If anyone under 35 still had mixed feelings about leaving New Zealand to build a future elsewhere, PM Christopher Luxon probably sealed the deal this week with his comments about the youth job market. Instead of showing empathy and/or apologising for the hardship that families are enduring on his watch, Luxon chose to blame the victims.
Kids these days. Lolling around on the couch, spending their waking hours on Playstation and more than satisfied with “a drive into welfare” for the rest of their lives. Luxon has known for months that this isn’t true. It was headline news in February that the unemployment rate for 15 to 19 year olds had hit its highest level in a decade. In the June 2025 quarter, 12.9% of this country’s 15 to 24 year olds were not in jobs, education or training, a far higher figure than the 9.5% in Australia, and not far below the crisis levels of youth unemployment (16.5%) being reported in China.
Bizarrely… when even the most highly motivated young people are struggling to find work and their families are battling to make ends meet, Luxon is planning to load more costs onto them. From November 2026, his government is promising to introduce means testing for those 18 and 19 year old young people on Jobseeker and other emergency benefits, and that extra cost burden will cut in on households earning as little as $65,000 a year.
Leave aside the moral injustice for a moment. What about the politics of it? It can’t be accidental that the new system will kick in at around election time next year – which suggests that National is willing to campaign on a platform decrying the lazy feckless nature of the nation’s youth.
Nothing new in this. Since time immemorial, centre-right parties have courted votes from social reactionaries by peddling visions of dole bludgers, lazy welfare queens, and good-for-nothing delinquent youth. Supposedly, it is all comes down to an attitudinal problem. Nothing to do with the government’s failure to foster the economic conditions conducive to job creation. Perish the thought.
In the past, there’s always been a sizeable audience on the far right for this toxic kind of messaging. Yet maybe this time, Luxon has misread the room. Surely even the crustiest of boomers have children and grandchildren who don’t fit the cartoon stereotypes that Luxon is peddling. Ultimately, Luxon and Brooke van Velden need to stop making policy on the fly, based on what a few of their self-interested business mates have been telling them.
After all, the Luxon government was elected by middle New Zealand doing it tough, and looking for relief. This means testing regime can only make things worse for them. If you look at this graph, 20% of New Zealand households earn between $100,000 and $150,000 annually. Giving the cost of living crisis, they are still only treading water today. Making such households pay to support their jobless 18 and 19 year olds would push many of them back under water. And yet in his infinite wisdom, Luxon plans to launch this moral folly around election time?
Fakin’ It
Luxon has told young people to pack up and “go to where the jobs are” and claimed that employers are “crying out” for workers in the rural heartland. For the past 72 hours, rural heartland employers and job recruitment agencies have been saying that this isn’t true, and that – at best – the need for seasonal workers won’t kick in for months, and even then the priority will be given to locals seeking jobs.
That aside, think for a moment about what Luxon was advocating. He was seriously suggesting that 18 and 19 year old young people in Auckland and Wellington should give up their flats and leave their friends and families behind to chase lowly paid temporary jobs picking and packing fruit and vegetables. At best, such jobs would vanish at summer’s end. These young workers would then need to return to the cities, go flat hunting again and get back on the same old treadmill of chasing non-existent jobs.
To advocate this, you’d have to regard young people as being nothing other than disposable labour units that deserve to be shuttled around the economy for short term gain. (Only someone who views the poor as “ bottom feeders” would think that way) By telling the young to go where the jobs are, Luxon is also advising them to pack up and go to Australia (or places beyond) right now, or as soon as they’ve finished their degree. Because in Luxonland, there are no jobs, no compassion, and no hope.
Footnote: Evidently, Luxon can’t even get his basic numbers right on this benefits policy. In stark contrast and in a terrific piece of work, Jordan Rivers has compiled the evidence – broken down region by region – on the numbers of the working age population, the numbers of those in paid work, the numbers of Jobseeker recipients, and the numbers of job vacancies.
For example: Wellington has 7,136 Jobseeker recipients chasing 513 job vacancies. Hamilton and Rotorua are no better. Even Nelson (1,863 Jobseeker recipients, 207 job vacancies) and Southland (653 Jobseeker recipients 87 job vacancies) are plainly not in any shape to handle a huge influx of urban youth chasing jobs.
The only region where Jobseeker recipients and job vacancies are remotely in sync is Queenstown – Lakes, and that may simply be a reflection of the notorious housing crisis in that locality. Good luck with finding a place to rent in Queenstown that’s affordable on the going pay rates in cafes and restaurants. You may get a job, but you will have nowhere to live.
The Gaza Flotilla
In vain, Greta Thunberg has tried to insist that the intercepted, jailed and deported people on the Gaza flotilla boats were not the story, and that the suffering being inflicted by Israel on Gaza should remain front and centre.
Instead, RNZ almost entirely made this a story about the three New Zealanders on board, and the anxiety/relief of the Mom and Dads at home – right down to what those three young Kiwis were wearing as they were released by Israel, and crossed over into Jordan, what relief one Dad felt etc etc. It takes something to turn Gaza into a feelgood story about lovin’ your kids whatever scrapes they get themselves into, but RNZ managed it.
Almost as an aside, we were told that while imprisoned, the flotilla members could hear the screams of Palestinian inmates apparently being tortured by their Israeli captors. Was this horror story investigated further? Hardly, even though credible reports on the systematic torture practices in Israeli jails do exist. Instead, and in pursuit of the age-old imperative – is there a Kiwi connection to this story?- the local coverage succeeded in burying the lead. All but literally.
Meanwhile, Israel is reportedly continuing to kill Palestinians at a rate of between 24 and 75 a day, even while the details of “peace” are being negotiated in Cairo.
Homeland Uber Alles
For a chilling glimpse into the fascist state that Donald Trump is building in America, take a look at National Security Memorandum/NPSM-7 issued by the White House a fortnight ago. NPSM-7calls for “a new law enforcement strategy to investigate all participants” engaged in alleged “criminal and terroristic” conspiracies that share “common recurrent motivations and indications…under the umbrella of self-described anti-fascism.” As the memorandum put it:
Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.
No irony in the man who launched the January 6 attempted coup (and who has pardoned its leading figures) now turning around and condemning those allegedly intent on “the “overthrow of the United States Government.” As others have noted, this memorandum seeks to outlaw and punish people guilty only of what Orwell called “thought crimes.” In future, any American saying or thinking anything critical of the state, capitalism or Christianity will run a serious risk of being criminalised.
Trump is promoting a militant fascism out to purge the existing order, and he is depicting this as being God’s will made manifest through the fusion of church and state. As this article suggests, if we’re looking for 1930s historical precedents, that sounds less like Hitler, and more like the brutal dictatorship of Francisco Franco, in Spain. The Franco dictatorship lasted nearly 40 years.
The cost of cutting aid
Trump’s actions in cutting US foreign aid disappeared down the memory hole of the 24/7 news cycle several months ago, lost amid his other outrages. However, the British medical journal The Lancet has just published a research study that has sought to measure the number of lives saved in Third World countries by USAID funding over the past 20 years.
We estimate that over the past two decades, USAID-funded programmes have helped prevent more than 91 million deaths globally, including 30 million deaths among children.
The researchers also estimate the outcomes that will result from the announced cutbacks to USAID funding:
Projections suggest that ongoing deep funding cuts—combined with the potential dismantling of the agency—could result in more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, including 4·5 million deaths among children younger than 5 years.
In other words…this one decision by Trump is likely to result in a death toll that could more than double the loss of life commonly attributed to the Holocaust. Some 4.5 million pre-schoolers are likely to die unnecessarily, over the next five years.