Joyce’s budget baubles ignore more pressing issues
There’s a wonderful line in playwright Dean Parker’s adaptation of Nicky Hager’s book The Hollow Men. National’s 2005 election campaign manager, Steven Joyce, stands front-of-stage and tells the audience: ‘‘The most important thing in politics is sincerity. Once you can fake that you can fake anything.’’
It’s a line which could very easily prompt a cynic to remark that the real Steven Joyce’s first budget was an extremely sincere document.
Some commentators have described the 2017 Budget as a foray into Labour/Green territory. We are asked to view it as a sort of Viking raid in reverse – where, instead of raping and pillaging, the Norsemen jog through villages handing out bread and ale to all who come within the reach of their outstretched arms.
A better analogy, drawn from the same period of English history, would be that Steven Joyce is hoping to placate an increasingly impatient electorate with a hefty payment of ‘‘Danegeld’’.
Danegeld was the ‘‘protection money’’ collected by Anglo-Saxon kings to ‘‘dissuade’’ the Danes from laying their territory to waste. Polls and focus groups have been telling Joyce and his colleagues that the voters are fast running out of patience with Bill English’s government.
Joyce’s hope is that by promising a handful of coins to ‘‘the battlers on Struggle Street’’ he will not only keep them sweet, but will also convince a sufficient number of conscience-stricken middle-class New Zealanders that he has heard their concerns and is doing something about them.
The thing about the Danes, however, is that they were a resolutely present-focused people. They were not the sort of invaders to be bought off with the mere promise of a pay-off. They expected to see silver and gold glittering at their feet. If the Saxons failed to deliver up their kingdom’s wealth ‘‘voluntarily’’, then the Danes would simply take it.
The forthcoming election will, therefore, turn on whether the electorate can be induced to wait until next April for a modest measure of economic relief from the National Party, or, whether Labour and the Greens (and NZ First?) are able to convince voters that the pay-off from a new government will not only be more substantial, but also more driven by the long-term interests of the whole nation.
Of the four great issues currently vexing the electorate – housing, immigration, poverty and water – Joyce’s Budget addressed only Poverty in anything like a serious way. About the other big election issues, this most important of pre-election documents had very little to say.
And that was very telling. A growing number of voters are looking for some evidence that the National-led Government has a coherent set of solutions to the crucial challenges confronting their country.
For these voters, the Budget can only have been a profound disappointment.
When, they ask, are New Zealand’s politicians going to faceup to the huge problem of its working population’s inadequate incomes? Deploying Working For Families as a way of topping-up employees’ wages and salaries is not an adequate answer. Nor is topping-up tenants’ rents with an increased Accommodation Supplement.
If New Zealand really is prepared to, once again, make wholesale subsidisation a feature of its economy, then there are much worthier recipients of those subsidies than bosses and landlords!
The Budget was also disappointing in how little it had to say about the fact that young New Zealanders looking to purchase their first house must expect to pay three times as much for it as their parent’s generation. No other statistic has left a deeper impression upon the political sensibilities of Middle New Zealand.
‘‘How in God’s name,’’ they inquire, ‘‘are our children and grandchildren to enjoy the benefits of a ‘property owning democracy’ without incurring a lifetime of oppressive debt?’’
And, as if that question, alone, wasn’t enough to vex the average middle-class voter, there are others. Like: ‘‘What sort of country have we become when families are forced to sleep in their cars, or their relations’ garages?’’ And: ‘‘Why are we allowing tens-ofthousands of migrants into a country already struggling to house, educate and look after its own citizens?’’ Or: ‘‘What happened to the clean, green country we grew up in? Why is it no longer safe to swim in New Zealand’s rivers and streams?’’
In this election year – of all election years – Steven Joyce’s Budget had to offer the electorate a sincere and credible effort to address every one of these questions.
That it represented little more than a reiteration of the same old ‘‘immigrants + tourists + cows = prosperity’’ mantra of the Key/ English era is already souring its public reception.
The Finance Minister’s first (and probably last) Budget has singularly failed to fake either sincerity or credibility.
If the New Zealand electorate are the Danes, and this Government the Saxons, then Steven Joyce’s Danegeld isn’t big enough.