Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has rejected widespread calls to alleviate the growing level of poverty and desperation by increasing core welfare benefits. Not much 'kindness' in evidence here...
THIS WEEK over fifty community organisations, NGO's and trade unions released an open letter to the Prime Minister, demanding that the Labour Government raise benefit levels before Christmas. The letter points to the growing level of poverty and desperation as ample evidence that benefits need to be raised now and they need to be raised substantially. In many ways the letter repeats the views of the Labour-led Government's own welfare working group which last year recommended that benefits be raised by as much as 70 percent. That recommendation, among with plenty of others, was rejected by the Government - a rejection, incidentally, supported by the Green Party.
So it should come as no great surprise that Jacinda Ardern has batted the letter away, telling a press conference that her government would not only not be increasing benefits by Christmas but there was also zero chance of them being raised by the next election. That was what she meant when she declared that poverty was '...not going to be an issue that can be resolved in one week, or one month or indeed one term.' Listen carefully and you can hear a Prime Minister appeasing her new found ex-National Party supporters and pushing the issue of poverty and inequality out over the horizon of the never-never, condemning beneficiaries and the poor to their fate. What now for Ardern's so-called 'empathy' described before the election by Martyn Bradbury, the editor of The Daily Blog, as 'almost supernatural'.
Indeed Ardern, on an annual salary of over half a million dollars, suggested that beneficiaries should be grateful for the most recent increase - a mighty $25 (don't spend it all at once). But as Brooke Stanley Pao of Auckland Action Against Poverty has commented : 'Referring to $25 as a ‘substantial increase’ in benefit levels is so problematic and disconnected with the realities of people who are living day to day in this country, and to be frank it reeks of privilege'.
The irony is that most, if not all, of the signatories to the letter campaigned or supported the re-election of Labour. In some cases that support was driven by direct organisational ties; both the Council of Trade Unions and the Public Service Association are affiliated to the Labour Party while the independent Unite Union always campaigns for Labour as 'the lesser evil'. Its union officials did again this year.
None of these organisations, of course, will be happy that Ardern has summarily rejected their call for a benefit increase but this grievance is largely based on the misconception that Labour is 'their party', a party that shares their concerns and values. But Labour is a centrist and neoliberal party, a party of capital, and a party of the status quo. The continued failure of the Labour aligned left to see Labour for what it really is means that, time and time again, it continues to head down a dead end road where only defeat and disappointment awaits. But its the working class, who they claim to represent, who always pay the price for these political failures.
And don't count on the Labour-aligned left to ever get it right. They haven't for the past three decades so why should it suddenly start now? Oh, there will be some strongly worded press statements, an acerbic and critical blog post or two, maybe the occasional polite protest, some throwing up of the hands in anguish. But what will be missing in any of it is a recognition that Labour is not the left's political ally nor has it the potential be. In the end 'the protest', such as it is, will amount to little more than a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing and told by idiots. And, right now, there are a lot of useless idiots circling around the Labour Party. The final stupidity is that they will still be calling for Labour's re-election next time round....
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