long wait ahead of them for changes to building codes.
Unlike in Australia, where Brisbane, Melbourne and New South Wales councils and water bodies have brought on architects and experts to help them create extensive guides for homeowners, New Zealand homeowners impacted by the recent extreme weather are on their own.
A spokesperson for Auckland Council said their building consents team can only assess proposed rebuilds for compliancy with statutes, which come under MBIE and BRANZ umbrellas. At this stage, it is one of the many building organisations that does not have flood-resilient home programmes like those offered in Brisbane or Melbourne after their devastating floods.”
Speaking of incompetence from the top, Marama who is in charge of violence and thinks that cis white males are the biggest problem with violence (statistics show a different Story in NZ) but again it is not about identity, it should be about stopping anybody’s violence not a very narrow focus and pretence on what the problem is. No wonder they can’t solve anything anymore!
Same with housing – they enable developers to build on flood plains and in places that when sold will be flooded and after record floods and cyclones, they just keep doing, same old and stopping change – but expecting a different result or maybe not caring what the result is as above their pay grade?
Too many lawyers in NZ milking it, and stopping change as telling law makers people will sue. Well they seem to have plenty of money to stop wages and conditions from happening in NZ (the carer lawsuit), or addressing historical child abuse in a timely manner (would not prosecute), or finding nobody accountable for Pike River and CTV building deaths, but when it comes to stopping neoliberal pollution and climate damage, government lawyers too lazy to do it in a timely manner. Or they just targets something stupid and unworkable, like all farmers being affected, when the majority of problems are more about intensive farming or farms in the public places, like the ocean.
In the same time it’s taken neoliberalism to bring us to this sorry state, China has engineered the greatest improvement in social living conditions, infrastructure development and national prosperity in the entire history of the world, but we won’t learn its lesson.