This Christmas tens of thousands of New Zealanders will go hungry. But the Government is claiming it is doing everything it can to get folk through the tough times. What would Charles Dickens think of it all and what can A Christmas Carol teach us about modern capitalism?THE COMMERCIALLY-DRIVEN regimented 'fun' and saccharine sentimentality of the Christmas season Is offensive at the best of times but for the political class to express their best and kind regards to us all this Christmas will be little more than hypocritical and offensive claptrap. While our well-reimbursed politicians look forward to their extended Christmas vacations, one in five New Zealanders can only looking forward to going hungry over this Christmas break. The seasonal bonhomie of the Prime Minister and her fellow politicians can only be regarded as deeply insincere and insulting since the Government has it within its powers to alleviate the economic desperation of so many, but simply won't. At a time of economic crisis it has effectively abandoned a large and expanding section of the community to the wolves. Many of those now under the economic pump probably voted Labour under the misguided impression that Jacinda Ardern was actually sincere about being 'kind' and 'compassionate'. Maybe they got conned into believing that the Prime Minister's empathy was 'almost supernatural' as one her sycophants wrote before the election.
In September 2019 some half a million New Zealanders were in a position of 'food insecurity' - without reliable and daily access to food - but the economic impact of the coronavirus is such that frontline community services are now barely to meet the increased demand for food parcels.
According to KiwiHarvest, a community food charity, it has seen demand increase 74% between the second quarter of 2019 and the second quarter of 2020 – and is predicting Christmas demand to reach new heights. A similar story is told by Generation Ignite in New Lynn, Auckland. It says it has seen a 146% increase in demand for food parcels since COVID-19 hit. While our eyes tend to glaze over when statistics are mentioned, we need to remember that there are real people and real families hurting behind these appalling figures.
Despite the widespread economic and social distress abroad in the community, Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Grant Robertson stood up in Parliament yesterday and claimed that the Government was doing it all it could to get New Zealanders through the tough times. Such a falsehood should have been met with howls of derision but there is no effective opposition to the neoliberal orthodoxy in Parliament, so he got away with it. Admittedly these are early days, but the Green Party has already shown little interest in taking the Government on within Parliament.
Grant Robertson controls the purse strings of a Government that has flatly rejected the widespread calls for a substantial increase in core benefit levels before Christmas in order that folk can live lives that are something more than subsistence. So while its boom times at the top end of town, its penury and desperation for those without property investments, family trusts and share portfolios.
When he was twelve years old in 1824, Charles Dickens worked ten-hour days in a rat-infested shoe-polish factory for six shillings a week. That’s the equivalent of £30.68 or $57 in today's New Zealand currency. It was all the money Dickens had to get by. His father, mother, and five siblings aged 2-11 were in prison because the family was in debt. If you fell behind on your bills or couldn’t pay legal fines, you and your family were forced into government workhouses where you would work long hours to earn your keep.
While modern interpretations of A Christmas Carol have mostly emptied the story of its political content, it remains a deeply political work that attacks the logic of capitalism and the prevailing bourgeois orthodoxy. Although Dickens was not a socialist, A Christmas Carol is an assertion of human values in danger of being ground down by what Karl Marx described as the 'heartless world' of commerce and calculation.
One of the common themes prevalent in the work of Charles Dickens is a defence of working people and the poor and their right to be treated with respect and not merely as cogs in the machine of Victorian capitalism, to be spat out at will.
In recent months many folk have been spat out by an economic system in crisis and while the Prime Minister speaks of 'kindness' she leads a Government that will allow tens of thousands of New Zealanders to go hungry this Christmas. They will have to rely on the services of food banks and charities for some temporary relief. But as Oscar Wilde observed, 'charity is not a solution (to poverty), it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible…'
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