Govt closing foodbanks as unemployment hits 4 year high with no end in sight.
Just joining a few dots.
… Or, hear me out, we could build 1km less motorway and fund them.
Or tax landlords a little more maybe.
I don’t think we’ve had such a tone deaf government in quite a while.
Is a while > 7 years?
What’s happening is really just a repeat and double-down of the Key Government. The key highlights from those years were:
- Tax Cutz for rich people
- Roadz of National Party Significance
- Tax rises (GST) that disproportionately impacted poorer people
- Budget “surplus” aka austerity by not doing infrastructure investment and structurally under-funding public services
- Vanity clipart flag project
And a fair bit of that was just a repeat of the National Governments of the 90s too. Basically all my life since about high-school on, which is just after the 80s & early 90s neo-liberal reforms had been bedded in has been a cycle:
- National Party led government gets in, starts doing policies that are to the benefit of a small number of richer, older people paid for by unfunding Public Services & Infrastructure and running it down. Economy drags along with most benefit accumulating with people who are already doing ok.
- Labour Party led government takes over and usually start immediately trying to catch back up from the unfunding over the last x years. They do this by mildly increasing costs on people who have grown wealthier and things get better for the poorer & working class but never catches up from the gap formed over the last government’s term.
The net result is over each 15-18 year cycle the wealthy have done extraordinarily well and have now embedded their advantage as it is the children of the wealthy who start off wealthy and get wealthier.
