The Post: To solve our housing crisis, we should look to Vienna

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At the tail end of New Zealand’s postwar state house-building boom, a strange edict was handed down to the government agency overseeing construction: don’t design anything with french doors.

The reason for this odd instruction? State houses had raised quality standards to such an extent that private builders were simply copying the designs and adding a few flourishs – french doors included – to distinguish their product. In order to keep commerce happy, state housing must not – the government decided – enter that territory.

This story, related in Ben Schrader’s excellent book We Call It Home, is relevant again this week, following our current government’s announcement of a tougher line on emergency accommodation.

The move to roll back emergency housing is a good one, given the scheme’s $340m-a-year spending on frequently awful motel rooms. And the government can take this line because Labour, after initially letting the sector boom, cut motel tenant numbers from 5000 in 2021 to under 3000 late last year. It did this partly by building or acquiring over 13,000 state houses.

The direction of travel, then, is positive. But National’s crackdown poses problems. People who have “unreasonably contributed” to their own housing situation, presumably by getting kicked out of other places, will be barred from emergency accommodation.

Yet people in dire straits often lead chaotic lives battling multiple dysfunctions, and almost inevitably make mistakes: is it really to the nation’s benefit to bar them from motel rooms if, as seems likely, they then just wind up on the streets?

A Wellingtonian I interviewed last year, Iosua Clarke, told me he was in emergency housing because “it’s hard finding accommodation, especially for [ex] inmates and fullas in the struggle. No-one will really take us”. It’s noteworthy, meanwhile, that the social development minister, Louise Upston, refuses to promise that the crackdown won’t worsen the crisis of homelessness. People, after all, need somewhere to go. In many cases, that is unlikely to be a private flat. Quite apart from the discrimination Clarke describes, the private sector is simply unaffordable for many.

Hence why New Zealand, like most developed countries, has long provided state housing, the rents for which are currently set at one-quarter of a tenant’s income.

There is widespread acknowledgement that we have too little social housing, a term that includes state homes but also NGO-provided accommodation that attracts similar subsidies. In 1990, social homes made up 5.4% of all houses, an already low number by developed-country standards. By last year that figure had plunged to 3.3%.

The main culprits in that decline were the National governments led by Jim Bolger and John Key. Subsequent Labour administrations made a start on undoing the damage. But we still need, in 2024, to build a staggering 43,000 social houses overnight just to get back to that 5.4% figure – that is, the level of social housing provided in 1990.

In opposition, the new housing minister, Chris Bishop, promised to “build enough state and social housing” to clear the state-house waiting list, which then sat at 25,000 families. That’s a pledge to which he must be held.

But we can also have higher ambitions. The current debate on social housing assumes that, even if boosted, it will remain marginal, a second-best alternative to private provision.

This is not, however, based on evidence that the private market works better as a rule. Rather, it is pure ideology, as a glance overseas demonstrates. In the Netherlands, nearly one-third of housing is provided outside the market, often built by the state then handed over to charities to run.

In Vienna, fully half of all residents live in state-owned or state-subsidised co-operative housing. Rents are low by global standards. And the apartment blocks aren’t brutal monoliths: as a quick online search reveals, buildings like the Sandleitenhof or Reumanhof are stylish constructions, often indistinguishable from private developments and sporting huge arched entrances, soaring architecture and quiet gardens.

If modern New Zealand state housing doesn’t look like that, it’s only because we’ve lost so much public competence and building knowledge since the first Labour government’s big construction push – and, more recently, the abolition of the Ministry of Works. As Schrader once told me, Labour’s original vision was that state housing, rather than being a residual service, should have “a social status equivalent to home ownership”.

For a while that vision came true. “When I interviewed [the first generation of] state house tenants, they said it was great to have a state house and they had sort of ‘made it’,” Schrader said. “It was a step up in the social hierarchy.”

Though this vision runs counter to current New Zealand thinking, in which the state just provides base-quality, cookie-cutter services, it’d be familiar to the Scandinavians, who like to say that for the public, nothing but the best is good enough. When it comes to housing, that principle should be our guiding light.

