MAKING HEROIC ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT LABOUR

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has derided the Green's proposed welfare policy, suggesting that it makes 'fairly heroic assumptions.' Ardern is right - but for the wrong reasons.

THERE'S NOTHING particularly radical about the Green Party's so-called 'poverty action plan'. A proposal to boost welfare benefits that are presently at subsistence levels and to fund it by increasing taxation on the wealthy would have hardly raised an eyebrow in the days before social democratic politics collapsed. Now the leader of the party traditionally associated with social democratic politics is questioning the Green's policy proposal describing it as making  'fairly heroic assumptions'.

Jacinda Ardern is right about that but not for the reasons that she might claim. She is right because the Green Party have heroically assumed that the Labour Party might be receptive to such a welfare policy. There is a thin line between heroism and stupidity and the Green Party have crossed the line into thinking that there still beats - however faintly - a social democratic heart within the neoliberal husk of the Labour Party.

The fact that this Labour-led Government has steadfastly refused to increase benefit levels, despite the lengthening dole queues and increasing poverty, should have provided the Green's with a big clue that their plan to increase benefits and fund it by increasing taxation on the rich, was not going to be warmly embraced by Labour.

For Jacinda Ardern to claim that Labour and the Greens 'have a shared goal of reducing poverty' is blatantly false since poverty has remained persistently high under her Labour-led government. Before the pandemic struck, Statistics NZ released data in February that revealed that there had been 'no significant change in material hardship rates since 2017.'

Such is the level of desperation that figures from the Ministry of Development revealed that hardship grants rocketed up a massive 67 percent in the space of just one year. They went up from 385,043 for the quarter ending December 2018 to 573,851 for the quarter ending December 2019. Not only does this not indicate that Labour shares with the Green's 'a shared goal of reducing poverty' it also highlights that the Green's have been complicit in their meek acceptance of the growing level of inequality and poverty over the past three years.

Ardern has also said that Labour will put out 'it's own tax plan' before the election but don't expect it to increase income taxation anytime soon. Finance Minister Grant Robertson, responding to the Green's welfare plan,  has claimed that the tax system is 'fair and balanced' and in Parliament he has made it known Labour has no intention of changing income tax rates if it becomes the government again. So the Green's brand new plan for welfare has effectively been torpedoed from the off. But at least it'll give the Green's a 'point of difference' to campaign on and maybe that was the intention all along.