THE GEORGE ORWELL BUDGET

'Austerity is growth', says Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Finance Minister Nicola Willis.

THE GOVERNMENT has described the 2025 Budget as a 'growth budget'.

'Budget 2025 is about growing the economy to create jobs and help Kiwis get ahead', Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said in a press statement. And, on RNZ's Morning Report, Finance Minister Nicola Willis insisted that 'all New Zealanders would benefit from the Budget'.

In the face of such 'economy with the truth', it's more appropriate to call this budget the 'George Orwell Budget', in honour of the famous author and socialist. It was Orwell who coined the phrase 'doublespeak'. The term means, in basic terms, to disguise, distort or completely reverse the true meaning of words. Orwell himself talked of doublespeak as disguising 'a gap between one's real and one's declared aims'.

So, if in 1984, 'war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength' we could well add, in 2025, that 'austerity is growth'.  How else can we define a 'growth budget' that actually sucks further money out of public investment and will see government spending shrink from 34 percent of GDP to 30 percent?

Nicola Willis also engages in doublespeak when she speaks of all New Zealanders enjoying the so-called benefits of her budget. This is the same budget that has seized  $12.8 billion from the low-income female dominated workforce to prop up the government's failed economic policies, including a $2.8 billion tax break for landlords at a time when rents continue to rise.

As the Green Party has highlighted with its alternative budget, austerity is a choice, not a necessity. Green Party co-leader Chloe Swarbrick rightly observes that this Government seeks 'fiscal consolidation' through 'a process of cuts, cuts, merciless cuts after cuts'.

While Luxon and Willis might deny that their Government is pursuing an austerity agenda, this budget requires ordinary people to carry the economic burden for the many failures of a broken system.

This Government's policies are only leading to increased poverty and inequality, a decaying education and health sector and other public services. Meantime, the victims of austerity, the poor and the unemployed, are at the mercy of an increasingly unresponsive and hostile welfare system. And now the Government is seeking to deny some 9,000 18 and 19-year-olds access to the unemployment benefit at a tine when unemployment is on the rise.

While Luxon, Willis, Seymour and co will never admit it, not in the least because they are the political representatives of a powerful oligarchy, the Government also has the power to raise public spending and investment, increase taxes on the wealthy and big businesses, and properly regulate big businesses and financial institutions.

This, to its credit, is the path that the Green Party proposes that the country takes. It's less clear though what the Labour Party is suggesting. The signs though are not encouraging and that it will only seek to be  'the better manager' of a failed economic system.