The Post: The missed opportunities and unfinished business of solving child poverty

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In a country as rich as ours, child poverty is an abomination: not a necessity, given the wealth and advancement all around us, but a choice. A choice not to ensure the nation’s resources are fairly shared, not to ensure a life of dignity for all, not to ensure that compassion is fully extended to those who struggle.

Conservatives sometimes blame our poverty rates on the poor themselves, and their supposed idleness, but that doesn’t really wash. Compare New Zealand’s child poverty rate, which in 2018 was nearly 14%, with that of Finland, where it was just 3%.

The Finns don’t excel because they’re superhumanly strong and self-reliant individuals. They’ve just made a collective choice to be compassionate, to care for others, and to provide communal supports – benefits, social housing, public services – that, like a trampoline, catch people when they’re falling and lift them up again.

It is in this context that we should interpret Thursday’s statistics, which show that, after many years of decline, New Zealand’s child poverty rates rose in the 12 months to June last year – unsurprising news, given the damage that inflation inflicted, but deeply disappointing nonetheless.

The data provide the penultimate verdict on Jacinda Ardern’s much-touted quest to reduce child hardship. (The final verdict will come next year, with data from mid-2022 to mid-2024, a period that reflects Labour’s policies and time in power.)

Before Ardern, John Key and Bill English had already made some inroads into poverty, although they allowed the gap between poor and middle New Zealanders to widen, leaving the former increasingly unable to keep up with rising costs or afford the things that society deemed necessary.

Ardern then systematised and, on some key measures, accelerated the reductions in poverty. Between 2018 and 2022, as Labour increased tax credits, lifted the minimum wage and raised benefits sharply, the number of children living in households below the main poverty line fell by around 49,000.

Even through the pandemic, Ardern ensured child poverty declined: a striking success. But in the 12 months to last June, as Labour failed to cushion the impact of inflation on the poorest, that figure had ticked back up by 12,000, leaving a net reduction in child poverty of around 37,000.

Other hardship measures tell a similar story: initial declines under Labour, then a partial reversion throughout the cost-of-living crisis. The end result? Some 145,000 children are still below the main poverty line.

Labour won’t, for various reasons, get full credit for its successes. Few people pay attention to abstract statistics; they remember instead the recent news stories of lengthening foodbank queues, of unaffordable groceries, and of people still having to sleep in cars, despite Ardern’s pledge to end this practice.

Some National Party figures, meanwhile, are already engaged in revisionism, selectively comparing Labour’s pandemic-era results with their party’s record during the economic boom years of 2013-17, and distorting dates to suit their argument.

Labour will find this frustrating, of course – but it was within their power to have put such false arguments out of reach. Given Ardern’s rhetorical commitment to the issue, and the targets she set herself, Labour should have continued to cut poverty harder and faster after 2019, once its tax-credit rises had taken effect.

It should also have done more to help the worst-off weather inflation’s storm, instead of pivoting to the middle with cost-of-living payments that explicitly excluded beneficiaries. Nor did Labour focus enough on the very poorest, the ones living on the streets and battling multiple dysfunctions, for whom – according to frontline social workers – little has changed.

In the end, Ardern’s mission ran out of road, lacking both the political will and the requisite cash; much of the latter Labour spent instead on questionable pursuits like health service reorganisation. Nor did the party ever make poverty reduction a crusade that would have mobilised every ounce of the state’s resources and the public’s sympathy.

Labour’s record should have been unimpeachable. The fact that it isn’t lets National muddy the waters.

Not that the latter has a plan for getting the child poverty numbers back on track – except a relentless focus on getting people off welfare and into work. Which is fine as far as it goes.

But four in 10 children in poverty already have a parent in a full-time job. Work doesn’t pay in this country, or not at the bottom end.

Where to from here? While there will, given humankind’s frailties and life shocks, always be a few people – perhaps 2-3% of the population – in temporary hardship, it’s not unrealistic to think we could end long-term poverty. We can break the cycle.

But to do that, we’d need to ensure work actually pays, as well as look after beneficiaries better, fix the housing market – and fundamentally reorient ourselves towards an ethos of collective care. Utopian? The Finns don’t think so.

