IN THE final days of Parliament for 2024, both Te Pati Maori and the Green Party asked Prime Minister Christopher Luxon several questions that sought his response to the increasing levels of economic distress to be found out in the community. They were met with Luxon's usual pat response. He and his Government understood and sympathised that 2024 had been a very difficult for many New Zealanders, intoned Luxon, but the Government was working hard to get the economy back on track. And....blah, blah, blah.
Of course, what Luxon will never admit is that it has been his government that has inflicted most of the economic distress in 2024. In a country where more than half of all the wealth is owned by the top ten percent of the population and where New Zealand's wealthiest individuals pay only half the tax of ordinary New Zealanders, this Government's decision to impose an austerity agenda on those least able to carry the economic burden, has been nothing short of reprehensible.
It beggars belief that David Seymour and the Act Party think that the cuts haven't gone far enough. And one of Act's little media cheerleaders, Newstalk ZB's Heather du Plessis Allan, recommended to Finance Minister Nicola Willis this week that she should adopt the slash and burn and anti-working class policies of Argentina's President Milei!
This Government's austerity agenda, as the disastrous state of its books has revealed, has only considerably weakened the economy and decimated our public services. But it's not Christopher Luxon and his mates who have suffered any of the fallout. This year, Luxon made over $900,000 on the sale of three of his seven properties. At the same time his government is cutting funding to foodbanks and beneficiaries and the poor are finding it increasingly more difficult to access emergency food grants from Work and Income.
Christopher Luxon says he and his family are planning to have a 'magical' Christmas. But many New Zealand families, thanks to his government's economic polices, won't be having any Christmas at all. But such is Luxon's political cynicism, he made sure that he and his wife got their photo taken packing food parcels at the Elim Christian Centre in Auckland last weekend.
Politics can be said to about choices, and the National-led government made the wrong choice when it chose austerity. It has only strangled investment while crippling public services and plunging more New Zealanders into poverty.
Austerity is not an economic necessity, as Finance Mister Willis continues to claim. There are other ways of running an economy that are not beholden to a failed neoliberalism. The Government could, for example, decide to tax the wealthy more and invest a higher proportion of the gross national product in the public sector.
Austerity is a choice, and this Government has also chosen to impose further austerity in 2025. It can only have further devastating consequences for ordinary New Zealanders. It is economic vandalism, and it must be strenuously opposed. This is especially true since the Government could well be setting up our public services to fail and then claiming that privatisation is the only practical solution.
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