National's New Zealand

How bad are things under the Luxon regime? We already knew that we had the worst wage growth in the world, with wages 6.4% below 2021 levels - which shows the lie of National's "economic growth". But what does that mean in reality? The Press headline from today speaks for itself: "Police are dealing with a new type of shoplifter - ‘everyday people’ who just need to eat":

A year ago, Sergeant Melissa Shaw’s retail crime team was set up to curb retail theft in Christchurch.

Shaw expected to deal mainly with drug addicts who repeatedly steal to fund their next hit. And there have been those.

But then came the surprise: A growing cohort of thieves who were not drug addicts, not kleptomaniacs, not youths.

They were parents and elderly people with no criminal histories, without the money to keep up with rising living costs, who stole food and clothing for themselves and their families.

And that's where we are now: normal people having to steal to get buy, because National's "rockstar economy" doesn't provide for them, and instead funnels everything upwards into the pockets of Luxon and his mates.

We desperately need to get rid of this government. So in November, vote for regime change!

Time to tax the rich

Aotearoa has a problem: the rich don't pay their fair share. They benefit from our society: the state protects their wealth and provides peaceful conditions allowing them to carry on business without fear. And yet they refuse to pay for it. Meanwhile, their cartels suck the money out of ordinary New Zealanders, so they can spend it on bigger and bigger houses, bigger and bigger yachts, helicopters, and so on.

Its time we made them pay their fair share. And over the weekend, the Greens put up their election year tax policy, which will make them do it. A wealth tax, targeted at the super-rich, which will finally bring them into the tax system. A new top income tax rate, for those earning top incomes. A capital acquisitions tax, targeting gifts and inheritances over $1 million, to limit intergenerational accumulation and tax-dodging. A higher corporate tax rate for big companies. A bank-levy, targeting our biggest cartel parasites, Aussie banks. Stopping foreign tech companies from dodging New Zealand taxes by pretending the profits happen elsewhere. And reversing Luxon's landlord and property speculator tax cuts.

These are not radical socialist policies. They are all perfectly normal overseas. But the rich have bought so much power in our society since 1984 that they've been able to gaslight us into thinking that the normal is abnormal, that other countries don't have wealth taxes, inheritance taxes, more progressive income taxes, restrictions on tax cheating. And they've been able to do that, in part, because they can use their money to buy politicians and media outlets, steering our society in their preferred direction, despite huge public support for taxing them.

Taxing the rich and limiting their ability to accumulate and weaponise their wealth is a necessary thing for the preservation of our society. And the best bit is that it won't affect the vast majority of New Zealanders. Only a tiny proportion of people - the Chris Luxons of this world - have more than $10 million. Only a tiny proportion of people inherit or are given more than $1 million. Only a tiny proportion (which includes every MP) "earn" more than $160,000. None of that affects us. Instead, what we get in practice from this policy is a reduction in inequality, a restriction on the power of the rich, better-funded public services, and a tax cut! Because most of us will end up better off, thanks to a shift in the tax burden from the poor to the rich. Which is perfectly sensible the moment you think about it. There's no point taxing people who don't have any money. Instead you go after the people who do have it, the bloated accumulators who have sucked all the wealth out of our society into their own pockets.

Sadly, Chris Hipkins - a man paid $305,900 a year plus slush, who rorted his parliamentary superannuation scheme into buying his holiday home and then said "it's my money" - is saying that none of this will happen if he's in charge. Voters should take that as a challenge: if we want these policies, we have to vote for them. We need to put the Greens in a position where they can force this policy on Labour. Otherwise, nothing will change, and the rich will just keep on leaching and looting us.

The price of justice

Last year, the regime rammed through the Equal Pay Amendment Act under urgency, gutting pay equity laws, dumping all claims, and stealing $13 billion from New Zealand women. Labour wants to reverse that. So naturally, they're getting the usual bullshit question from the regime and its stooges: "how will you pay for it?"

The short answer to this is "who the fuck cares?" It is fundamentally immoral to pay people less because of their gender. The state has been committed to eliminating this form of discrimination for over fifty years. It is appalling that it has taken so long to do so. It is even more appalling to see people quibbling about the fucking cost. Do they think we should pay women less? This is justice; we pay whatever it costs. It's that simple.

