Back in the 1950s we used to say New Zealand was a very egalitarian country; and it was.
Sure there were wealthy people - industrialists and business people like Myers, Kerridge, Caughey, Yates, Dove-Myer Robinson. There were landed gentry like Elworthy, Kelt, Ormond. And there were flash cars. Robbie and Rainton Hastie, of strip club fame, both drove Rolls Royces.
There were also poverty pockets of run down, barely livable houses (especially rural Maori), and a growing number of urban poor.
But there was nothing like the income gap now existing in Aotearoa, nor any of the ostentatious flaunting of wealth we see today. ‘His and Hers’ Ferraris, Lamborginis, Aston Martins galore, and Mercedes winning car of the year in New Zealand - at $150,000 a disgrace.
No, it’s not jealousy, nor tall poppy syndrome, it’s concern for the wider New Zealand society, increasingly divided, anxious, depressed, and angry.
Increasing affluence is not making people happier. As Australian public professional Clive Hamilton has said, “Westerners are four or five times wealthier than they were 50 years ago, but they are no happier.”
Between 1985 and 2000 under Douglas and then Richardson, both rampant neo-liberals after the style of Thatcher and Reagan, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer in God’s own country. If you read The Spirit Level, by Wilkinson and Pickett, you see how New Zealand fairs badly in social statistics like prison incarceration, child mortality, teenage pregnancies and youth suicides alongside the inequality.
Recently I have noted an increase in gated communities. This is the beginning of a ‘them and us’ mentality. It could end in revolution - an extreme proposition, but one not unknown in our difficult modern world.
Much of what appears ‘natural’ today dates only from the 1980s - the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatisation and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor. The rhetoric that goes with this includes uncritical admiration of unfettered markets, disdain for the public sector and the delusion of endless growth.
Economists like Joseph Stiglitz, former world bank economist, and Thomas Picketty, writer of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, have warned of the gross inequality. Stiglitz calls for both pre and post income redistribution through taxation, while Picketty postulates a depressing equation which embeds inequality in a capitalist society, where R is the rate of return on capital and G is the rate of growth in the economy.
Most economists are not calling for socialism or total state control. They are calling for a better balance between private enterprise and state control.
Can anything really be done to produce a fairer economy for New Zealanders, or is it too late? I think there are three plausible possibilities.
The first is that the 99% will rise up and overthrow the 1%. The numbers taking to the streets during the so-called Arab Spring were impressive. Regimes in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya were overthrown.
The second possibility is that the 1% could begin to understand that the status quo is not in their best interests (hiding behind gated communities, frightened of violence and theft, knowing the system is unfair). They may just start to realise that it is in their interests to have a fairer and more just society.
The third scenario would see the diminishing middle classes realise that they have been kidding themselves when they think that their interests are the same as the interests of the 1%. This is what Marx called ‘false consciousness’.
Most tellingly, as Sir Edmund Thomas (retired judge of the New Zealand Court of Appeal) said in his Bruce Jesson memorial lecture several years ago, “New Zealand will never again be a fair and just society until we rid ourselves of the last vestiges of neo-liberalism.”
We must act now before we lose our planet, and our democratic way of life, and this Labour government may be our best chance. (JOHN ELLIOTT)
#ponsonbynews #iloveponsonby #ponsonby #auckland #aucklandshippestrip #onlyponsonby #ponsonbyroad #Greylynn #freemansbay #westmere #ponsonby #hernebay #stmarysbay #archhill #family #friends #coxsbay #inequality