The Government’s Economic Development Plan

Stuart Munro. 4

Economics, not being an objective discipline, struggles with implementing real solutions to contemporary problems, much less strategies to improve future outcomes.

As Croaking Cassandra was saying the other day, since the neoliberal turn our economic outcomes have lagged those of our trading partners, and the message of this pdf is that the government is still pretending that isn't so.

We know the CGT was a required modest step to address housing inequality, but for reasons Labour is not disposed to discuss, it's off the table. A competent opposition would have them on the rack for that, but National is more of a howling shitstorm than an opposition. It's fair to say that no or ineffectual action is what the government prefers – which is after all the attraction of neoliberalism to the political class, it absolves them of responsibility, at least in their eyes.

So what should a modest centrist government be doing that they are not?

Well they should begin of course by constraining the out of control unskilled immigration normalized by the previous government. It drives wages and conditions down, thus impoverishing the rest of the economy. Conditions matter, and with record suicide running at over twice the road toll, employers imposing unnecessary stressors like the split shifts that cost Wellington bus drivers their jobs need to be viewed distinctly unsympathetically.

They should be prioritizing cost of living rorts, and in particular rates and utilities. We are at the long end of a global supply chain, but that does not apply to our power companies, whose product is locally produced. Nevertheless, we now have some of the most expensive domestic electricity prices in the world (thankyou Roger Douglas and all your disgusting fellow traitors). There's really no excuse for this, and none of the pathetic burble about markets or 'shopping around' makes it a whit better. The privatizations took place on the promise of cheaper prices and have not delivered them. The companies therefore have no-one but themselves to blame if they are returned to public ownership with minimal compensation – they lied to and defrauded both government and citizens. There are two economic objects in reducing cost of living in this fashion – to make our workers more internationally competitive, which they cannot be if they are being rorted six ways from Sunday, and to increase the cashflow within the economy, which makes small businesses and startups more viable.

Urgently address rent-rorting and housing insecurity. Although it has been congratulating itself for turning around housing construction, the government is still falling short of demand growth driven by migration. We could really use several hundred thousand extra houses in numerous locations, and in accord with adapting to a more sustainable model, tiny houses are an obvious answer. They use less labour and materials in construction, their portability lends them flexibility, and their energy footprints are likely to be much smaller than those of conventional housing. Far from encouraging them however, councils are aggressively overcharging on permits for them, with permit costs of 30-40k being now typical. Government could drive that down by producing lines of standardized plans with permit and rate caps. You know of course that most prospective tiny house dwellers would have preferred conventional dwellings, but they are forced to these alternatives by the epic incompetence of successive governments, who have pissed away their jobs to migrants and their housing to speculators – (thanks Roger Douglas and all your fellow traitors).