And the substantive answer is that we could afford it up until last year. What changed then is the government's priorities: they decided to spend all the state's money on landlord tax cuts and stupid fucking roads, and that these things were somehow more important than justice. That was an appallingly immoral decision, which shows what disgusting sexist pieces of shit the present regime are. But a different government can change those priorities. It can not be sexist, and put justice ahead of greed and stupidity. So, it can "pay for it" by simply reversing National's landlord tax giveaway. Or maybe just by cancelling some stupid roads.

Either way, the people asking these questions should be asked one in return: do they think women should be paid less? If so, they're ghouls and weirdos who have no place in the modern world and can be simply ignored. If not, then why are they even asking? Either way, maybe they should be thinking about the values underlying the policy, rather than the details.

Out of touch

There's been some stuff over the last few weeks about how MP's high salaries and extensive perks put them out of touch with normal people. How out of touch are they? Revenue Minister Simon Watts thinks that people with $50,000 invested overseas aren't wealthy:

Inland Revenue figures suggest only tens of thousands of New Zealanders have directly invested more than $50,000 in overseas shares.

But Revenue Minister Simon Watts has rejected the assertion that those whose purchases total less than $100,000 and who stand to gain from a tax change in Budget, could be described as mostly wealthy.

Watts has four houses, three trusts, and a salary of $320,600, plus perks (including $52,000 a year for housing and a tax-free "expense allowance" of $19,000). With all that, I think its fair to say that he has a certain level of wealth, and might not see $50,000 as a big deal, and certainly not real money. But $50,000 is vastly more than most kiwis have - median savings balances are less than a tenth of that, and a third of kiwis don't even have $500. Only 38% have a Kiwisaver balance of more than $40,000, so Watt's "not wealthy" is more than most people's entire lifetime savings.

You'd think as Revenue Minister, Watts might have some acquaintance with these facts. But wealth is something this regime steadfastly refuses to look at, because if it did, it might face pressure to do something about it. So he just falls back on his own reckons as a four-house, three-trust, $300K salary guy. $50K isn't a lot of money to him, so ergo people who have it aren't wealthy.

Which just goes to show that ministers and MPs are in a completely different boat from the rest of us. And that calls into question their claim to be "representatives".

Fucking absurd

Since time immemorial - or at least the 1990's - the National party's Big Economic Idea was cuts. Slash the state! Sack people! Give away billions in tax cuts to cronies so future governments couldn't fund anything! And to justify this peculiar fixation, they talk constantly about debt. There's too much of it! We can't afford the interest! We're about to go bankrupt! And sadly, this ideological framework has been swallowed wholesale by Labour, who sternly promise to keep debt low and not increase spending

But as Bernard Hickey points out this morning, none of this is true. Sure, the NZ government has $426 billion of debt - but it has $611 billion of assets, a positive net worth of $185 billion. And interest payments - which are now fixed and in NZ dollars, unlike the 1980's - are just 2% of government revenue. Which is perfectly sustainable.

And yet, National still keeps demanding cuts. Meanwhile, we have failing infrastructure, collapsing public services, and 33,000 homeless children. Hickey asks the obvious questions: would you leave kids homeless when you were worth $207 billion? Would you leave your kids homeless with interest costs of 2% of income? Answering "yes" to those isn't just fucking absurd, it's absolutely sociopathic. But I guess that's the sort of person right-wing politics attracts: the sort of person who wants to deliberately starve and freeze children, while running the country into the ground, all so they and their rich mates can steal more from us.

We need to vote this NeoLiberal plague out. Both sides of it. Because as long as Labour remains committed to NeoLiberalism and the "too much debt" myth, they will continue doing exactly what National does. The only difference is they'll lie to us about how they're helping us while they fuck us over.