The Guardian: New Zealand needs a new vision for the social security system – not more flipflopping

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This week’s announcement by New Zealand’s new conservative government of a “tough love” welfare policy is simply the latest instalment of 30 years of flip-flopping that have left the country with a fragmented, ineffective and less-than-fully-humane benefit system.

Inspired by Jacinda Ardern’s rhetoric of “kindness”, the previous Labour-led government poured an extra $16.5bn into welfare, carefully delivered in instalments so as not to alarm the middle classes. The core unemployment benefit rose from $215 a week to $340. Even after adjusting for inflation and higher rents, the average beneficiary’s income grew by 43%, with flow-on effects including fewer children living in households where food runs short.

Anecdotal evidence also suggests Work and Income offices became more welcoming. Paul Clutterbuck, a 50-year-old Wellingtonian, said he had seen “a huge culture shift … moving away from beneficiary bashing and towards an environment of trusting the client to do the right thing”. Even so, many beneficiaries’ incomes were still $36-136 a week below the poverty line.

Now, as sure as night follows day, a centre-left policy of relative generosity is being replaced by a centre-right policy of relative toughness.

The National-led government has announced it will require welfare recipients to re-apply for benefits more often, tightly monitor how many jobs they are applying for, and use more sanctions against those deemed non-compliant, including cutting their benefits by up to half.

That is the “tough” part of their agenda – the “love” part, not yet fully fleshed out, will include more detailed skills assessments, job coaching and “job plans” for beneficiaries.

Many of these changes could have been copied and pasted from the relatively tough policies of John Key’s previous centre-right government, itself reacting against the relative generosity of Helen Clark’s preceding Labour administration.

In this ongoing policy loop, one of the frustrations for onlookers, and a source of stress for beneficiaries, is the emphasis on sanctions that derives from a flawed understanding of beneficiaries’ lives.

Battling addiction, poor health, low self-esteem and a lack of qualifications, welfare recipients often have few reserves – of money or emotional bandwidth – when disaster strikes. Their lives are frequently turned upside down by sudden health issues, the struggle to pay bills, dysfunction in the people around them and frequent moves in search of adequate housing.

Often it is these life shocks, not a lack of motivation, that stops them turning up for job interviews.

Unsurprisingly, punitive approaches achieve very little. Studies of Britain’s increasingly harsh welfare system, for instance, have demonstrated that sanctions don’t get people into paid employment more quickly. In fact, they can slow that process by destabilising already unstable lives. What sanctions definitely do is increase the misery of their recipients – and their children.

Why, then, do sanctions remain popular among conservatives? Because they fit a comfortingly simplistic idea of welfare claimants – and because, according to one survey, most National voters don’t know anyone who lives on benefits.

Although Ardern’s government massively increased beneficiaries’ incomes, it didn’t fundamentally shift public opinion on welfare. Nor did it set out a compellingly new vision for the system.

These are the gaps that need filling. Welfare recipients must be better supported to tell their stories, in ways that allow middle class New Zealanders to understand what the social and economic barriers impeding beneficiaries’ progress are.

A new vision for the social security system, should spell out how it could provide security in tough times: wrap-around support from the moment people need it, adjusted seamlessly and in real time to changing needs and delivered in a way that enhances the recipients’ dignity.

Where paid work is the right goal for beneficiaries, the system would use carrots not sticks, investing generously in retraining programmes to bridge the gaps between the skills people have now and the skills they need, and ensuring the jobs available are high-quality and well paid.

The system would also assert the value of collectively supporting people who are caring for children or grappling with disability – and do so in a way that commands widespread support.

Then perhaps the constant oscillation of policy might finally be disrupted.

The Spinoff: Public-sector leakers are playing a dangerous game

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When a Cabinet paper about foreign housing investors became at least the fifth major document to be leaked since Christopher Luxon took office, Kieran McAnulty saw an opportunity for a gag. “I walk my greyhound twice a day and she has less leaks than this government,” Labour’s housing spokesperson told Newshub – leaving thousands of viewers to add a mental “boom – tish”, while others fumed about the death of the distinction between “less” and “fewer”. 

