The Ministry of Social Development’s latest analysis of household incomes should make uncomfortable reading for the government. It shows that real equivalised median household incomes dropped by almost 3% from 2010 to 2011.
Now that’s some fine economist-speak, but in English it means that ordinary Kiwi families are $900 per year worse off than they were a couple of years ago.
$900 is a huge amount of money. It could buy all the kids’ school uniforms, or pay quite a few power bills. It’s enough for a whole neighbourhood to set up vegetable gardens!
But it’s $900 that your average family doesn’t have anymore. And National’s economic mismanagement is to blame. Their top-rate income tax cuts and GST rises saw top earners boosted up, but the middle and bottom went backwards.
Today in Parliament I asked the acting finance minister, Steven Joyce, about the MSD report. I wanted to get to the bottom of how National can possibly think that it’s fair for ordinary Kiwi families and the poorest New Zealanders to be much worse off under this government, while at the same time the richest New Zealanders have gotten huge tax cuts and are much richer now.
The minister was clearly uncomfortable, and in light of the facts he should be.
As expected, Mr Joyce trotted out the usual list of hollow National excuses.
But it was astonishing to hear him arguing (as the Prime Minister did yesterday, incidentally) that the 3% decrease was actually an increase!
Joyce’s reasoning:
“The point is over what period of time the median household incomes have increased…. The Member has selected a period from 2009/10 to 2010/11.”
Obviously I chose that period because it’s the period that National have been the government.
If we follow Steven Joyce’s logic it’s not important to rationally analyse the success or failure of the government of the day and its policies. It doesn’t matter to him that struggling families are getting poorer.
All that’s important to National is finding any historical comparison point which might make today’s disastrous economic figures look better. Evidently our acting finance minister doesn’t even understand inflation.
This is what National’s “brighter future” means. It’s an unfair and unequal society where the government helps its rich mates to get richer while making everyone else poorer.
Very interesting David, you are certainly relishing being the finance spokesman again, has anybody told the other David?
This latest household incomes report indicates the widest income gap between rich and poor ever. We have large numbers of children, the elderly and other vulnerable people living in poverty. I despair at the policy decisions that have made the rich richer at the expense of every other New Zealander.
We should be focusing on secure jobs, decent living wages, and a safety net in the form of benefits that are liveable and humanising.
I wonder if this Government is ashamed of the further suffering of the poor and the vulnerable through its policy decisions?
National: Building a Blighted Future
Hmm… The more people who are struggling financially, the more desperate we become for jobs, leading us to become more pliant:-more open to any policy that **is said to** create jobs and the more angry we become with anyone opposing such.
Mining and oil drilling, pretty unpopular approaches toward boosting our economy, were mentioned in Parliament a number of times today when the subject of poverty/inequality was being addressed.
Are we being maneuvered into accepting activities that we normally wouldn’t?
Admittedly a very cynical thought, however, it is very hard to make sense of the choice of our government to boost higher earners income while creating more costs for lower income earners in a recession. Are they really THAT incompetent?
Why is anybody surprised. This is what governments of the ‘right’ do!. In times of plenty there can be an element of ‘trickle down’, but when the chips are down National will support its own. Of course the asset sales will make the inequality seriously worse…Well… nationally strategic and essential infrastructure is removed from common ownership and largely transfered to the wealthy! And this bonanza for ‘friends’ just as the world is beginning to appreciate the huge value of green energy.
Administrations of the right thrive best when the population is mislead and dumbed down. It helps also immensely to have a Pied Piper(of Helensville?) to entice the gullible innocents into the dark cave.
It is not in the baser interests of a Rogue Trader to work for the greater good
“If we follow Steven Joyce’s logic”.
There’s your problem in a nut shell, David. There is no logic. Just spin. Sometimes outright lies. Anything to get through. Muldoon was a master at it. So was Bolger. Must a Tory gene at work?
Building a Brighter Future for the Wealthy.
More Tax Cuts for the Wealthy, John Key has certainly lifted himself out of the gutter and is now soaring high with the eagles.
I guess the rest of us can buy tickets to China and start working on their dairy farms and in their factories.
Last worker left in NZ please turn off the lights b4 you leave.
Tēnā koe, David
I always appreciate your comments on behalf of the most vulnerable members of our society. This government is mean-spirited, small-minded, and morally destitute and should not be in the business of running a country.
However, Labour is not that much better (bar you and a few of your colleagues). Its drive to court the middle-classes is at the expense of the vulnerable, the marginalised, the dis-enfranchised, and the working poor.
I guess because they tend not to vote makes them irrelevant to the party heirarchy therefore an easy scapegoat in order to engender support from the middle class demographic.
My family were avid Labour supports – like many other Māori families but now, no way. Until true leadership emerges that fights hard and passionately (without stuttering or umming)for those most vulnerable – Labour will continue to lose our votes.
Ngā mihinui ki a koe.
Dear Mr Cunliffe.
Did you ever hink hat perhaps income inequaliy has worsened because of all he governmen forced wealh redisribuion?
Here sure has been a lo of i.
I would have thought that in today’s world the first step out of poverty was to be able to speak English, or Maori, properly, in order to be able to read and write.
If you cannot speak clearly you cannot understand anything properly, and you certainly cannot go on educationally to a better world.
@SheepDog – did the government re-distribute your “T” key as well?
The “government-enforced wealth redistribution” in the form of tax cuts, GST increases, and income bracket fiddling on National’s watch is the most proximate example coming to my mind!
Oh Tim! Seems silent t Cunliffe is not the only humourless oik here.
From memory some time ago key said the solution to
child poverty was ‘education’huh! the irony in this
is that in order for kids to learn they must be fed,
be healthy,have warm clothing, afford school books and be open to learning, then education would be a benefit, not a distraction.
I am pleased to see you put up a resistance in the
house against the nacts process of thinking,their
rhetoric just doesn’t stack up as with regards to
all the nact policies.
I think also that there should be some policies that
are binding on any new government when it comes to
the welfare and health of the people of the country,
at the moment its ‘smash and grab’ and it’s the people
and kids that suffer.