A vicious, corrupt and insane policy from a vicious, corrupt and insane regime

Albert Einstein reportedly said that insanity was doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. And that's basically National's housing policy. Back in the 1990's, they sold state houses, raised rents, and handed out money to their landlord cronies via the accommodation supplement. The result was poverty, overcrowding, the resurgence of third-world diseases, and the creation of a permanent underclass. There was some relief from the Helen Clark-led labour government, which built state houses to replace some of what had been sold, and replaced market rents with income-related ones, but it didn't undo the damage. Then, in the 2010's, under the Key-led national government, Paula Bennet did it all over again. That time we got all the previous bad effects, plus a homelessness crisis, people living in cars, then WINZ putting them up in motels at enormous cost (and then trying saddle them with odious debt) to avoid the resulting bad headlines, and finally a bipartisan acknowledgement that it hadn't worked. The following Labour governments again managed to undo some (but nowhere near all) of the damage, started a building programme and so on. And now its 2026, the end of the first term of a national-led regime, and Chris Bishop is back, doing it all again, this time with the added insult of pretending state house tenants are "lotto winners":

"If you're in a state home and you compare how much income you have with someone in a private rental who's got exactly the same income as you, you're $110 a week better off," she said.

"These changes are about making the system fairer. At the moment, people in social housing effectively have won the lotto, they get so much more support than a family with just as lower income in a private rental. That's not fair, and our changes are about fixing it."

So her solution to that unfairness is to make things worse rather than make things better. To kick those on the bottom of the heap and steal from them in order to enrich her cronies. Because increased accommodation supplements don't help renters - they go directly to landlords, who immediately hike rents to capture the entire increase. So the only people who benefit from this policy is them. And the national MPs they kick back to with donations, of course. It is a vicious, corrupt policy from a vicious, corrupt government. And thinking it will lead to a different result from the previous times it has been imposed is pure insanity.

Pushing on an open door

RNZ has polling today on taxing billionaires, and its not good for the plutocrats:

The second poll commissioned in February 2026 revealed that 66 percent agreed that New Zealand's economic system was not set up to effectively to address issues like housing, healthcare and climate change.

Half of New Zealanders also agreed that billionaires shouldn't exist while people still struggled with basic necessities like food.

Sixty-eight percent supported billionaires being taxed more to fund public goods like healthcare, housing and climate action.

And another 37 percent were in favour of introducing a billion-dollar wealth cap to minimise the amount of wealth any person could legally hold.

This level of economic dissatisfaction and support for taxing billionaires means that taxing wealth fairly is pushing on an open door. The public is waiting for the government to do it, but so far only the Greens and Te Pāti Māori have committed. Meanwhile, Labour is still flailing around with its weak and pathetic "let's not actually tax anybody" capital gains tax. Will they rise to the occasion and lead people where they want to be led? Or put their own property portfolios before the public and continue to be toadies for the wealthy?

National has fucked the economy

National's core promise as a government is to be "better economic managers" (meaning: bald men in blue suits). And they made specific promises last election to return the government to surplus by the next election. So how's that working out for them? Terribly:

There is still no surplus in sight, according to Treasury’s latest economic forecasts.

Treasury sees the deficit deepening further, from $14.0 billion in the year to June 2025 to $16.9b in 2025/26, before narrowing to $60 million in 2029/30.

While this is an improvement from when Treasury last published forecasts at the May Budget, it still undershoots National’s pre-election pledge to return the books to surplus by 2026/27.

Unmentioned in any of the media coverage (which is all about surpluses and GDP and debt) but in the HYEFU is that unemployment still hasn't peaked and will remain high as far ahead as treasury is looking, while wages won't grow. So life is going to suck for normal people, no matter what the overall economy does.

And all because Nicola Willis crashed the economy by cutting everything and sacking everyone. Worse, she's promising more of the same, in a desperate effort to meet that self-imposed budget target.

The evidence is clear: things won't get better until we remove this government and replace it with one which understands that making things better requires investment, not cuts. The sooner the election, the better!

