Long
on aims, short on delivery. Greta Thunberg is
not the only person who feels that the Ardern government
is better at aspirations than achievement. Once upon a time,
Jacinda Ardern may have called climate change “this
generation’s nuclear free moment” but…during the same
fortnight that New Zealand declared a climate emergency,
this country was not awarded a speaking slot and did not
take an active role in a major UN climate change virtual
conference, apparently because we didn’t have any
ambitious new proposals to bring to the table. In
fact:
Of the 43 Annex I countries –
industrialised nations which have benefited the most from
greenhouse gas emissions and therefore have the greatest
obligation to reduce emissions – just 12 have seen net
emissions increase since 1990. New Zealand is one of
those.
Thunberg may
have got it wrong when she said this country had
committed itself to reducing less than one per cent of the
nation’s emissions overall by 2025. She seemed to be
equating the country’s entire emissions reduction effort
with its commitment to reduce public sector emissions. By
2025, Climate Change Minister James Shaw is hoping this will
result in a 7 per cent cut in our total emissions…Yet even
so, as Stuff recently
reported, there has to be a question mark over just how
much of a reduction gain we’ll actually get from state
housing, schools and hospitals. And besides…the estimated
gains have to be shaky, given that as of September 2020,
only eight out of 46 state agencies have up-to-date figures
on their carbon emissions.
You get the picture. Even
amongst the allegedly radical Greens that centre-left voters
were keen to see returned to Parliament in order to keep
Labour honest, radical change is not in prospect. Thunberg
may have been wrong on the details, but she was dead right
in the thrust of her criticism. Our emissions reduction
efforts have not engaged with the urgency of the problem.
Unfortunately, this failing is indicative of a far wider
problem.
Voting For Change
Most of the people
who voted for Labour this year were voting for change – and
not for business as usual with leavenings of caring concern
on the side. Voters not only gave Labour (and the Greens) a
mandate for significant change, but also handed them the
power to follow through on it. The social needs – in
housing, health, poverty, student debt, benefit levels etc
– are glaringly obvious. So if not now, when
?
Imagine if it had been a centre right National/Act
government that had just been swept into office by similar
margins. By now, they’d be starting to sell off every
existing state enterprise to their mates, would be scrapping
the remnants of the welfare safety net and awarding
themselves massive tax cuts. It would be the whole
Thatcherite package once again, on steroids. Nothing
remotely comparable seems to be on the agenda of this Labour
government, and the Greens are abetting Labour in its
displays of virtue signalling.
So far, Labour has been
more willing to announce the radical policies that it
won’t pursue be pursuing – no wealth tax of any
sort, no meaningful capital gains tax on Ardern’s watch
– than announce what radical steps it will take. Much has
been made of the 400,000 former National voters who crossed
over to Labour in the October election. Retaining them seems
to have become a pressing Labour priority.
There’s
no good reason for Labour letting itself be trapped in this
way, by its own policy triangulations. This year, 1,443,546
people voted Labour, 226,754 voted Green, and a further
33,632 voted for the new, leftist version of the Maori Party
for a grand total of1,703,932 people voting for a
centre-left agenda. To govern as if the imagined tolerance
levels of only 400,000 of those 1.7 million people should
now dictate Labour’s actions seems utterly perverse. After
all, most of the voters in question are likely to be
fairweather friends liable to desert Labour just as soon as
National gets its leadership problems
sorted.
Transformational politics
To repeat :
Labour had been empowered to govern alone and has won the
first absolute majority ever recorded under MMP. Given the
historic opportunity on offer, it isn’t enough to merely
build a few more houses, improve public transport a bit, and
tinker with the income abatement rates for the few
beneficiaries able to get a job at the local supermarket. In
no particular order, here are a few things a
transformational centre-left government might
do:
1.Write off student debt. This is
a matter of generational fairness. The boomers enjoyed free
education and an easy employment market. Once in power they
awarded themselves massive tax breaks and have bequeathed a
socially toxic housing market where – largely – only
those blessed with wealthy parents can ger a foothold. The
least that can be done is to remove the student dent
millstone, thereby making saving for a housing deposit more
of a possibility. And yes,. free tertiary education used to
be a birth right. It could be again.
