Finance Minister Nicola Willis will deliver her first budget on May 30. Photo / Mark Mitchell
OPINION
At National Party meetings there’s a thing they love doing. The speaker will say, “We’re going to get New Zealand …” and the crowd will join in loudly: “Back on track!”
They’ve done it all last year and into this: Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Finance Minister Nicola Willis both led enthusiastic renditions of the chant at his recent State of the Nation rally. The party faithful just can’t get enough of it. Fair enough, I guess. Every group has its bonding mechanisms.
And now, after a summer with fires but no devastating floods, we’re starting to see what “back on track” really means. And what it doesn’t mean.
It’s not literal. There’s no commitment to fixing Auckland’s broken rail network or building any light-rail services, even though they’re much-needed and there are far cheaper and easier options than Labour’s tunnelled dinosaur.
We won’t be “back on” railway tracks anytime soon. But I think we knew that.
Still, why is the state of the railways in Auckland not an emergency commanding the Government’s urgent attention?
Now the focus is moving to a very big “back-on-track” project. It’s Willis’ first budget, due at the end of May, and there’s every sign she wants it to rival Ruth Richardson’s self-proclaimed “mother of all budgets” in 1991.
Richardson was finance minister in the National government of Jim Bolger and it was her first budget too. She rolled back benefits, set in train the collapse of the state housing programme and in many other ways pumped up the neoliberal agenda of her predecessor, Labour’s finance minister Roger Douglas.
Just a couple of months earlier, the government had passed the Employment Contracts Act, which helped eviscerate trade unions and laid the groundwork for the low-wage economy that still blights this country today.
Richardson herself remains an inspirational figure to many in the Government, and the admiration runs both ways. In 2020 she told the Herald that Act Party leader David Seymour “represents the finest political leadership — lucky us that a person of his calibre … is so dedicated to his mission to make New Zealand a better country”.
His prescription for savage cuts to the public service is pure Richardson. So is Housing Minister Chris Bishop’s demonisation of Kainga Ora, which could destroy the agency’s capacity to keep building affordable and state housing at pace.
So are Social Development Minister Louise Upston’s attacks on beneficiaries and the suite of new employment laws rushed through Parliament by Workplace Relations Minister Brooke van Velden.
Beneficiaries are once again being treated as lazy shirkers who hold our economy back; low-wage earners will once again see their real incomes falling. And unemployment will rise.
In these “tough times”, as Luxon calls it, his ministers are flexing their muscles.
Better productivity is the goal. But despite 30 years of evidence they will not help, tax cuts for those who need them least are still on offer.
Stand by for the Daughter of the Mother of All Budgets.
Ah, but “back on track”. For many people, it’s nostalgic. An appeal to the days when we all got on well and we didn’t have clogged up roads, apartment housing, or Māori names for things.
The obvious problem is that there never was a time like that. But scratch nostalgia again and you remember, yes, there was a time when we didn’t need to worry.
Food appeared on the table and no one asked you to think about failing infrastructure, or racial injustice, or hospitals with patients lining the hallways.
It’s called childhood.
We didn’t have to worry because adults did that for us. That’s one reading of what the back-on-trackers want: to be treated like children.
Perhaps it sounds harmless. But nostalgia distracts us. It invites us to look back when we should be facing the future.
I’m writing this in Wellington, a city where the pipes are broken and, as you walk around, you can see places where water bubbles up out of the ground. That’s what decades of not facing the future does. Nostalgia’s great in a song. In politics it’s a menace.
Another problem with “back on track” is that it’s always selective.
The PM is not promising to return us to a time when homes cost, on average, not nine but three times the average household income, as they did until well into the 1980s.
He doesn’t ever talk about making the streets safe enough for parents to feel they can let their kids walk and ride bikes to school.
He probably doesn’t envisage gloves for the ladies and long socks and walk shorts for the gents, either. Imagine.
He seems unworried that in 1997, the average pay of a chief executive was 11 times higher than the average worker’s salary, but by 2019, it was 18 times higher. Who’s going to get that back on track?
The chief executive of Fletcher Building, Ross Taylor, announced his resignation last week, citing poor company performance. That would be a $100 million loss over six months.
For running Fletcher Building off the tracks, Taylor has been the highest-paid chief executive of a publicly listed company in New Zealand. In 2021 he earned $5m a year plus $2m in shares.
That’s 88 times more than the average wage in a Top 50 listed company.
Boosting salaries at the top while suppressing them at the bottom is about as sure a way of keeping productivity too low as I can imagine.
Perhaps Upston, who is also Minister for Poverty Reduction, could join the dots and speak out about the damage done to the social fabric when the big end of town walks off with all the money.
In truth, “back on track” has a meaning almost everyone would support, even if we don’t know how it can be achieved.
We want things to get built, more or less on time and within budget, and outstanding problems in health care to be resolved. We want better achievement levels in education. We want the population housed and crime under better control.
It could also have some other meanings. We used to be proud of our heritage as a social innovator. We used to value the balance we struck between making a decent living and enjoying, and caring for, the natural world around us.
In his election night speech in 1990, Bolger committed his government to building a “decent society”. Months later, his finance minister trashed the idea.
Luxon doesn’t need to go the same way. He likes to say we’re “the best country on earth” and we used to tell ourselves we were “the best country in the world to bring up children”.
Then we learned about the prevalence of family harm, the abuse in state care, the rheumatic fever and other preventable diseases of poverty, the horrors of the road toll and summer drownings. What will the budget do about them?
AUT vice-chancellor Damon Salesa gave a talk at the weekend in which he said our education system doesn’t offer real opportunity to everyone in it. Instead, it’s one of the most efficient in the world at reinforcing economic status. At all levels, most children are trained to stay where they started. Getting back on track won’t change that, but being future-focused could.
What if we said, we really are going to make this the best country in the world to bring up children?
Willis’ budget could adopt the goal and lay the groundwork. She could do it in honour of Fa’anānā Efeso Collins, who died last Wednesday.
He never did anything that wasn’t focused on making the world a better place for children. And he was acclaimed for it in Parliament – on all sides.
The Good Daughter of the Bad Mother of All Budgets. How about that?
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues, with a focus on Auckland. He joined the Herald in 2018.