You don't win elections by telling voters to expect less

Aotearoa is broken. The economy is fucked. The dogshit vandal regime is smashing our democracy, our public services, and our society, while pushing the accelerator on burning the planet to the ground. People are crying out for change. And so Labour, the largest opposition party and so the de facto leader if there is a change of government, is telling them "nope, you won't get that from us!" First, we had finance spokesperson Barbara Edmonds promising to continue the NeoLiberal austerity which has gutted our public services and allowed our infrastructure to decay. And now we have party leader Chris Hipkins - the de facto Prime Minister of any new government - telling people to dream smaller:

But the wider public-facing focus of the conference was a presentation of Labour as a very sensible-sounding Government-in-waiting, with small targeted changes to allow for more health spending, but nothing big enough for National to really attack.

[...]

Hipkins told media Labour would need to do more than just critique National to win. Yet despite borrowing the design style of New York mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani for the posters the party faithful were waving at Hipkins, the new policy he had to offer yesterday was far less ambitious than anything Mamdani would put his name to – a new low-interest loan scheme to let 50 GPs a year set up their own practices. It’s hard to see this being a policy that defines much of the campaign. A small, easily achievable promise is exactly what Labour is eager to put out currently. The party will tell anyone who asks that it was making too many promises that hurt them last time they were in government.

Which will no doubt have the smooth-brained political consultants nodding and stroking their beards and murmuring sagely about "small target strategies". Quite apart from the inherent deceit - a "small target strategy" is one where a party deliberately refuses to say what it plans to do in government, so its lying to voters - its a mistake. In order to regain power, Labour needs to increase its vote share to 40% of the vote (it can get less if it is willing to deal with a three-way coalition situation, but 40% plus 10% from a coalition partner is the basic equation). Its not going to get there by telling people to expect less. While it might avoid offending swinging middle voters, its not going to inspire anyone to actually tick their box rather than shrug and stay home.

Its also a complete failure to read the room. People want change. Not just in people, but in policies. Not just in tone, but in substance. Sure, we want the current regime gone, an end to the regime's weekly attacks on Māori, poor people, parents, children, democracy, and everything else - but we also want the harm caused by those attacks to be undone, insofar as it is possible. We want te Tiriti restored. We want democracy respected. We want pay equity and worker's rights restored. And we want the health and education systems to function. But Labour isn't in any hurry to do that bit. They'll change the faces and the tone and stop the attacks, but they're not promising to fix anything (or at least, anything which might cost money - can't offend the rich, after all). It really is as if their entire critique of government boils down to it simply being a matter of the wrong people being in charge, and things would be infinitely better if only their team were the ones collecting the fat salaries and juicy appointments...

Fortunately there are other left-leaning parties who are actually promising to change things and undo the damage the vandal regime is causing. And because we have MMP, voting for one of them doesn't actually hurt the chances of a left-wing government (you're just contributing to a different part of that equation, while still helping to boost the total). So I'd suggest that if you're a left voter who wants more, who doesn't want to dream smaller and expect less, then vote for one of them and leave Labour to rot.

There is a magic money-tree after all

Remember when Bill English called prisons "a moral and fiscal failure"? It was an example of his cautious conservativism, a recognition not just that prisons do no-one any good 9and often make people worse) and are driven by wider social failings, but also that maintaining that system costs an absolute fuck-ton of money which could be better spent elsewhere.

The attitude of the current National regime couldn't be any more different:

Facing reporters at Parliament on Tuesday, Luxon was questioned about the prison muster, which has surged to record highs and is now nearing 11,000 inmates.

"Absolutely, that's a good thing," he said. "Yep, good thing."

Luxon said the coalition would not ease up on criminals or adjust policy simply because the costs were rising.

"I understand... the financial implication of... restoring law and order in New Zealand, but we make no apologies about that," he said.

"The cost will be what the cost will be."

There's no thinking here, just the mindless "number go up so it must be good" of the mediocre middle manager promoted to his level of incompetence. As for "the cost will be what the cost will be", its a perfect example of how spending decisions illustrate real priorities. The regime dismantled the pay equity regime, putting fair pay out of reach for a generation, because "we can't afford it". It uses the same excuse for working doctors and nurses to death rather than accepting safe staffing levels, and for underpaying teachers and public servants. It is used to justify cutting Kāinga Ora's massive building program, leaving empty wastelands in our cities where once social housing stood; for shitting on beneficiaries; for cutting the vital Cook Strait ferry link; for refusing to fund decarbonisation; and for a host of other policy areas. If we need it, National says "we can't afford it". But when it comes to prisons, "the cost will be what the cost will be".

