It’s not the despair…
The old saying that “"It's not the despair. I can take the despair. It's the hope that destroys you” pretty much sums up the feelings of anyone voting Labour since Muldoon announced the snap election in 1984. Unless something changes significantly in the next six months any hope for significant reform, should Labour win, is becoming vanishingly small. Indeed a poll released today showing a 7.5% drop for Labour suggests that a win may be becoming increasingly unlikely – maybe some policy is needed and preferably positive and progressive policy.
As far as can be discerned, to date this year’s election again looks to be long on despair and short on hope.
An Australian perspective on political realignment
In an earlier post I made the point that that poverty and inequality are not insoluble but are the result of deliberate political choice. A recent article in the Australian publication, the New Daily makes the same point in the wider political context of shifting political allegiances in Australia.
The starting point for this article is that for most of human history, children lived as their parents did – “Wages, calories, life expectancy, mortality– the great markers of human prosperity barely moved… The Industrial Revolution changed this but generational improvement was real, but slow…across decades, this produced the modern world but within a single human lifetime, the change was usually modest.” However in the period from the end of WWII until about 1975 saw “the compression of inequality to historically anomalous levels”.
However, the writer argues that this situation has now been deliberately reversed: “The story of the past 40 years is, at its core, a story of reversal.” The writer points to the neo-liberal reforms that began in the 1980s, the integration of capital markets, the deregulation of finance, the marginalisation of organised labour, and makes the point that “These were not isolated decisions, they were a system. And the system worked in the sense that it produced exactly the outcome it was designed to produce – the gradual restoration of prewar patterns of wealth and power.”
The article suggests that this phenomenon is resulting in a major realignment in Australian politics and in particular that it explains the rapid rise of One Nation which is increasingly drawing its support from “the mortgaged, asset-stretched, outer-suburban working class of the growth corridors [of the major cities]. These voters work in trades, transport, freight and what is left of manufacturing. They are mortgage-stressed gen X and boomers – households that bought into the dream of asset-based prosperity and are servicing the debt without the wage growth that was supposed to come with it.” Voters who once favoured Labor.
The article concludes that “Voters are not moving from one party to another in response to short-term events. They are aligning themselves with the bloc that reflects their economic experience. And these blocs are sharper, more separated and more demographically distinct than at any point since the 1940s.”
More importantly they are recognising that Labor no longer represents them and that it has become the party of the university-educated, inner and middle city voter “anchored in the public sector and the care economy. It is dominant among gen Z and millennial voters. And it skews female by a clear margin.”
Readers can amuse themselves by applying this analysis to New Zealand.
Lessons for New Zealand?
Six months out from an election we have seen nothing from Labour that indicates a genuine programme to reverse the increased societal inequality that has developed over the last half century. In particular it has backed away from any meaningful tax reform – the reform most needed if the problems of poverty and the problems created by the austerity agenda are to be reversed.
Proposals for meaningful tax reform are available, most notably that from Tax Justice Aotearoa. Labour has, however, shown little interest in comprehensive reform. And without additional revenue any significant attack on poverty, improvements in health and education, or support for those whose employment has been deliberately manufactured to support the current economic agenda, are unlikely to eventuate
Reducing poverty is the most important reform needed in New Zealand. The Productivity Commission estimated that only one-third of the benefit of ending child poverty would accrue to those suffering from it, the rest would fall to others as the result of lower social and welfare expenditure. Reduce poverty and you increase the educational achievement of children and decrease the long term health impacts of childhood poverty.
Labour has also been quiet on the extent to which it will legislate to restore fair pay agreements or pay equity or even on its plans to reverse the potentially far reaching changes to the ER Act.
Politics in New Zealand is also in a state of flux and there already seems to be a move of the aggrieved to New Zealand First. TOP is now polling at 6%. Fiddling with the margins of progressive reform seems unlikely to be a strategy to attract those most impacted by decades of neo-liberal reform and more recently by the economics of austerity.
Future posts
This post is intended as a warm up for future posts on the potential long term impact of recent legal changes and the needed actions from a Labour government should one be elected. Coming up – the brave new world of contracting.