In Defence of Frills
It’s time to have the courage to imagine something different.
The name says it all. This week’s ‘no-frills’ Budget delivered a handful of measures that merely skimmed the surface of our collective need. The task of undoing decades of poor economic decisions which gutted our public services and syphoned wealth into the hands of a rich few, is clearly for another day.
I was born in 1989 which means I have only known a country post-Rogernomics and the ‘Mother of all Budgets.’
Conversations around my dinner table speak of the ‘good old days’ when people didn’t have much, yet there was always enough to go around. My uncle talks about how there were only five people in Upper Hutt on the benefit which was a sign that people were prospering. Communities were tight, futures were hopeful and importantly, the Government had become known as a safety net to those who needed it the most.
But over recent decades, we have seen a paring back and cutting down of Government-led public services which has left a gaping hole in the functioning of our everyday lives. It looks like buses not showing up so you can’t get to work. It feels like terrifyingly long waits at hospital emergency departments. It smells like the mould of a deeply embedded housing crisis.
We watch our political parties casually move Budget numbers around, while families go hungry or rack up more debt just to survive. Our news pages scream of crimes committed by desperate people. Poor and transient loved ones die in a burning lodge. Supermarkets and banks cream off our misery with mega profits. The fallout affects young people and marginalised communities most, but is now impacting almost everyone.
We know within our bones, and hearts that something in our system is not working.
Yet even in these dire times, the so-called solution is to spend less, just with different metaphors. This logic is being loudly pushed by National and Act and it’s successfully influenced our Labour Government. Leading up to the Budget, our Prime Minister’s answer to our systemic issues was to tighten Government belts, just as families are being asked to do. But herein lies the problem.
Government budgets do not work the same as household budgets. The Government is not a benign, powerless entity beholden to whatever life throws at it. It has a range of options available that families simply do not have. And it has a responsibility to use them. In fact, what we don’t spend publicly ends up as private household debt.
We don’t need a Government with a tight belt. We need decision-makers who use their ability and resources to improve peoples’ lives as much as they possibly can. Who hold our private sector to account, so that we can rebalance the scales between those who have easy access to wealth, and those who are locked into poverty. We need a Government who takes our responsibilities to Te Tiriti o Waitangi seriously, and doesn’t throw Māori under the bus when elections roll around. More than anything, we need good people who have the guts to do what is right even when it inevitably impacts the opinion polls.
If those are frills, then sign me up.
Contrary to what we are told, there is no lack of wealth. Bernard Hickey writes that our country has a net household wealth of $2.25 trillion, which is $450,200 per person. There is enough to go around, but it is not being distributed fairly into our shared pool.
There is no lack of solutions. We have evidence-based efforts that we know have made a difference in the past, such as increasing our public housing stock in times of need. Our iwi and hapū have enduring experience of living in balance with our natural world, and can enable us to prepare for climate change. Our teachers and nurses can shape how our education and health systems can function better. Our tax experts can guide us on the details of how we move from collective scarcity into abundance. Our creatives can story, sculpt and sketch what a better, fairer world can look like.
It is entirely possible to avoid lurching from crisis to crisis, but it will mean we have to kick old mentalities to the curb. It’s tempting to believe that our economy just needs to be managed more ‘efficiently’, and we will make it through. But this has not worked. Privatising everything has not worked. Hollowing out our public services has not worked. Trickle-down theory has not worked. Obscene corporate profit has not worked. Letting the market run our lives has not worked.
It’s time to have the courage to imagine something different. Our systems can be a combination of old and new, the innovative and familiar, and shaped by what is uniquely us. But we can’t do it without decent, long term public funding commitments, and a Government who is ready to do the right thing for us and for the future — frills and all.
Kassie Hartendorp (Ngāti Raukawa) has a background in community work and youth development. She is currently Director for people-powered organisation, ActionStation.