I guess there is a "magic money tree" in Wellington after all. Its just that the money can only be spent on cruelty and sadism, on ruining people and making our problems worse (and on roads, of course). As for our actual needs, our actual demands, National doesn't give a flying fuck about any of that.

We need to get rid of this corrupt dogshit regime as quickly as possible. Bring on the election!

Luxon is a poster boy for greed

Yesterday, when talking about his proposed capital gains tax, Labour leader Chris Hipkins pointed out an unpleasant truth about the Prime Minister:

"He sold four houses last year and made more money, tax free, from doing that than he made in the prime minister's salary, which he paid tax on every dollar of.

"Why should he be able to make more than $600,000 in one year from flipping properties whilst the people who go out and work hard every day for a living pay tax on every single dollar that they earn?"

He made more from flipping houses than he did from his huge prime minister's salary, as much as a dozen of us would earn in a year. But unlike those dozen median income earners, he didn't pay any tax on his side-hustle income. It is simply obscene.

Luxon thinks this is unfair, but its not. Luxon is emblematic of a social problem in our country: that the rich are thieves. They steal from us, they do not pay their way, and they write the rules to ensure that that theft is legal. Luxon, a rich-lister worth between $20 and $30 million, is basically a poster boy for what is wrong with our society, a perfect illustration that you don't get rich (or stay rich) by living honestly. He chisels us at every opportunity, demanding to be paid to live in his own house, demanding cuts to his rates, and now demanding that we all ignore his greed and tax cheating. We should not ignore it. Instead, we should throw this rich prick out on his arse, and tax his capital gains and his wealth so that he pays his fair share and no longer distorts our society. And if he doesn't like that, he used to run an airline, so I'm sure he knows what to do.

Still useless

So, Labour has finally, shambolically, released its capital gains tax policy, and as signalled it is a weak extension of the bright-line test, covering only non-residential property (but not farms), pre-compromised into oblivion in a desperate effort to avoid offending anybody. When they teased this idea back in September, I said that they're going to pay the political price of a CGT, in order to not raise enough money to do anything useful. All cost, no benefit. That hasn't changed. About the only thing going for this policy is that it can be implemented quickly, within a year of an election. And it can be extended later to cover the things Labour has excluded, like farms and shares and other financial instruments, some of which might require tricky policy work. But Labour isn't talking about that, so they're not even teasing incrementalism here. So even if you have an optimistic view that this is part of a secret plan to incrementally impose a comprehensive CGT one sector at a time, Labour simply can't be trusted to follow through on it.

(As for their quid pro quo - three free GP visits a year for everyone! - they've lumbered it with a pile of NeoLiberal rationing and a de facto universal ID card. Which is just intrusive, pointless waste. FFS, just fund health...)

It is clear that the state needs money to pay for the things we want it to do. It is also clear that we need to arrest inequality and the political power of the ultra-rich, by taking money away from the wealthy and using it for public purposes. Labour's bullshit half-measure doesn't really do any of these things. So I won't be voting for them. Instead, I'll be voting for a party which promises an actual wealth tax, which whacks the rich and raises enough revenue to actually fix things. I encourage everyone on the left, who wants proper public services and hates billionaires, to do the same. Labour's half-measure is OK as a transitional step towards a real wealth tax. But its not enough - and looking at their institutional culture of complying-in-advance with the demands of the rich, nothing from them ever will be.

Pointless cruelty

That is the only way to describe the regime's sudden policy to apply a parental income test to 18 and 19 year old jobseekers. Legally these people are adults, and their parents have no legal duty to support them. But apparently now they will be made dependent.

The ostensible purpose for this policy is to encourage 18 and 19 year olds to work. That's bullshit, and everyone knows it. The simple fact is that, thanks to National's engineered recession, there are no jobs. And even the people who Chris Luxon thinks 18 and 19 year olds should be working for say so.

