As the old saying goes, “With your eyes, you enter the world. But with your ears, the world enters you.” This may explain why hearing the familiar cadences of certain politicians on the radio can trigger a visceral reaction. Hearing political spin tends to be worse than watching it on television, where the eye is free to wander.
Buckle up, because the bad news is coming thick and fast, and the excuses are getting weaker. We’re nearly two years into the Luxon government. The cost of living crisis hasn’t gone away, public services continue to be degraded, wage growth and hiring are being deliberately stifled, user fees charges are rising, people are leaving the country in record numbers and the jobs are vanishing, particularly for young people. Meanwhile, even Treasury is feeling worried about the unsustainable costs of the government’s law and order policies. Its time that National owned its mess.
As the CTU recently pointed out, the New Zealand economy has 50,000 fewer jobs now than in December 2023, when the Luxon administration took over. Reportedly, those jobs losses are widely spread across construction (16,230 fewer jobs), manufacturing (8,707), retail (6,091), professional services (7,228), IT and telecommunications (3,527), and public administration (6103).
The pain is being felt, says CTU economist Craig Renney, in every part of the country. “Every region has seen job losses. Since December 2023 there have been 23,000 jobs lost in Auckland – 35 jobs lost every day. Nowhere in the country has escaped the pain of rising unemployment, even in areas where the local economy is stronger.”
That last bit is worth repeating. Even in rural regions where retailing is supposed to be buoyed by those high global commodity prices that farmers are earning, the jobs are still vanishing, regardless. “The economy is particularly difficult for younger workers,’ Renney says,“with 19,842 fewer filled jobs for 15–24-year-olds than this time last year, and 41,000 fewer filled jobs than this time 2 years ago.”
In other words, a lot of people are either losing their jobs, or feeling worried about keeping them. At the same time, the jobless are being harshly sanctioned by Social Development Minister Louise Upton, if they fail to keep on fruitlessly chasing that diminishing number of jobs. To all outwards appearances, the Luxon government has no economic plan other than to cross its fingers and hope that the RB cuts to interest rates will be enough to kick-start some sort of recovery.
Yet to state the obvious: in a climate of job insecurity, people will feel reluctant to spend up large in shops and cafes even if lower interest rates are finally giving some of them a bit of mortgage relief. They’re far more likely to use any gains to pay off debt and/or save for tomorrow’s rainy day. Not only does the coalition government appear to have no clue how to reverse these trends, it can’t offer a credible explanation for their causes. After two years in office, they’re still blaming Labour for all our social and economic woes.
For example: according to Simeon Brown, the last Labour government is to blame for why electricity bills climbed so high this winter. Nothing to do with price gouging by the cartel of electricity companies, and the lack of genuine price competition. Energy Minister Simon Watts seems stuck in the same spin cycle. Yesterday, Watts promised that the government was “working to address” the challenges of high power bills “head on” – but this phantom plan doesn’t involve structural changes to the electricity market. Relief, if it comes at all, is to be limited to “targeted support for vulnerable households, improving energy efficiency in homes, or accelerating investment in low-cost renewable energy.”
Like Brown, Watts is still blaming Labour, even two years down the track. Our sky-high energy costs, it seems, have been the love child of the “persistent high inflation and interest rates under the last government.” Meanwhile, the current government seems to be chronically unwilling to make the structural changes required to fix the electricity market, the banking system and the supermarket duopoly. Too hard. Most unlikely to please the corporate sponsors.
Lagged Labour liability lingers
Simeon Brown’s “reasoning” on RNZ had something to do with Labour tolerating inflation, and that tolerance feeding into higher user line charges and so…here we are today, and National will somehow make things better. But it will take time, because its hard, and because it is all Labour’s fault. Got that?
For the record, National didn’t actually inherit a mess. The inflation rate was under control by the time Labour left office. Inflation was at 1.8% in the September quarter of 2023, and running annually at 5.6%. By the December 2023 quarter it was down to 0.5 % and annual inflation had reduced to 4.7% and was headed downwards. National inherited an improving situation and the subsequent mess has been entirely of the coalition government’s own creation.
Reality aside though, does anyone really expect anything but fumbling, bluster and dead-eyed spin from Simeon Brown? Like a political Roomba, Brown shuttles around trying to vacuum up the dirt but more often than not, he just ends up banging into the furniture.
Footnote One: The truly egregious falsehoods that Brown has been peddling of late have been in his own Health portfolio. For months, Brown has been claiming that media reports about inadequate funding for public health have been “fake news.” Allegedly, our spending on Health as a share of GDP has exceeded other developed OECD countries. Repeatedly, Brown has weaponised that argument to resist (a) wage increases for nurses and doctors and(b) additional hiring in public hospitals.
Reality has finally caught up with him. This very recent report by two Auckland University economists not only torpedoes Brown’s argument, but shines a useful spotlight on the dodgy (and old, from 2018) figures he has selectively deployed. Strikingly – as the report points out – Brown has misleadingly used old New Zealand health spending figures that include GST, and compared them favourably to the health spending within countries that (unlike us) don’t apply GST to their health funding. Meaning: in the comparisons Brown has been making, he’s given New Zealand a 15% head start, none of which is being spent directly, or at all, on public health.
Footnote Two – The Auckland University report cited above also poured cold water on the latest attempt by ACT leader David Seymour to recycle the failed policies of the American right as if they are bright new ideas. Reportedly, Seymour wants everyone to take out compulsory health insurance. As the Auckland University report indicates (page 26) the world tried that, and gave it up long ago:
The only high-income countries to have ever switched from tax-funded to mandatory insurance in the last sixty years were all former Eastern European countries under Communist rule in the post-war era. Many more high-income countries switched from mandatory insurance to taxation between the 1960s and 1980s.
Footnote Three: When not funnelling taxpayer funds into profit opportunities for private health providers, Brown has chosen to fund a 24/7 medical service that’s due to start in mid 2026. Question marks remain over the comparative reliability of online consultations, and the relatively limited numbers of people who will be able to afford the online service. (Already, the current price barrier is causing a decline in GP visits.)
While an ability to provide online diagnosis is better than nothing, such a diagnosis can only be a starting point within what remains a seriously broken system of public healthcare. As Dr. Buzz Burrell, chair of the General Practice Aotearoa organisation points out: “So, when a doctor or nurse sees a patient over video and identifies a problem that needs to be dealt with, where will that patient go? Emergency department? Designated GP clinics?” These are good questions.
Yes, Simeon Brown has given a long overdue boost to the capitation funding that is (just) keeping GP practices afloat – but even then, the compliance fish-hooks will erode some of the value of the headline amount. Overall, the systematic funding (and staffing )shortfalls in public health just do not seem to be of pressing concern to our current Health Minister. Performative politics are more his bag, and always have been.
Dancing On Our Own
The title “The Orb,TX” seems suitably enigmatic for a track that sounds like the score to a Morricone Western cross-bred with a dancefloor banger. Kerala Dust are a trio of Brits, now based in Berlin and Zurich. In the video, singer Edmund Kenny is way out West with a donkey, and he’s as game as Jarvis Cocker when it comes to looking silly while in service to the groove:
Talking of building to catharsis…here’s another, more ominous escalation to an even bigger finale. Just Mustard are a five piece band from Ireland, and this latest single is mesmerising:
Finally, here’s the new single by the Australian singer/comedian Keli Holliday, currently on tour in this country. “Dancing 2” bears comparison with the Los Campesinos! classic “You, Me, Dancing!” which it resembles somewhat: