The political powers snatched by our ruling (and undeniably right wing) coalition government seems to have no use for our younger generations.
A couple of weeks ago in this column, I touched on the unpleasant realisation that children – the young of the nation and extending far beyond those in low decile communities – are becoming functionally invisible in our current, ethics-deprived political discourse.
Possibly because children impact only marginally on The Economy , that Great God of Capitalism and the hard-right’s idolatry.
Their mother’s work (or their father’s either) inside the home is similarly invisible in the accounting structure of the widely discredited data-gathering hitting-stick that is GDP, a measurement that weighs up the paid work that rebuilt Christchurch (slowly) but aimed to count (and levy income tax) on after-school jobs.
The young did Covid hard, many of them cooped up mentally, physically and socially, academically hobbled by isolation and lack of structured stimulus through the most formative years of their life.
Now Covid is over, no one should be allowed to fail in school because they are hungry or chronically sick.
The system owes them, not less but much more than the recent dubious inflation-fighting measures which left us with fresh fruit and vegetables inflating by a staggering 67 percent in a land of plenty.
Yet our leaders are squawking “lock them up” if youngsters turn to a tribe and go to the bad, and demanding the already-discredited boot camps and truancy police from the public purse.
Then we were unashamedly told that the employees of 75 local businesses across New Zealand’s straited regional towns and districts that were suppling school lunches for 176,000 schoolchildren will be dumped out of work.
A giant grocery conglomerate, led by global catering giant Compass Group and including Gilmours and Libelle which have prospered mightily from hospitality industries and New Zealand’s corner stores for generations, now walks away with a $1 billion contract for pre-packaged food. And judging by the last tin of apple slices I purchased, most of it will have clocked up more air miles than your average billionaire.
The new contract price of $3 per meal will be saving the government $6 a pop, but at what real cost?
The profits will almost certainly head straight out of the country to the parent conglomerate, increasing our GDP but bypassing government tax dollars, which the current resident businesspeople must dutifully pay in full.
And global corporations typically don’t.
Also ignoring the fact that the same money in local circulation is reused four or five times – from plumber to bookshop to cycle repair shop to restaurants and coffee shops – as it bounces around each local economy, multiplying both GDP and GST for the region. What’s not to like?
Shopping locally does that quite naturally, and the loss of jobs in 78 small towns and communities is another devastation for families already struggling with the whole weight of our counter-intuitive attempts to curb inflation.
And that’s before you even start on the life-altering effects of hot, wholesome food for those 176,000 young minds. The improvement inside and outside of the classroom may even reduce truancy numbers. Paying an army of truancy police and the courts – also earnestly proposed in recent weeks – certainly won’t.
How does a ‘good’ economy equate with this wanton waste of the brains, the brawn, the life-force and the innovative potential of the athletes and scholars and families into the future?
We live in paradise, particularly here, but now even our clean hydro-power legacy looks likely to collapse, with our last major manufacturing companies announcing closures, mainly due to exponential rise in electricity prices and a need for government intervention. Which they have been told they won’t get. Although Comalco did.
The government has said it cannot save them all – without any visible desire to do so – and we need better than that.
We literally pay the government to collect taxes to actively maintain a fair and equitable society.
We already have the lowest taxes of all our traditional trading partners and huge gaps in our management of wealth accumulation that attracts little or no tax at all, despite staggering fortunes being made by brisk trading in basic housing stock.
There are literally thousands of wage earners and government servants already out of work on this government’s watch and still it whitters on about cutting taxes.
The young will be paying the price of every one of those job losses, every mingy austerity, every shuffling excuse for shutting down services, every young family broken up by the impossible task of feeding and housing children on two full-time wages.
You cannot have a robust economy without a stable, well-resourced population.
Unless we revive our egalitarian ways and rebalance wealth distribution, we will miss the point of civilisation and drift into a later-day slave economy that is merely a tool to extract wealth from its workers. And even 18th century Scottish philosopher Adam Smith knew that model was actually highly inefficient .
• Liz Waters
© Waiheke Gulf News Ltd 2024