(The real reason is to juke the stats so National can meet its self-imposed target to cut jobseeker numbers by 50,000. They can't do it by getting people into work, so they'll just throw them off benefits instead. And they will call this "success").

Cutting benefit eligibility when there are no jobs does not incentivise anything. It is nothing but an exercise in pointless cruelty. But it is so very, very National, isn't it? Its what they always do: blame and victimise the young, rather than admit that they fucked things up.

"Laser focused"

When the regime was elected, they claimed to have a laser focus on bringing down the cost of living. So how's that working out for them? Badly:

Food prices are rising much faster than wages, putting more pressure on household budgets and creating a squeeze that's feeling worse for some than the global financial crisis, one economist says.

Stats NZ data for August shows prices were 5 percent higher than a year earlier.

Depending on how wage growth is measured, incomes are growing by as little as half that.

[...]

Higher prices for the grocery food group, up 4.7 percent, contributed most to the annual increase in food prices.

That was largely down to the increase in milk, cheese and butter. Milk was up 16.3 percent to $4.72 per two litres, cheese up 26.2 percent to $12.89 for a kilogram block and butter was up 31.8 percent year-on-year to $8.58 per 500g.

Meat, fruit, and vegetables are also all up. And what's the government's answer? Nothing. Oh, they'll tinker around the edges and wish for a deep-pocketed competitor to enter the market, but they won't actually do anything. They won't make a KiwiKai to provide competition, or forcibly break up the oligopoly which gouges us. And the Prime Minister's response to basic food prices being so high is to blame "international markets", without once asking why kiwis, the people who subsidise food production and bear its environmental costs, are paying those prices, or why food producers are allowed to export in preference to feeding us first. Because asking those questions would be very bad for the people who fund this regime, and who profit by gouging us.

But if this regime doesn't have an answer, then voters can and should look for one at the ballot box. Price gouging does terrible things for your social licence, and its time we reminded our grocery oligopolies of that. Regulate them properly, force them to sell to us first at a fair price before they export anything, and make it clear that their primary purpose is to serve the New Zealand market, not foreigners. The problem with having a food industry which exports 90% of its output is that they don't have to care about us; so maybe we need to challenge the problem at its root, stop those exports, shrink the industry to something more manageable (and less environmentally destructive), rather than letting them impoverish us economically, socially, and environmentally for their own profit?

Typically useless

On Saturday, the Herald's Thomas Coughlan reported that Labour was inching its way to a capital gains tax. But in typical Labour fashion, they're watering it down so much as to exclude almost everything:

It would probably look like a maximalist bright-line test: family homes exempt, farms also likely spared, but residential investment property and the family bach are all in.

Tax would be levied at realisation, not the once-favoured “deemed return” method, which is a wee bit too much like a wealth tax on people who aren’t always that wealthy.

[...]

Trade-offs abound. Political saleability comes at a fiscal cost. Oliver’s paper reckoned his limited CGT would raise barely 39% of the broad CGT’s take – around $2.4 billion after 10 years. Not trivial, but still less in 10 years than Labour’s 2023 wealth tax would have netted in one. At worst, it could make Labour look unserious about tackling the alleged austerity it’s spent the parliamentary term prosecuting.

So, they're going to pay the political price of a CGT, in order to not raise enough money to do anything useful. All cost, no benefit. And meanwhile, their rival parties, on whom they depend to even be a government, are going for simpler wealth taxes, which whack the rich to raise enough revenue to actually fix things, while leaving normal people - almost everybody, in fact - completely unaffected. Which seems simpler, easier, and clearer than Labour's bullshit.

If you're on the left, and you want better public services and a reduction in inequality, why vote for half-measures? And why vote for a party which waters its policies down, in order to comply in advance with the rich? Fuck the rich. By definition, we outnumber them 99-to-one. And if our country imagines itself to be democratic, our government should serve us, not them. It is an appalling indictment of our mainstream political parties that they continually pander to this tiny minority, while screwing over almost everybody who actually votes for them.

