Finance and Cyclone Recovery Minister Grant Robertson reveals more details of Budget 2023 to Newstalk ZB’s Mike Hosking. Video / Newstalk ZB
OPINION:
This Thursday, the Government could end poverty. It could boost teachers and nurses and midwives and emergency service workers’ wages and conditions to rival Australia. It could knuckle down and commit to the scientifically necessary actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in agriculture, transport and manufacturing. It could put more conservation rangers in our native forests, restore wetlands and daylight streams across our cities.
It could pay for these things like the First Labour Government did, with taxes on those who profited handsomely during an extremely difficult period of time for everyone else.
The Government of Rt. Hon. Michael Joseph Savage created universal superannuation, introduced free medical care and education, established national libraries and legislated the 40-hour, five-day work week along with our first public holidays, including for Christmas, New Year’s and Easter.
All of these things were impossible, until they weren’t.
All of these things were well-resourced and capable of expansion, until they weren’t.
Covid-19 exposed that the things we’ve been told are impossible are simply a matter of political willpower. Direct payments to people who need it, flexible working arrangements and rent freezes were issued at lightning speed. The needs of everyday people were prioritised.
Government Budgets, like laws, aren’t passed down from the gods. They aren’t written in scripture. They are the product of decisions. Those decisions reflect the values and priorities of decision-makers.
Tax, trust, legal and economic systems driven by political decisions built “business as usual”, where the top 311 families hold more wealth than the bottom two and a half million New Zealanders. Where those with an average wealth of $276 million pay an effective tax rate less than half of the average New Zealander.
Last week in Parliament I asked Prime Minister Chris Hipkins about the Government research which unveiled this history-making inequality and whether it would spur action. While he stood by his statement that some New Zealanders are not paying their fair share of tax, he made it very clear that he did not intend to do something about it, at least in this term of government.
Grant Robertson announced that the Budget would contain $4b in savings and reprioritisations over the next four years. Photo / Marty Melville
He and the Minister of Finance have spent the past few weeks tempering any expectation of real change, let alone transformation, in Thursday’s Budget. They’re talking down spending, talking up trade-offs and trademarking “bread and butter”.
These are their decisions. Tinker or transform. Choose an admittedly unfair status quo or choose the change empowered by a historical majority.
We’re already on the middle road. It’s flooding.
You cannot keep a world below 1.5 degrees of warming without taking the necessary, and now requisite, radical action to actually achieve that. That means you cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet. You cannot end poverty without raising benefit levels to livable incomes. To do otherwise is to decide that some people deserve to live in poverty. You cannot get house prices to affordable levels when you refuse to define what affordable levels actually are.
You cannot say that you are pulling all of the available levers while ruling out land back, a capital gains tax, a wealth tax or rent controls.
You’re not using all the cutlery when you leave the knife and fork in the drawer.
Across Auckland Central and throughout Aotearoa, the discontent at politics as usual is palpable. New Zealanders know intimately what the research and evidence consistently substantiates: things are broken. The “system”, economically and environmentally, is unsustainable.
Everything can change. It did in the 1930s and 40s with the introduction of the welfare state, then again in the 1980s and 90s with a concerted effort to shred that social contract.
It’s 2023. Everything is already changing. Our cities and towns and regions have been ravaged by climate-change-charged weather. We have the highest rates of wealth inequality on record.
Decisions made on Thursday can change everything, or they can perpetuate these problems. If our Parliament doesn’t have the guts, New Zealanders can not only elect those who will - but join their campaigns and community-building efforts - in the lead-up to October’s election.
