LABOUR : ENFORCING THE STATUS QUO, AND WE'RE THE LOSERS

The Salvation Army's State of the Nation report was met with largely indifference from the Labour Government this week.

THE SALVATION ARMY'S annual State of the Nation report makes for grim reading, painting a picture of a country wracked by increasing poverty and increasing inequality. I'm reminded of Marx's observation about how the 'accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the one opposite pole.' So while an increasing number of New Zealanders are struggling to just put food on the table each day, out on the Waitemata Harbour the super yachts are lining up to watch the America's Cup yachting/hydrofoiling, an event that the Government has poured $163 million into with the Auckland City Council forking out an additional  $113 million. We're certainly got our priorities well and truly skewed.

What has also been of concern has been the ineffectual political response to the report. If it had been released during the reign of the previous National Government, Labour Party supporters would of jumping up and down, demanding immediate action from Prime Minister John Key. But now that Labour are in power, the silence has been overwhelming- bar a few honourable exceptions. This limp acquiescence is a logical conclusion of a politics that has been more than prepared to defend Labour's atrocious neoliberalism as 'the lesser evil' and has been even prepared to brag about Labour outflanking National on the right.

Labour supporters will roar like lions when National are in power, but they are as silent as the lambs when its their own party that's crapping on the working class.

It was left to Jan Logie of the Green's to raise some semblance of opposition this week. But the Green's are fundamentally compromised by the 'memo of understanding' they signed with Labour and Logie's series of perfunctory and strangely lifeless parliamentary questions about the Salvation Army report findings were easily batted away by the Minister of Finance Grant Robertson. His standard anaemic response that 'there is still work to be done'  only underlines that the Labour Government isn't prepared to do anything that might unsettle the status quo.The Salvation Army's call for 'brave policy action' will certainly be ignored by this Government. 

In her article 'Jacinda Ardern is not Your Friend' and published by Jacobin, Justine Sachs writes: 

'After a generation of neoliberalism, New Zealand badly needs a political program to redistribute wealth back toward workers, communities, and public services. Drawing up that program and building a movement that can advance it will require us to go beyond “Jacinda-mania” and the mirages of liberal centrism.'

Unfortunately much of what constitutes the New Zealand left will be readying itself to get Labour re-elected, betraying the interests of working people and the poor once again.