Marlborough Express - Weekend Express
Handbrake remains despite mandate
TALKING POLITICS
In the Speech from the Throne, the Government unveils its legislative road map for the next parliamentary term.
Judging by what GovernorGeneral Dame Patsy Reddy read out to Parliament last week though, the Ardern government intends to travel down much the same well-worn paths as before, and not in the fast lane, either.
Stability and continuity were promised, not radical change. With luck, the economy might be assisted to expand a little. Once more, the government is promising to ‘‘relentlessly’’ make progress on affordable housing, child poverty, and climate change but holding your breath on any of those targets is not advised.
The Government’s selfdeclared top priority in 2021 will be to keep people safe from Covid-19, and this effort will (hopefully) include rolling out free vaccinations for every New Zealander. During the first half of 2021, the rewrite of the Resource
Management Act will also (finally) begin to take shape.
All worthy steps. No doubt, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern sincerely wants to alleviate child poverty, but she also appears to have little appetite for changing the economic structures that keep on generating it. A wealth tax of any sort has been ruled out. So has a meaningful capital gains tax as recommended by Labour’s Tax Working Group.
In the past, Winston Peters was criticised as the handbrake allegedly holding Labour back from fulfilling its progressive ambitions. Now the handbrake has gone, but the Labour Government still seems to be proceeding at the same careful pace.
Ironically, voters have just handed Labour a huge mandate for change, but its leadership duo – Ardern and Finance Minister Grant Robertson – seem to prefer only incremental changes, which tend to be micro-managed to avoid any possible political fallout.
How then is Labour going to achieve its wider aims – to reduce income inequality and combat climate change – if it is so instinctively averse to rocking the boat?
Two years ago Labour’s
Welfare Expert Advisory Group outlined a series of practical measures to address poverty. Yet the Speech from the Throne merely tinkered with welfare reform. The allowance to help solo parents retrain, and re-enter the paid work force will be reinstated. Lifting the hourly minimum wage to $20 will also help workers – many of them, women – currently on subsistence incomes.
Welcome steps. But the Covid recession is due to deepen in 2021, and the subsidies that have softened the impact of the pandemic have expired. Rent and mortgage pressures will increase throughout 2021 and inevitably, poverty will bite harder.
Yet, as the Speech from the Throne illustrated, the Government appears set – at least until Budget 2021 – on ignoring calls to raise the benefit levels. This is despite the consensus among experts on the front lines of welfare delivery that raising benefits would be the most effective way of alleviating child poverty in particular.
After Labour won the first outright majority in the history of MMP voting, there was early talk about whether it would be a ‘‘transformational’’ government.
No doubt, better public transport, more affordable public housing, and a retraining allowance would be genuine advances – but they would hardly count as the systemic, transformational change that many had hoped for.