This is, however, a serious issue. As Newshub’s Jenna Lynch pointed out, leaks of Cabinet papers – highly sensitive proposals being placed in front of the nation’s ultimate decision-makers – have generally been “incredibly rare”. But alongside the foreign housing paper, this government has already seen the leaking of David Seymour’s proposed Treaty “principles” and advice about the repeal of Fair Pay Agreements, among other documents.

Is it wise for public servants – by far the most likely culprits in each case – to act in this way? As a journalist, I know leaks can be vital – and valid. Time and again, politicians and state bodies embark on morally dubious courses of action. And it is not always realistic to expect public servants to resolve issues internally. Confronting one’s superiors is often, as the phrase has it, a career-limiting move. And sometimes principled objections are simply brushed aside.

Leaking assumes particular importance in contentious cases where there is no prospect of timely disclosure of the relevant information. Take Guyon Espiner’s revelation that associate health minister Casey Costello had asked for advice on freezing tobacco taxes, a story based on documents RNZ had “seen” thanks to persons unknown. Because Official Information Act (OIA) requests for policies under active consideration are almost always refused, it is hard to see how else this information could have been made public. 

But given the extraordinary nature of the story – a health minister advocating policies likely to damage health – disclosure was clearly in the public interest. The story revealed a senior minister repeating corporate propaganda about cigarette companies being “on their knees” and nicotine posing no greater problem than caffeine. It exposed the fact that misleading the public is not, under this government, a sackable offence. And it may have helped strengthen Luxon’s resolve not to freeze tobacco excise. (In her defence, Costello did ultimately recommend a continued increase, at least for this year.)

But not all leaks are so valuable. The leaked advice that repealing Fair Pay Agreements would harm vulnerable workers was, frankly, unsurprising: anyone paying attention already knew those were precisely the people the agreements were designed to help. And the documents were likely to emerge eventually. Since the government was never going to abandon the repeal, the leak served no purpose.

Indeed it could, as part of a wider trend, cause real damage. Of course confidential documents emerge under all administrations; in opposition, National’s Nicola Willis got wind of Labour’s plan to remove GST from fruit and vegetables and – to a more limited extent – the Treasury’s research into wealth taxes. But the leaks are now starting to become torrential.

Ever since the National-led coalition won power, rightwing commentators have been warning of a conspiracy by public servants – sometimes in cahoots with the “leftwing” media – to obstruct Luxon’s plans. Commentators have even begun talking about “the Blob”, a conspiracy theory borrowed from Britain’s Tories, who conjure feverish images of an amorphous network of public servants and journalists blocking their every move.

There is little truth to this, here as elsewhere. Public agencies can, and do, abuse their control over information to “go slow” on ministerial projects – but they are just as likely to do this to leftwing politicians as rightwing ones. The New Zealand Transport Agency under Julie Anne Genter is, reportedly, one of the totemic examples.

If unjustified leaks continue, though, the conspiracy theories will take on the sheen of truth. And the consequences of diminished ministerial trust in the public service could be severe. 

This government already has a low-level dislike, sometimes veering into contempt, for public servants. (If you don’t believe me, just listen to Chris Bishop on the subject of Kāinga Ora officials.) Should ministers start to feel, with some justification, that they cannot trust public servants with confidential information, they will hold their plans and information ever-tighter, diminishing scrutiny and leading to more sub-par policies. Or they may seek counsel elsewhere, effectively privatising advice. An oppositional relationship with civil servants will be cemented, leading to further moves to diminish the public service and bulldoze through policies against agencies’ advice.

A public-sector leak should be a last resort, employed only when it is absolutely justifiable in ethical terms and there is no other prospect of the information becoming public. Most Cabinet papers, after all, are released once they have been approved and have thus made the shift from proposal into firm policy. (In very few countries does this happen, incidentally.) In the same way, many documents eventually fall under the ambit of the OIA. Which opens up the safe, time-honoured and legitimate method of getting state information into the public domain: quietly telling a journalist which documents to request.

