All aboard the handbasket!

Man, New Zealand politics. What happened? We started off with a whoosh and a roar, the new right-ish monetarist government detailing all kinds of plans that sounded sensible and beneficial, things like national cycleways (because bugger being a cyclist on a main NZ road) and the house insulation subsidy to make our shitty homes, of which mine is one, actually inhabitable by human beings. You know that when the Green Party is applauding the National Party for something, you have entered territory that is seriously weird.

Too bad that we seemed to have sailed right back out of that territory again into terribly familiar waters. Visions of the 1990s are floating about in an unwelcome fashion, because you know that when a party famous for its dogged worship of economics and little else gains power during an economics-obsessed period in world financial history, the gloves will be coming off and the things which might enrich us as people are pushed aside in favour of blinkered decisions based on ideology. It also seems that "being retarded" is another deciding factor.

(Brief aside: anybody on TV or in print using the ghastly cliche "in this current economic climate" gets a punch in the neck. Public figures, use your imaginations! For once!)

Here are some things that have popped up just recently.

Let's close more rural schools! This was something that the previous Labour government was into, until Trevor Mallard suddenly realised that it was fucking stupid and slapped a five-year moratorium on closures. Now that's expired, and Education Minister Anne Tolley is gleefully rubbing her hands. The local paper alone featured a dozen schools looking down the barrel; some kids will face a 150 minute commute to and from the nearest school, which is basically inhuman. Yeah, yeah, Correspondence School and all that, but it's a bad excuse. Try telling these kids that they don't get to hang out with their friends all day anymore and see what happens.

We promise not to privatise anything in our first term! Oh, nice caveat. Very smooth. No-one at all will notice you assembling the menu for the second-term slaughterthon. The menu includes:

• The public service. The dialogue goes something like this:
  "Hey! Public service! Be profitable or you're out! BTW we're cutting your budget."
  "What? We're the public service, we're not meant to be profitable."
  "You might be if you were privately owned!"
  "Wait, no, put that axe down - *sputch!*"
  
  
• Prisons, now with more shipping containers. The fundamental flaw with private prisons, which the US is experiencing without really realising it, is that prison profits hinge on number of inmates. This gives rise to a prison lobby that does its best to torpedo efforts to reduce prison population. In fact the more people in prison, the better!
  
  
• ACC (a public Accident Compensation fund, for my overseas readers). Because allowing Tories to get their hands on something that benefits workers and that employers see as a salty pain in the ass will work SO WELL.
  
  
• Meridian Energy. You know, it's not like power companies aren't already gouging us with inflated prices so they can pay monstrous bonuses to their chiefs; I'm sure privatising a power company wouldn't make this worse at all!
  

Ooh, this is a good one! How about we raise GST while simultaneously lowering the top income tax rates! From the Sunday Star-Times:

Shamubeel Eaqub, principal economist at the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research, said GST was a fair tax in the sense that it was uniform and avoided the distortions often found in the different rates of income tax. Increasing GST and lowering income tax rates would be a "positive" move in principle.

Note to ivory tower economic knobtouchers: "uniform" does not equal "fair". In fact, where tax is concerned, uniform is in fact the opposite of fair. Doubly so here, since a low-income person will experience a tax increase; a high income person will not. Flat income taxes penalise those on the lowest income because...why am I even explaining this? It's Tax 101. I can only assume that the assholes who push these things do so because they have no conception of poverty, that poor people are an inconvenient speed bump on the road to accumulating more wealth.

It seems to be a thing about Tory governments in New Zealand, unique among other similar countries, that they will plow forward into massive cost-cutting measures, completely oblivious to any social costs down the road.
(Or indeed financial costs: how much money could Telecom have made for the government had we not sold it in 1990? Although it was a Labour government that sold it, its finance minister, Sir Roger Douglas, was a model for the National government that was elected that same year)

It is this blinkered approach that is loading up the handbasket. The Labour government may have been dull as old socks, but they implemented some good changes while managing to not make too big a mess. This new lot? The recession has given them carte blanche to steam in and fuck everything up for those who can least afford to be fucked with, and they're being cheered on by a majority of Kiwis who don't even realise what's going on.

To summarise, there's a good chance this country is ruined. There's a lot more to cover, about judicial reform, New Zealand democracy in general, and the sorry state of our media, but that requires a great deal more space and I need to go get some breakfast.