OPINION
Strange but true. Both major parties are becalmed on a sea of voter scepticism. Both are responding with what they hope will be populist appeals rather than policies of direction and purpose. And yet it’s those very appeals to populism that undermine their popularity. They’re stuck in the middle.
We want more, and better. We live in critical times and we want our political leaders to rise to the challenge. To fill their sails with policies of direction and purpose. But it’s the minor parties - some, not all - that offer this.
Some are intent on sailing into a storm and some out of it, and each of us can decide which is which. But if one or more minor party becomes influential in the next government, we will probably not remain becalmed.
Being becalmed, by the way, as any sailor will tell you, is not the same as being calm. It’s not a happy place: everything gets worse and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Labour leader Chris Hipkins has confirmed his party will remove GST from unprocessed fruit and vegetables if it is re-elected. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this.
The policy, along with more far-reaching ones, is conventional throughout the OECD and in many other parts of the world. In Australia, it applies to all unprocessed food, including meat and bread, and it’s now accepted that adding the tax would undermine public health.
We should be talking a lot more here about how taxes on food impact public health.
Instead, a critical bunch of cynics and purists keep trying to persuade us that making food cheaper in this way is “bad policy”. They argue it will help the wealthy more than the poor, it’s too complicated and too likely to create dreadful anomalies.
This is all hogwash. Removal of sales taxes almost always helps the wealthy more, because they spend more. Wealthy people buy more expensive food and they drive more too.
But that entirely misses the point. When essentials like food become a bit cheaper, it makes a bigger material difference to those on low incomes because, for them, every penny matters more.
And the anomalies? So what if a bag of shredded salad veges becomes GST-exempt but coleslaw with dressing doesn’t? That’s such a petty criticism.
As for simplicity, I get that it’s a virtue in a tax system. It reduces the risk of avoidance and evasion and can be cheaper to run. But I’ll take the “too complicated” criticism seriously when the critics advocate taxing all wealth and income equitably, whether it’s earned or not.
That’s the simplicity we really need.
Which points to the only substantial criticism of Labour’s policy. It’s timid. A bit of a breeze, not a genuine wind beneath our wings.
Meanwhile, National’s own brand of populist posturing has seen it hit a laughable new low.
Yep, it’s Christopher Luxon’s plan to ban students’ phones in school.
Don’t get me wrong: phones in schools obviously are a problem. They’re disruptive in all sorts of ways, from online bullying and distractions in class to using up schools’ bandwidth.
But phones cause problems everywhere. They undermine in-real-life communication, they distort the way we learn about the world and they cause car crashes. Adults glued to their own phones are doing an excellent job modelling the behaviour for children.
Why pretend this is a kids’ problem or that we can solve it by punishing them?
There’s much more wrong with National’s policy. Many schools already manage the use of phones, limiting their disruption, utilising their value as an educational tool and retaining the ability of kids and parents to stay in touch.
It’s not easy - nothing is - but it’s doable and they do it. Governments should support them, not set crude rules.
As for the hypocrisy, it’s breathtaking. National loves to promote personal responsibility and local communities running their own affairs. These are proudly proclaimed core party values. But is there a bigger example of the Nanny State - anywhere? What does National stand for, apart from getting votes?
And yes, many kids are struggling at school and many teachers are struggling to manage that.
But why is this? Teacher shortages and other symptoms of underfunding take their toll. Bullying is an ongoing issue in many schools and so is violence in many homes.
Covid has been profoundly disruptive. In May, the longitudinal Growing Up in New Zealand study reported on 12-year-olds. It found that 52 per cent had an “increase in depressive symptoms” and this was more common among Māori, the poor and children who identified as transgender or non-binary.
And then there’s poverty. The same study reported that a quarter of children live in homes with damp or mould, and a sixth experience food insecurity. A fifth had been forced to move house in the previous four years.
If we want better outcomes for our kids in school, ending poverty would be a good place to start.
Addressing poverty was the aim of the other component of Labour’s announcement on Sunday: an increase in Working for Families (WFF) payments. At around $45 per week, this will be 10 times greater than the tax saving those same families will make on their vege bills. Labour says 160,000 families will be better off.
But none of them will be out-of-work beneficiaries, because WFF excludes them.
Labour is nothing if not true to form. The policy is good, but for heaven’s sake, why isn’t it better?
As economist Susan St John from the Child Poverty Action Group told RNZ yesterday, WFF’s in-work tax credit should have been folded into the family tax credit.
“If that had happened,” she said, “there would have been at least another $72.50 into the very worst-off families in New Zealand.” Instead, she believes, “the families of at least 160,000 children, maybe up to 200,000, will get absolutely nothing”.
The discrimination against beneficiaries not in paid work also contains a double punch for WFF recipients who lose their jobs. Not only do they lose their wages but, after two weeks, their WFF payments will stop as well.
The Green Party has compared the new WFF regime with its own Income Guarantee package, announced in June.
According to the party, a single parent with two children earning the median wage and working fulltime would be $140 a week better off with the Greens’ plan, but they’d get only $25 more from Labour.
A two-parent family on median wages, working a combined 60 hours a week, with three children, would be $225 better off under the Greens, compared to the $25 bump they’d get from Labour.
A single parent with two children who earns $8000 a year from part-time work and receives a Sole Parent Support benefit would be $119 per week better off under the Greens’ plan. With Labour’s WFF changes, they’ll get nothing more.
This is the difference between a big of huffing and puffing and a proper wind to fill your sails.
The Greens propose real tax and benefit reform. Their policy includes a wealth tax, adjusted tax brackets, the Income Guarantee and changes to Working for Families and other benefits. They say 95 per cent of the population would pay less tax, while the wealthiest 5 per cent pay more.
That longitudinal study of 12-year-olds made some other telling discoveries, although you wouldn’t say they were surprising. Māori kids, for example, were half again as likely as Pākehā to live in inadequate housing. Pasifika were twice as likely.
But the study also revealed that most children do live in a warm, dry home. It’s a reminder: while the worst problems of poverty are acute, they don’t touch most people. So what’s out of sight can easily be out of mind.
But poverty is not out of mind for politicians. They know exactly what they’re doing when they knock a bit off the price of your greens or whip up the hysteria about kids and their mobile phones.
Diverting our attention. Pretending they’re sailing along, even though they’re really still becalmed.
“Poverty is a political choice,” says party co-leader James Shaw, “and the Green Party is choosing to end it.”
They could all do that. If they did, we’d be up on foils.
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues. He joined the Herald in 2018.
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