The Post: Employment law changes all about who is in control

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Does this government seek the “contractorisation” of the workforce? That question has been posed to me, post-election, by people alarmed at what might happen to employment rights under the new workplace relations minister, ACT’s Brooke Van Velden.

Putting a libertarian in charge of dealing with trade unions is, of course, mildly provocative. And there’s no doubt that times will get tougher for working people.

Fair Pay Agreements, which would have boosted wages and conditions in poorly paid industries, have been scrapped. A below-inflation minimum-wage increase leaves the poorest workers going backwards.

And large employers will soon be able to sack staff without justification in their first 90 days on the job, even though a 2016 Treasury report on this practice found it doesn’t significantly increases hiring rates, but does ensure “many employees face… increased uncertainty about their job security for three months after being hired”.

New Zealand’s ‘Shaky Isles’ nickname, in other words, applies not just to geography but, increasingly, to employment rights.

For decades now, firms have been making their employees redundant and replacing them with contractors. Last week NZ Post reportedly sought to join the trend.

The attraction, for employers, is that contractors aren’t entitled to four weeks’ paid holiday, 10 days’ sick leave or KiwiSaver contributions. They don’t get minimum wages or protection against dismissal; they can’t bargain collectively for a fair slice of firm revenue.

Conservatives like to paint all this in the glowing light of ‘flexibility’, arguing it gives workers greater freedom. But that paint is whitewash. Sure, there is ‘flexible’ working for highly paid, highly skilled contractors who choose that life. But that has nothing to do with badly paid, badly treated workers who have had a sham form of contracting imposed upon them.

The genuine contractors are those who decide who they work for, and how they work; they determine the profits they make and the risks they take. When, by contrast, a firm dictates all or much of the above, the ‘contractor’ is just a disguised employee.

As with many things in life, it’s all about control – and those who have little control suffer. One in three workers, the Council of Trade Unions estimated in 2013, has a precarious job.

Precarity may now spread further – if the government can get its plans straight. The National-ACT coalition agreement promises to “maintain the status quo” that people who have signed a piece of paper saying they are a contractor cannot then challenge that document in court.

Embarrassingly for the government, this is the exact opposite of the status quo. Currently, people can challenge such a declaration. And it’s vital they can do so.

Individuals desperate for work, who are at their most vulnerable, can readily be coerced into saying they’re contractors, even if they’re really employees. So employment legislation, like some other laws, assumes that certain rights are ‘un-waivable’: they cannot be signed away.

In response to The Post’s questions, Van Velden wouldn’t say how the coalition agreement got things so badly wrong, nor what the government actually intends.

But she’s obviously exercised by court cases like that brought by Uber drivers, who – quite reasonably, and like their colleagues overseas – are arguing that because the rideshare firm essentially controls their pay and the conditions under which they work, they are not contractors but employees. The drivers won the first round of their case, which faces an appeal by Uber next month.

Van Velden laments the “uncertainty” this creates for employers. But the solution she clearly has in mind – to take away the right to challenge one’s employment status – would create certainty for corporations only by removing it from workers.

It would evoke John Key’s infamous ‘Hobbit law’, which let Warner Bros dictate New Zealand legislation and prevent film workers from doing what the Uber drivers have just done. Even partners at law firm Buddle Finlay, hardly militant trade unionists, argue such moves would expose more people to exploitation. And with no minimum wage to prop them up, lower-end pay rates would fall.

All this is, admittedly, a complex area: not everything about Uber drivers, for instance, fits the classic profile of an employee. But the previous government was at least trying to create certainty the right way: by protecting the most vulnerable.

With the support of Business NZ, ministers had floated various ideas: for instance, a court determination that one worker was an employee could be applied to all their equivalent co-workers, ensuring rapid and widespread justice.

Chris Hipkins, however, fed those ideas into last March’s now-notorious ‘policy bonfire’, preventing Labour from setting the agenda on precarious work. ACT is now filling the resultant void. Only up to a point: whatever libertarians outriders might wish, full-scale “contractorisation” isn’t yet on the agenda. But the direction of travel is clear.

The Post: Backdowns on smokefree rules suggest tobacco lobbyists are in the House

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It is not an ideal start to one’s ministerial career to have misled the media. Yet that seems to be the situation in which the associate health minister, Casey Costello, finds herself.

