Andrew Dickins: Change doesn't come cheap and it's the poor who'll pay

I wonder if everyone, particularly the poor, are aware of how much pain we need to bear before we get to the gain we've been promised.

Any change of government results in uncertainty, but when a government promises to be transformative then a wise person knows that things are going to get worse before they get better.

So first of all. Noticed the price of petrol going up? As the market waits for what is going down with policy settings, the dollar is also going down. And that means petrol is going up. It is what it is. But that hurts the poor more than the rich, who don't notice a cent here or there.

But hold on - there's also the Auckland regional fuel tax of 10 cents a litre which was the first policy off the rank. There's another cost.

The fascinating thing is, that tax will pay for infrastructure to provide public transport so the poor can still get around the city. But that won't be in place for years and in that time the working poor still have to get to their workplaces. By car. Paying 10 cents a litre more. Again, the rich will suck that up no problem. But the poor won't. The poor are being asked for a donation to help themselves. Not very Labour I would think. Normally they'd ask the rich to pay for the improvements to the poor's lot. That would probably be congestion taxes. User pays. Hit the fat cats coming into Auckland central to the highrise head offices would be the normal Labour way. But no.

And so the list goes on.
The warnings of pay pressure and the resultant strikes in an environment of emboldened unions. The threat of trade negotiation breakdowns because at the end of the day we're going to be more protectionist. The taking away of the Timaru gas boom because of emission concerns. And speaking of emissions, there are all the penalties that this government is more prepared to pay than the last one.

None of this is necessarily wrong, but I think it is prudent to say, particularly to the poor, that things are going to get harder before they get better.

That's always the price of transformative governments. As the physical trainers say: no pain, no gain.

The government won't talk about the pain, only the gain, for obvious reasons. The opposition will hype the gain into some mythical monster. Look what they did to the elusive fiscal hole.

The truth is - like all things - in the middle

But I am just warning change doesn't come cheap. I trust you're aware of it and up for it.