In December last year Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said that "queues out the door" at the Auckland City Mission showed just how much impoverished Kiwis needed help. But, some eight months later, there's little sign that anything has changed. And, under this Government, New Zealand's richest individuals have seen their total wealth increase by 20 percent.

THIS WEEK the National Business Review released its annual Rich List for 2018. And you will no doubt be pleased to hear that the rich are not having to go without. Life is good for New Zealand's rich elite. The combined total net worth of the rich listers came in at $100.8b, up from $79.9b in 2017. That's a 20 percent increase in the total wealth of people like Graeme Hart (New Zealand's richest individual), who added another $1.5 billion to his pile of cash and assets this year. He's worth a cool $9 billion.

The total net worth of the country's richest individuals breached the $100 billion mark for the first time. In 2013 it stood at a little over $60 billion.

But its not an indication of a 'growing economy' that the Government appears too keen to shout about. Finance Minister Grant Robertson has been resolutely silent about the growing prosperity of the already wealthy.

But the rich are getting richer at a time when more and more New Zealanders are struggling. It was also reported this week that more and people are being forced to turn to welfare agencies just to put food on the table.

According to the Ministry of Social Development (MSD), 26,432 more hardship grants for food were given out compared to the June quarter last year, bringing the total to 137,424 grants between March and June this year.

Toni Ashton is Professor of Health Economics at the University of Auckland. She is also the spokesperson for the Child Poverty Action Group . She says that 'food insecurity' is "not only severe but it's widespread. And it's not only for beneficiary families, it's for working families."

She has also suggested that the MSD's figures may only be the tip of the iceberg because many  people may not be seeking help because they ashamed or  have had difficulty in navigating the bureaucratic maze in order to get assistance.

Graeme Hart : Increased his fortune by $1.5 billion in 2017.
According to Auckland City Mission chief executive Chris Farrelly, food has become a 'discretionary item' for many New Zealanders. 

"Someone with an income of $500 a week and expenses of $480 will only have $20 left for food, and if an emergency occurs, that money will get squeezed. This means people are unable to afford enough appropriate, quality food, and find they need to ask for emergency food assistance."

Professor Ashton points to the decline in wage and benefit levels over the past decade as being the main driver in the rise of poverty - but New Zealand has been characterised by deepening poverty ever since the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s began to grip. It also should be pointed  ou that many of New Zealand's poorest people are also in insecure work. Just a fortnight ago commentator Bernard Hickey noted that some 344,000 people were either unemployed or would do more work if they could find it.

So the economy is 'booming' - but only for a few. The chasm between the rich and the rest of us shows no signs of decreasing. And the Government shows little interest in doing anything significant about it. It was the Prime Minister, after all, who ran away from increasing taxes on the wealthy and declined to increase the level of core benefits on the grounds that the Government had no more money to spend.

In a country of obvious poverty, joblessness and income stagnation, its worth reflecting on Karl Marx's shrewd observation that "“Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole.”





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