Remember those slick online National Party ads during the 2023 election campaign, the ones with the interactive slider? Toggling across a photograph wiped away the world of empty café tables and stunted houseplants to reveal paradise, bought to you by the National Party.
The ads are still on view via The Clios ‘ads of the world’ website, if you want to see what ‘not aging well’ looks like.
Check out the one titled ‘Cost of Living’, set in a middle-class kitchen at night. A young girl in pigtails gazes into a fridge, next to a golden dog of indeterminate breed. We’ll call it ‘AI labrador’. At stage left, a houseplant wilts next to a tower of unpaid bills. The fridge is half empty, although there’s fancy mustard, cos lettuce, half-filled deli jars and butter. Not much of interest for children or dogs.
If we pull the slider across the photograph – oh my goodness. What a difference! The girl now reaches for a rather un-PC pink donut in a fridge packed with groceries. The house plant has grown as big as a spaniel, and the pile of bills has become – oh joy! A bowl of fruit. Inside the fridge there’s marbled beef, and mountains of cheese and butter, enough to give the All Blacks heart failure. Crystal champagne flutes which weren’t there under Labour – I mean, which weren’t there in the first photo – sparkle under a weirdly specific light. Even the mismatched crockery has transformed into French colonial. Happy days! A final toggle reveals a National Party logo.
With such a full fridge, I’m guessing girl-with-plaits must have siblings. Maybe they are leaving school with the PM’s tender instructions ringing in their ears; “get off the couch, stop playing Play Station and go find a job”.
Funny he should mention jobs. Along with butter, it’s likely to be a sore point for families worrying how on earth they are going to pay for the electricity to power the damn fridge.
Since National took office, the unemployment rate has soared from 3.9 percent to 5.2 percent, despite 200 people a day subtracting themselves from the count (on average) by leaving the country.
When companies cut back, the last person on is often the first off, and this is reflected in NZ statistics showing a crisis in youth unemployment. Since the election, there are 37,243 fewer 15 to 19-year-olds in ‘filled’ jobs. In the last two years, Jobseeker Support claims for 18-24-year-olds increased by 41 percent. The unemployment rate for 15 to 19-year-old Māori is 21.4 percent, and for Pasifika 26.6 percent. We haven’t seen figures like this since the global financial crisis.
Oddly enough, the PM thinks there are plenty of jobs, hanging off trees ready to be picked. Does he actually know anyone trying to find a job? The Hawke’s Bay, as one example, has 7359 Jobseekers and 568 jobs on Seek.
To help propel a nation of teenagers into finding this work which doesn’t exist, from November next year 18 to 19-year-olds whose parents earn $65,529 or more will no longer be eligible for jobseeker support. The economist Craig Renney is scathing. “Sometimes a policy is so stupid it makes you question the very fabric of reality… The scheme’s income cap is equivalent to two parents each working 27 hours at the minimum wage, not even full-time. That’s around three days at work per week each. If the parents earn one dollar above the cap, then their child gets nothing. But if one parent works one hour less (giving up $23.50 a week), then their child now gets $261 a week. The household is much better off if the parents work less. This is the first time I have ever seen a policy from a right-wing government that seeks to minimise the number of hours being worked and to maximise benefit claims.”
The government has produced no evidence that a family earning $65,529 before tax can support adult children, or that taking away money available for transport, retraining or bond money will help them find work. Teenagers from dysfunctional homes and trans youth will obviously be at added risk under a policy which robs them of so much agency as adults.
But maybe helping young people find work isn’t the goal. Is Luxon just trying to rescue one of his KPIs? (In business jargon, a KPI is a ‘key performance indicator’, and Luxon’s employment target is 140,000 on Jobseeker support by 2030. It isn’t going well – by June 2025, the figure was 216,000).
Renney suspects Luxon is simply fixated on this KPI. “Is the government planning on getting to its targets by removing the number of people who can claim? Like when the same minister – Louise Upston – moved the government’s child poverty targets so that up to 17,000 more children could be living in poverty?”
We can’t let Luxon pin his mess on young people. When the government cut thousands of jobs on ideological grounds, from the public service to Kāinga Ora housing projects and school builds, it cratered the job market and the contracts businesses relied on. The businesses which relied on them began to suffer, too. In the last two years, the construction industry has shrunk by 16,000 jobs and more than 1000 companies.
It isn’t teens on the couch who are to blame for the economic pickle we find ourselves in, but politicians so deep in the soporific squabs of ideology that it would take a crane to pull them out. If only the crane driver hadn’t buggered off to Oz. • Jenny Nicholls