So next election, if you want change, vote for it. Vote for parties who will hold a metaphorical gun to labour's head to force them to do what is necessary. Don't vote for useless bootlickers.

National's divide and rule plan for health

The regime's austerity has resulted in a perfect storm of industrial action: primary teachers, secondary teachers, and nurses have all struck this month, and doctors are currently balloting on industrial action. And the latter is enough for Health Minister Simeon Brown to demand arbitration:

Brown said the only way to avoid that strike would be for an independent, binding, arbitration process.

“The rejection of Health New Zealand’s latest offer and the immediate ballot for further strike action has made it clear that the bargaining relationship has broken down. I see little prospect of Health New Zealand and ASMS reaching a resolution on their own,” he said.

[...]

Brown gave the union until the end of the week to decide whether it would accept going to an independent arbitration process.

If it wanted arbitration, he said the union would need to agree not to strike.

But why should they do that? Why surrender in advance?

Brown's unspoken threat here is legislating to ban strikes and force arbitration, as is the case for police. But that has huge political costs, and runs the risks of replacing organised industrial action with disorganised industrial action - with the kicker that there will be no-one to negotiate with to stop it. The fact that Brown is asking, rather than doing that, tells us that he doesn't want to pay those costs and risk those outcomes at present. And he'll be even less likely to want to pay them, and more likely to want to settle, in an election year. So there's nothing to gain by complying in advance - and insofar as any legislation will simply be repealed, and will increase the chances of regime change and a new government more willing to settle in the long-term, then there doesn't seem to be much to lose by rejection National's divide-and-rule plan and saying "fuck you; make me".

If the regime wants a functioning health system, and a functioning education system, and functioning public services, they have a simple solution: pay these workers what they're worth. And introduce safe staffing, so our overworked hospitals don't kill people. Its that simple. And if they want to plead poverty, having given away billions in pointless landlord tax cuts, and wasted hundreds of millions more on no boats, that honestly sounds like a "them" problem. They're the government, they can raise money by taxation or decide to spend it less wastefully if they want. And if they're prefer to have strikes and dysfunctional public services rather than do that, well, that's on them.

National's New Zealand

National came to power in part because it promised to reduce the cost of living of ordinary New Zealadners. But two years in, the reality is different. Stuff today reports that we are paying 80% more for food than the Australians are, despite (or perhaps because?) farmers telling us they're "feeding the world". And meanwhile, RNZ reports that people with jobs are forced to live in cars:

Lower Hutt vinyl layer Dylan Holdaway, 35, said he had been sleeping in his silver Toyota Wish for the past five months.

He told RNZ that living this way had led to him losing 25 kilograms and dealing with several infections.

[...]

He worked 30 hours a week, and said living in his car made it hard to maintain his appearance on the job.

This is National's New Zealand: a country where we are gouged by landlords, supermarkets, banks, and power companies; where ordinary people with jobs can't afford a place to sleep and are slowly starving to death because they can't afford food. Because National's low-wage, cartel-dominated economy doesn't provide the income for people to have even the basics anymore, and their gutted government doesn't provide the services to make up for that.

In 2016, similar stories shamed the Key government into actually doing something to ease homelessness. But this bunch are shameless. They have made things this way deliberately, grinding down working conditions, giving a green light to gougers, gutting Kainga Ora, and giving away the government revenue which could have helped solve this to landlords with gratuitous tax cuts. They are not going to fix this, because doing so would mean admitting they were wrong - and because they and their mates are profiting from the misery they are inflicting.

The only way this will change is if we change the regime. But that's not enough, because the next government needs to actually do something about it, rather than just trying to perpetuate the grossly unjust status quo. And that means restarting Kainga Ora's building program, to build the homes people need; forcibly breaking up the cartels and regulating the fuck out of the pieces to prevent price-gouging; regulating landlords to prevent them gouging for rent; restoring the benefit system; and taxing wealth to pay for it all. And if Labour won't promise that, then you should vote for someone else who will.

