Chlöe Swarbrick is the Green Party co-leader and MP for Auckland Central.
OPINION
Together, we can do things that none of us could do alone.
There are very few people who have the individual wealth to build schools, hospitals, mass public transport networks and thousands of state homes.
Few could afford to hire the rangers to manage the conservation estate that covers a third of the country, protect our borders from invasive pests, or wrangle down climate-changing emissions across industries.
There’s next to none who could afford our annual $20 billion-plus superannuation bill.
That’s why we form society.
A dollar of one’s own money might be enough to buy a bag of lollies from the dairy.
But a dollar from each of the approximate 3.38 million taxpayers in this country helps seed serious investment in the challenges we all face.
In fact, we could levy that investment fairly on the basis of what we can afford to contribute.
That means taxing wealth, not just work.
Unfortunately, politics for most of my lifetime has been focused instead on arguments around who can spend that isolated dollar better, obscuring the critical questions of how we confront the climate and inequality crises, drivers of crime and $200b infrastructural deficit.
These issues impact all of us, and we genuinely cannot deal with them in isolation.
Regular people have been primed by decades of political debate informed by trickle-down economics to look at a government Budget and ask “What’s in it for me?” instead of where we as a country are going.
The bloody-minded pursuit of $14.7b in tax cuts announced in last week’s Budget comes at enormous collective, environmental and social cost.
We’re talking about delivery on one short-term, heat-of-the-moment election promise that in the cold light of day doesn’t really stack up, least of all to meaningfully reduce the cost of living.
We’re talking about political decisions that kick the can down the road on every mounting long-term issue we’re facing.
The Government is dancing on the head of a pin to argue the cuts are “fully funded” from slashing-and-burning programmes for half-price public transport, conservation, climate, state housing builds, 20 hours free early childhood education, community energy funds, laptops for teachers, freshwater programmes, agriculture emissions pricing and more.
But this doesn’t hide the fact that the Government is borrowing an extra $12b above December’s forecast.
At the collective cost of nearly $15b to invest in our infrastructure and collective problems, the maximum tax cut an individual without children can receive is $26 a week.
Meanwhile, properties on Trade Me have risen by an average of $50 per week since last year.
The Reserve Bank told us that the $2.9b tax cut for landlords will serve to bid up the cost of housing, while Treasury’s Budget Economic and Fiscal Update tells us rents are forecast to continue rising rapidly.
Government decisions also mean public transport costs have doubled for around 774,000 children, young people and their families.
Throughout the campaign, in office and post-Budget, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon continued to tell us that these tax cuts would mean families would be better off by $250 a fortnight.
As it transpires, just under 3000 families will be eligible for that level of tax cut.
Meanwhile, around 9000 will be worse off as a result of these tax changes.
This means that triple the amount of people will be worse off than those who actually receive the benefits National built their campaign upon.
They’ll be hoping these broken promises and inconvenient facts are swept up in general political frustration and quickly forgotten.
Between the co-Deputy Prime Ministers igniting culture wars over bathroom access and “woke food”, shredding of environmental and climate programmes in order to pour oil, coal and gas on the climate crisis fire and rushed legislative agenda to wilfully misinterpret and deprioritise our constitutional foundations in Te Tiriti, there’s a lot to keep anyone who cares about our country busy.
The task in front of us is not just to mobilise and organise to stop the bad stuff.
Perversely, it’s those profiteering from the deeply unfair and unequal status quo who benefit if that’s where the battle lines are drawn.
Our work must go deeper.
Within our homes, workplaces, educational institutions, neighbourhoods and communities, it’s time for us to have overdue, hard and long conversations.
It’s time to talk about what we value, who we are, and how we all – collectively – can make that happen.
It’s time to stop letting the agenda be set by mainstream political incentives to respond to the immediate polling and issue of the day at the expense of our shared future.
It’s time to do this from the grassroots up.
Our democracy, our politics and our future don’t belong to any one political party nor politician nor prime minister.
It belongs to you – to all of us.
Once upon a time, the idea of women voting, let alone occupying seats in Parliament, the idea of civil rights, of legal personhood for rivers and mountains, and the right for me to marry who I love, were all impossible to fathom.
These changes didn’t happen by accident.
They weren’t ideas magicked up by politicians in the midst of election campaigns.
They were values and causes fought and won by enough regular people who put enough pressure on enough politicians to change the course of history.
We’ve done it before and we can do it again.
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