I spent last weekend glued to my laptop screen for a three-day international Zoom conference hosted out of Sydney, a lively mix of ethnicities, ages, beliefs and global perspectives, spiced with the logistics of time zones and technologies.
I also had a common-or-garden head cold, spending most of the conference breaks with a towel over my head, inhaling the potent fumes from a dab of Vicks in a glass of hot water.
Fortunately, I had a little green-and-blue tub of that most trusty of childhood remedies to hand, purchased in Fiji when the friend I was travelling with insisted that we stock up with the local brand. It was, she said, much more redolent of the herbs and oils than the same product in hometown Melbourne.
Its efficacy had not waned, miraculously clearing my painful sinuses and evoking memories and insights.
But along with simple gratitude was an uneasy feeling. What is the current price of a little pot of Vicks, I asked myself, pretty sure that even such a tiny fraction of family health needs would wipe out the coalition government’s derisory weekly ‘tax cut’ for many households.
Odds are that a lot of children this winter are going without Vicks to relieve the misery of colds and winter illness. And while my generation even had our mothers at home to nurse and coddle us, current household economics mean many of today’s schoolchildren won’t even have that.
Even in our own, fairly straited years raising a family on Waiheke in the 1980s, we took for granted being able to buy health essentials, to eventually finish building a house and to maintain that Auckland tradition of nearly universal ownership of some form of yacht or launch – making the compromises elsewhere to have rich family life in such a magnificent sailing ground.
Yet here we are. Capable, as a nation, of feeding 40 million, living in an earthly paradise undreamt of by any civilisation in the last 11,000 years, paying our taxes and finding we can no longer summon up the political acumen to feed children whose parents cannot, mathematically, afford to live or eat or raise them in this particular society.
Last week had been particularly frightening as a whole new tranche of tried-and-failed right-wing experiments were pushed out from Wellington, seemingly designed to further jangle the nerves of a once generous and modestly prosperous population.
“People in poverty deserve so much better than the pain and misery this government is inflicting upon them,” Green Party Social Development and Employment spokesperson Ricardo Menéndez March said at week’s end.
“People deserve to live in dignity, they deserve to be supported in times of need. Everything we need to turn this ambition into a reality exists, all that is missing is the political will.
“This government is setting a poverty trap by cutting thousands of jobs while at the same time intentionally cutting benefit increases,” said the spokesman whose party campaigned on tax reforms and a properly costed plan to end poverty.
The government had shown little interest in really addressing poverty and has instead made life harder for many of our communities, he said. “Cuts to benefit increases, job losses and an increase in sanctions have left people without the resources to put food on the table and pay their bills.”
You would think we had enough clean, renewable hydro electricity generation for our needs, too, so the arrival of what has been described as ‘a slow-moving train wreck’ in our electricity supply industry, mega profits on the retail side and families sitting in the dark and borrowing from friends to pay overdue power bills laden with added penalties has also been a shock.
“The word that keeps on coming through is ‘struggle’,” Consumer NZ’s campaigns manager Jessica Walker said after they sought public comment on the issue. “For many people, the rising costs and dropping temperatures have led to a sense of despair.”
The watchdog entity’s latest energy survey estimates that 140,000 households had to take out loans to cover their power bills in the past year.
“Disconnection puts you at risk of being rejected by electricity retailers in the future, she said, and almost one in 10 households have been turned down as a customer by an electricity retailer because of a previously unpaid bill.
It’s not pretty, and we now hear about exceptionally high wholesale prices and the expectation that these will soon flow through on to household bills. As Consumer says, this almost certainly means people who are currently just managing to scrape by will soon be struggling too.
What happened to the good idea that sunny Northland could be economically revitalised by a solar generation industry, cutting out a vast proportion of the transmission costs from the far south?
We seem to have let our gumption drift away.
• Liz Waters
© Waiheke Gulf News Ltd 2024