Feathering their cronies' nests

The central refrain of this regime has been "we can't afford it". They're constantly pleading poverty over public services, and using "tight" finances as an excuse to drive down public service wages. Meanwhile, they're nearly doubling the pay of their cronies who serve on government boards:

A Cabinet document, quietly uploaded online on Monday, shows ministers agreed to lift the maximum annual fee for chairs of governance boards from $90,000 to about $162,000.

The "Cabinet Fees Framework" is not binding but provides guidance to ministers when deciding compensation for those on a range of bodies, such as royal commissions and ministerial inquiries.

Speaking on Tuesday, Luxon said public sector fees had become completely "out of whack" with private sector rates and needed a reset.

So, just to get this clear: workers are paid too much and need a pay cut, but managers and board directors are paid too little, and need a whopping increase (probably so they can afford butter). As usual, austerity applies only to normal people, not the rich. Alternatively, the regime is just looting the public purse and engaging in upwards redistribution - as usual.

And next, of course, those higher pay rates for government boards will be used to "justify" higher pay for Ministers. Just wait...

Willis says "let them eat butter"

Butter has become a flashpoint in the cost-of-living crisis, with the price of the baking staple doubling in the last 14 months, and people queuing for cheap blocks. Its got so bad that National - the party of rich farmers - has had to pretend to care, with Nicola Willis having a meeting with Fonterra's CEO in an effort to talk down the price. The result? everything is fine, apparently:

The Finance Minister does not believe New Zealanders are getting a "raw deal" on butter, but has accepted there is no getting away from how expensive it is right now.

We’re not getting a raw deal? Bullshit. We can see it every time we go to the supermarket. But Willis is paid $304,300 a year plus slush, so she can buy all the butter she wants. Which makes the above sound a lot like "let them eat butter".

So who’s to blame? Willis is desperate to deflect attention from Fonterra, so blames the supermarkets:

The meeting had reinforced Willis' interest in increasing supermarket competition to put downward pressure on the price of butter.

"All roads lead back to supermarket competition. I continue to believe that is the most powerful lever that the government has on this issue. We will never be able to control global dairy prices. What we can influence is the amount of competition in New Zealand's grocery sector and we have a lot of work underway to address that."

While the supermarket cartel is absolutely part of the problem, National's "work programme" is basically "hope a third party joins the oligopoly and gets in on the gouging". So they have no real solutions there. And they're certainly not going to do what is necessary: legislate to forcibly break up the cartel and forbid mergers in the sector or its underlying logistics to prevent such accumulation of market power.

And none of this should be letting Fonterra off the hook. Because while there's a global price, there's no reason we, the people who bear the environmental costs of the dairy industry's profiteering and who subsidise them billions of dollars a year in water and carbon, should pay it. And we have tools we can use to ensure we get some benefit from hosting this parasitic, polluting industry. For example, we could ban or restrict dairy exports to ensure they served the domestic market first. Or just directly regulate to require them to sell domestically at a low price. Because seeing butter exported overseas while it becomes unaffordable to kiwis is simply unacceptable.

Obviously, regulating Fonterra would be bad for farmers. But it would be far better for the rest of us. And why shouldn’t those subsidised rural parasites give something back to the community they leech off for once?

This industry should be destroyed, not subsidised

The health insurance industry is parasitic on our public health system, taking people's money, providing them with th easy, cheap stuff, then sending them straight back into the public health system for anything which might cost them money. But not enough people are buying it anymore. So they're doing what all NZ industries do when the going gets tough: demanding a government subsidy:

Health insurance is becoming too expensive for some New Zealanders and it's prompted a call from the industry for tax breaks to help.

Research from the Financial Services Council, which represents life and health insurers, shows that a third of people with health insurance have downgraded or reduced their cover in the past year.

They're wanting full tax deductibility for premiums, and an exemption from fringe-benefit tax for employer-paid schemes. Which would obviously be great for them, and great for the rich people using their system to try and jump the queue. But any money spent subsidising their profits like this would be far better spent directly through the public health system. And spent there, it would benefit everybody, not just health insurance executives and their shareholders.

This is not an industry that should be subsidised. Instead, like foodbanks, the government should be actively trying to drive health insurers out of business, by building a stronger public health system that provides for everyone's needs.