BUTTER AND THE COST OF LIVING CRISIS

The skyrocketing rise in the price of a block of butter is emblematic of a much wider problem for the government, the rising cost of living and the destructive impact of its austerity agenda.

THE COALITION GOVERNMENT continues to be chased by a block of butter, and its efforts this week to escape its clutches have only made its political predicament worse. The Finance Minister's claim that New Zealanders are not getting a 'raw deal' on butter, has not gone down well and the attempt by Nicola Willis to pass the buck and leave Fonterra to face the music, didn't work either.

Fonterra CEO Will Hurrel's claim that he understood why folk were upset about the skyrocketing price of butter, but he was not about to lower the domestic price was not what people wanted to hear. But such is the logic of capitalism. Profit rules the roost. Hurrel is on a salary package of some $6 million per annum and he presides over a dairy company that registered a half year profit of $729 million. Little wonder people feel that they are being fleeced. 

Meanwhile, out in medialand, the Government's cheerleaders were doing their best to pour cold water on the butter bonfire. On Newstalk ZB (where else?) afternoon co-host Matt Heath claimed he couldn't understand what all the fuss was about. He suggested that folk should just curtail their use of butter. He told his listeners not to eat cake but eat margarine. I imagine his advice would not have gone down well with commercial bakers, who would not have appreciated being told how to do their job by a talkback host. 

The difficulty for the Government, as some commentators have observed, is that the skyrocketing price of butter is emblematic of a much larger problem for the government, the rising cost of living. It has turned into a full-blown crisis, and one that has been exacerbated by the government's austerity agenda. This has seen a continuing series of concerted attacks on the economic interests of the working class and has resulted in an estimated half a million people now having to rely on foodbanks in order to get by.

In another country plagued by neoliberalism, a three percent rise in the price of train tickets led to widespread protests against the high cost of living and the widening economic gap between the haves and the have-nots. This was Chile in 2019, with the protests continuing into 2020. They were only curtailed by the outbreak of COVID.

A Chilean sociologist observed that while the rise in the price of train tickets might have sparked the protests, they had their roots in 'high levels of inequality and a political class not living up to expectations.'

It can be argued that we are unlikely to see such protests here. Although this week's Talbot Mill poll suggests that more than half the country thinks the country is on the wrong economic track, people may well seek relief by voting a Labour-led government into office next year. But Labour has provided no evidence that it's prepared to do anything but tinker with an economic system that is fundamentally broken.

But as UK economist Grace Blakeley has noted, there's nothing inevitable about austerity cuts — it's a deliberate decision to avoid confronting the powerful. The Labour Government under Jacinda Ardern retreated from that confrontation, and it's unlikely a Labour-led government with Chris Hipkins at the helm will be any different. 

Bearing that in mind, perhaps we should also reflect on the fact that outbursts of resistance often come as a surprise to the political establishment and outstrip the expectations of its academics and commentators.