It’s Easter week and I find I am not writing about fluffy bunnies or the pagan origins of spring’s annual rebirth or the vanishing moral imperatives of Christianity.
Handwringing by rapacious overlords? That we do have, if you remember the Easter vignette of Roman administrator Pontius Pilot washing his hands after handing over the inconvenient prophet, Christ, to the mob of Jerusalem’s local priests and elders calling for his death.
Easter week this year has demanded a response to the prospect of all-out war in the Middle East, an oil crisis of Biblical proportions and an uncertain future about everything from our food security to our electricity capacity and the demise of our manufacturing and public employment.
As the straits of Hormuz slammed shut, our ruling coalition did not boldly make public transport free, extending out what little fuel we do have and giving us all a robust way forward together. Public transport is a great leveller, and we could do with a lot of that homogenisation in the face of such an existential threat.
Almost immediately, it became obvious that our parsimonious ruling clique had simply hunched over its citizens’ taxes and come up with a derisory support package that might see about 140,000 families receive $50 a week fuel handout. For a little while.
“Ninety-two percent of households won’t get anything from this package. New Zealanders already doing it tough – pensioners, welfare recipients, single people – won’t see any relief. It won’t help those working in rural communities who are facing huge price increases,” said NZ Council of Trade Unions president Sandra Grey.
“Industries across the country are under pressure from rising fuel costs. We are already in a cost-of-living crisis, and now fuel prices risk flowing through to the price of food and other essentials. And yet the government is choosing to provide minimum relief.
“During the global financial crisis and the pandemic, the government consulted with working people and their unions on solutions to the nation’s problems. Now is the time for government to talk with unions about what real, long-term solutions might look like,” she said.
Greenpeace Aotearoa executive director Dr Russel Norman says the government spent two years making the country more fossil fuel dependent. “They cancelled cycleways, cut public transport, subsidised new motorways, cut the clean car discount, weakened fuel efficiency standards and increased speed limits.
“It cancelled the gas transition plan, the big battery project and wants to spend billions on an LNG import terminal. They blocked offshore wind generation by pushing seabed mining in the same location. It is time for them to admit they took the nation down a dead end of expensive fossil fuel energy and climate disaster.
“It’s time for Luxon to issue a mea culpa.
“Making buses and trains free immediately would be a good start.
“And for goodness’ sake, let’s stop private jets from refuelling while we are short of jet fuel.”
Meanwhile other threats are compounding quickly, and the leadership must be dragged along if it won’t be responsible. Parsing dictionaries for alliterations and yapping out slogans only goes so far.
The closure of McCain’s Hastings vegetable processing factory is another massive failure on the government’s record, hitting not just workers, their families, and the Hawke’s Bay community but challenging our very food resilience as we go into a challenging future.
“Sadly, this is part of a broader pattern of closures affecting thousands of jobs across the manufacturing sector under Christopher Luxon’s watch,” Labour jobs and income spokesperson Ginny Andersen said this week.
“We’ve now seen major closures at Wattie’s, Kinleith Mill, Winstone Pulp, Sealord and many other companies reducing their workforces. Christopher Luxon promised he would fix the economy, instead he’s making it much worse.
“Unemployment has soared. There are 32,000 fewer jobs since National took office. Business liquidations are at a 15-year high. Each one of those jobs lost is a family struggling to pay the bills or a loved one moving to Australia.
“We can’t afford more such failures,” she said. “Labour’s priority is a more affordable New Zealand with well-paid jobs and a future made in New Zealand.”
Right now, we live in a world where literally a handful of people wield almost all the aggregated wealth and power of humankind over millennia and our own political leaders have been handing our abundant natural wealth to lobbyists and predator corporations.
Two years ago, Labour and its followers were resigned to the fact that a Luxon government would reap the benefit of an economy already recovering from global recession. “That’s politics,” Labour prime minister Chris Hipkins – windblown from the most recent East Cape floods – pragmatically shrugged it off as the fortunes of electoral processes.
In the event, that glint of hope vanished for working New Zealanders struggling in the toils of a faux precariat culture, a blizzard of ad hoc legislation and a two-year frenzy to ‘flood the zone’ with constant law changes to keep us overwhelmed. It’s the far-right playbook and entirely cynical.
• Liz Waters
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