Benefit changes will push more into poverty - Chlöe Swarbrick

“War is Peace.”

Orwell imagined the slogan for his fabled Oceania’s “Ministry of Truth” in his book 1984. The well-trodden notion was that a common enemy unites people, controlling narratives of the past narrows citizens’ aspirations and understanding of a possible future and, ultimately, that subjected to extreme fear and stress, we can en masse be driven to believe things that are politically convenient, albeit untrue.

This came to mind last week, when the Minister of Social Development argued for a bill that the Government’s own advice says will push an estimated 7000 kids into poverty by 2028 by reducing benefits through indexing changes, telling Parliament “it is fair to protect the real purchasing power of those on main benefits, and this is the approach our Government is taking”.

Prime Minister Luxon delivered the rhetorical sucker punch this weekend when he told us the state of the nation was fragile, not because IRD and Treasury research revealed last year that 311 families hold more wealth than the bottom two and half million New Zealanders, paying an effective tax rate less than half of the average person, but because young people are projected to be trapped in poverty for longer.

His solution? Not to read the footnote which came with the figures he cited, showing an incredibly complex and gut-wrenching litany of “risk factors” that land a young person in such hardship and address those. Not to consider the Welfare Expert Advisory Group’s 2019 report that “there is little evidence in support of using obligations and sanctions (as in the current system) to change behaviour; rather, there is research indicating that they compound social harm and disconnectedness”. Not to reflect on Auckland City Mission’s 2014 Family 100 research that the poor in this country “spent copious amounts of time and effort trying to get benefits and assistance from agencies … This present-only mindset combined with a lack of time due to basic-need seeking may not be conducive to job-seeking or future planning in general.”

No, the problem, he concluded, wasn’t that benefits are set below the poverty line and trap people there. He told us the problem was the beneficiaries themselves. His solution is to punish the poor.

We’ve been here before. Many politicians over the past 40 years have decided to punch down in hopes of piling up popularity. Perhaps it’s what Luxon meant when he promised to get the country “back on track”.

He certainly didn’t mean to follow through with the increasingly ridiculous promise in his Government’s coalition agreements that “decisions will be based on data and evidence”.

One of the first acts of the new Government, just before Christmas, repealed a law that required IRD to report on the efficacy and fairness of our tax system. They said that this reporting could be done without the law they spent a lot of time and energy repealing while also committing not to report this information, and that it was a cost of living measure to cut the 2.5 staffers (or, 0.06 per cent of IRD’s staff) working on the project reporting crucial public information on tax fairness.

In 2024, this Government wants you to believe poverty isn’t the problem, but rather it’s the people in poverty. They want you to believe the solution to that poverty is to push people further into poverty. War is peace, and all that.

Orwell’s book was written in 1948, around 10 years after a range of measures passed through our Parliament under Michael Joseph Savage’s Government, establishing public housing, fully funded public education, public healthcare, public libraries, public holidays and weekends, introducing the minimum wage and nationalising the Reserve Bank. These measures were paid for by higher taxes on those who had profited during a time of hardship for many.

Forty years later, a succession of Labour and National governments sold off, cut and corporatised these historical gains for regular people. They slashed taxes at the top end of town and told us it would trickle down. Instead, we have among the highest rates of wealth inequality and lowest rates of home ownership on record.

The only real “tough choice” Christopher Luxon and his Government face is whether to uphold this unequal economic system that is crumbling around our ears, tearing our environment to shreds and challenging faith in democratic institutions.

After the election, he proudly declared the nation to be “under new management”. The Greens will be using every opportunity we’ve got to remind him that our country is not a company - a Prime Minister is supposed to serve citizens, not shareholders. Or perhaps he said the quiet part out loud.

To be fair, this part of his approach is entirely in keeping with the two legacy parties’ avoidance of politically inconvenient advice. Over the past six years, Labour could and should have ended poverty and created a more equitable tax system by following their own commissioned advice from the Welfare Expert Advisory and Tax Working Groups. The Greens held them to account just the same.