2. Raise
benefit levels immediately as recommended by the
government’s own
Welfare Expert Advisory Group. This
would reduce poverty overnight, and provide a major
injection into the retail economy. Given the extent of raw
need, and because unemployment is bound to worsen in 2021
from the effects of the pandemic, an immediate increase to
benefit levels should be this government’s number one
priority.
3. Scrap the array of health
charges preventing sick people from accessing
primary health care. Currently, the cost barrier of going to
the doctor imposes hardship on families unfairly vulnerable
to the diseases of poverty. It is also a false economy that
induces people to postpone preventative care until
conditions worsen and people have to present for emergency
care at the hospital door. Again, boomers enjoyed free
primary health care access when young. They should take
pains to bequeath it to their children and
grandchildren.
4. Make agriculture
pay for its pollution. The government should cease
pandering to farming’s demands that greenhouse gas
emissions and waterways pollution can only be reduced at a
speed (and to an extent) that imposes no additional costs on
farmers. Currently, farming seems to believe it has a right
to expect taxpayers to pick up the tab for the environmental
damage it leaves in its wake. This has to stop.
5.
Tax and regulate the banks in ways that
reduce the extortionate levels of profit they funnel
offshore every year, and the predatory practices they pursue
against their New Zealand customers. Here’s a small
example : before the festive season began, why didn’t this
Labour government have regulations in place to make banks
reduce the extortionate charges they levy on local retailers
for Paywave transactions – which are pitched in New
Zealancd at percentage rates well above what
the banks charge in Australia and the UK?
The
average fee charged for credit cards is 1.6 per cent but
they can top 2 per cent. That compares to 0.8 per cent on
average in Australia and 0.5 per cent in the United
Kingdom.In New Zealand, a typical contactless debit card
payment costs 1.2 per cent, compared to 0.6 per cent in
Australia and 0.2 per cent in the UK.
More
importantly, why is Labour routing our pandemic -related
quantitative easing (QE) measures though the banks as middle
men – thereby allowing them to clip the ticket on these
transactions – rather than enabling the Reserve Bank to make
the money directly available to government?
The list
could go and on. There’s an argument for using QE measures
to ensure everyone a basic income in the light of what the
pandemic, workplace automation and AI are already doing to
employment. (The risk is that a cost-cutting future
government could easily reduce a UBI-like scheme to
subsistence levels.). But you get the picture. In isolation,
none of these measures qualify as “transformational.”
That term should require the government to enact systemic
changes – and not just to improve things here and there in
their own sweet time as the current economic settings
permit.
Since the election, Labour appears to have set
out to dissipate any momentum from its victory and to lower
expectations. One can only conclude this is because it is
gun shy of the political flak, if it sought to do more.
Whatever the reason, there an evident mismatch between the
opportunity for change, and the appetite for political risk.
Grant Robertson learned his trade in the similarly cautious
administration of Helen Clark and Michael Cullen. Both he
and Ardern would have been right at home in any of Tony
Blair’s “Third Way” governments. (Ardern worked during
the mid-2000s as a senior adviser in a policy unit within
Blair’s Cabinet office.) No doubt, both Ardern and
Robertson would like to reduce poverty, but only without
disrupting the economic settings that keep on generating it.
That’s the deep irony. Voters have put the potential for
revolutionary change within reach of a Labour leadership
that is instinctively averse to it.
Footnote
One: Arguably, New Zealand has had only two
‘transformational’ governments in the past 80 years. The
Savage government of the mid-1930s ended the Depression,
created the welfare state and promoted egalitarian norms
that served the country pretty well for the next 50 years.
The first Lange/Douglas government of the mid-1980s
privatised key public assets and promoted a market ideology
that still sets the boundaries on what is regarded to be
acceptable public policy. Both governments changed this
country utterly. At the time, they took the public with
them.
Footnote Two: BTW, can Ardern
really, and unilaterally rule out a wealth tax and a
meaningful capital gains tax? Labour went through a lot of
convulsions a few years to create a better balance between
the party and its parliamentary wing. In the process, the
membership rank and file and the union affiliates took back
some of the power, Since then and by winning elections,
Ardern appears to have single-handedly pulled power right
back into the parliamentary wing once more..
Yet
surely, it shouldn’t be her call alone as to whether and
how the party chooses to tax the rich. Similarly, Ardern
shouldn’t be allowed to hold the party to ransom – no
meaningful capital gains tax or I walk – on other policy
fronts
either..
