Fortress NZ will be here for a long time yet
Enough happened this week that you probably missed one of the most remarkable statistics of the crisis. More than a million workers – 41 per cent of our entire workforce – are now being supported by the Government’s wage subsidy. In just three weeks, $6.6 billion had been paid out. For context, that’s $2b more than the Government was planning to spend on all working age benefits – jobseekers, disability, sole parent support – for the entire year. It’s three years of the Provincial Growth Fund, twice. All over three crazy weeks.
The state has intervened in New Zealand society more than it has in almost anyone’s lifetimes. It’s done this with remarkable public buy-in – polling out this week showed only 5 per cent of New Zealanders think the Government has gone too far, and close to a third want it to go further.
Even the Right-wing lobby group the Taxpayers Union has taken $60,000 in government cash, breaking an oath it had made to never accept government help. Crises make socialists of everyone.
Over halfway into this lockdown period, the news is looking good for New Zealand. We’ve had three days now where the number of recovering cases exceeds the number of newly discovered ones. The existing clusters appear to be growing on a linear scale, not an exponential one.
It’s far too early to say for certain – the Government is not keen to reveal its plans until two days before the end of the fourweek period – but it’s certainly looking like this lockdown won’t be extended, at least not for the whole country.
This does not mean a return to normal, however. Level three, the next level down, will still mean the closure of thousands of businesses and many schools. And because much of the rest of the world does not have this virus under anything like the control we seem to, our borders will have to remain closed for a long time. We’re heading back to Fortress New Zealand.
This won’t quite be like Robert Muldoon’s walled paradise. The Government has emphasised over and over at every stage of new restrictions that goods should still be able to move freely in and out of New Zealand. You’re still going to be able to buy stuff from overseas, and we’re still going to be selling our milk over there too.
But we’re not going to be jumping on planes for overseas trips. The tourism sector – which directly and indirectly supports 400,000 jobs – is not coming back for a long while, no matter how much we try to promote domestic travelling.
The state is going to stay very involved in the economy for a while to come. As governments of all colours spend huge sums all over the world, it would seem the retreat of government power, begun in the 1980s and cemented in the 1990s, is finally over.
That or – like in many countries after 2008 – the spend-up right now will give governments an excuse for austerity in the years to come. This remains possible, but would seem politically difficult, given the current support everyone has for health workers. How do you tell a nurse who just went through the coronavirus year that they don’t deserve a pay rise?
Key to making sure our strange new world actually works will be politics.
People hate politics, especially at times like this. But politics is the way we legitimise the kind of power being exercised right now.
It’s the way you can make sure that the fortress country we become after the lockdown is one you want to live in – or at least one where you have a ‘‘loser’s consent’’, by which you can accept that the majority of people want a different country than the one you want.
There has been a lot of criticism of National leader Simon Bridges’ 500-kilometre commute from
Tauranga for the select committee that has replaced Parliament.
Undoubtedly, Bridges could probably do most of the job from home over Zoom, like all the other MPs are doing. Or he could have moved his family to Wellington – although Bridges lacks the luxury of Premier House.
But the questioning of whether he has the ‘‘authority’’ to travel is ridiculous. He’s the leader of the Opposition. If a cop tried to stop his free travel around the country, it would be a constitutional outrage.
He’s made clear that access to the press is one of the reasons he wishes to be in Wellington, and that reason stacks up – while we all have his phone number, TV generally needs footage of politicians.
Obviously no-one should be ‘‘above the rules’’, but Bridges meets the definition of essential worker easily enough.
Of course, currently there aren’t actually that many divides in party politics. National has been pushing for the quarantine implemented on Thursday, but the Government has never really been hostile to the idea, and clearly signalled it would be doing one on Monday, once the capacity for it was sorted out.
But divides will emerge as we get closer to the election date of September 19, which should not be delayed unless absolutely necessary. National and Labour will have very different plans for how to get out of this hole. And the Green Party, hopeful that this stimulatory spending is not as carbon-intensive as stimulatory spending usually is, will have a whole different idea entirely.
The best way to sort all that out is an election, and an election soon.