Interviewed this week by RNZ’s Guyon Espiner, the New Zealand First MP denied having “sought advice on”, or even discussed, the idea of a freeze on tobacco taxes. Yet Ministry of Health documents show she “proposed … to freeze the excise on smoked tobacco for three years”. And when asked last year whether she would like advice on such a proposal, Costello signed off on a document with “yes” circled in response.

Quite apart from this apparent contradiction, freezing tobacco taxes would be an appalling policy: even as the price of staple foods rises rapidly, the Government would be taking steps to make tobacco more attractive relative to milk, bread and other basics.

Yes, tobacco excise helps empty the wallets of poor, addicted smokers. But the “weight of evidence”, according to Ernst & Young research, is that price rises are “the single most effective tool for reducing tobacco use”. The financial toll on the remaining smokers is surely best reduced by quit-smoking programmes, not continued addiction.

Costello’s move comes on the back of the extraordinary reversal of the last government’s smokefree plan, a move seemingly guaranteed to ensure that under National more people will die from smoking than they would have under Labour.

Ministers are apparently bemused by their hostile media coverage, privately bemoaning the lack of any “honeymoon” period. But much of the negative reporting simply echoes public shock at the smokefree reversal.

Although technically a NZ First manifesto pledge, it was not actively campaigned on by any party; indeed, National’s Shane Reti had promised to keep core parts of the smokefree legislation.

Commentators are also naturally asking how ACT and NZ First became so ardently opposed to legislation that would have saved thousands of lives and billions of dollars. Claims that it would have triggered a massive surge in black-market cigarettes, quite apart from not being a knockdown argument, appear unsupported by evidence, unless you count tobacco-industry-funded research as “evidence”.

While we will never know exactly what or who influenced David Seymour and Winston Peters, we do know that two former high-ranking NZ First officials, David Broome and Apirana Dawson, now work for tobacco giant Philip Morris. We know that Shane Jones invited Dawson to the Government’s swearing-in ceremony, and “took soundings” from him when developing policy.

We know that Costello used to chair the Taxpayers’ Union, a lobby group that has taken vehemently pro-tobacco-industry positions without disclosing that it receives money from British American Tobacco, one of the worst of the merchants of death.

We know also that another influential right-wing group, the New Zealand Initiative, is financially backed by British American Tobacco and Imperial Brands, which sells – ironically – “Winston” cigarettes.

So there are clear grounds for being concerned about the tobacco industry’s influence on current politics – and good reasons to reform our transparency laws so we can see whether tobacco firms, and indeed others, are lobbying government.

In New Zealand, lobbying is an entirely unregulated industry, despite its immense proximity to power. Aside from the publication of a few ministerial meetings, and some heroic reporting, we have no clear idea who is influencing whom.

Most developed countries have started letting sunlight into these closed rooms, requiring lobbyists to disclose contacts with decision-makers. Not New Zealand, though. We also lack a mandatory code of conduct for lobbyists and a ban on former ministers going straight into lobbying, as Labour’s Kris Faafoi notoriously did.

Indeed the issue caused Labour such trouble – especially following Espiner’s reporting last year– that it launched a wide-ranging review of our lobbying regulations, or rather their absence.

In opposition, National appeared to back a mandatory code of conduct, while advocating a one-year stand-down period for ministers before they can lobby and “a transparent, publicly accountable register of who's doing the lobbying and who they're lobbying for”, as Nicola Willis put it.

Has their resolve held? In a letter this week to Health Coalition Aotearoa, justice minister Paul Goldsmith said officials were still working on a code of conduct for lobbyists, but only a voluntary one. And the wider review of lobbying regulation was just “one of many priorities the Government must consider, and specifically in the Justice portfolio where it has a heavy work programme”, he added.

Such language often presages abandonment – but absolutely should not in this instance. It is vital to a democracy’s health that citizens can see who is influencing whom, so that pressure is brought to bear on ministers to hear from a broad and equitable range of voices, not just those of the powerful.

Labour had enough problems with its integrity. It would be a terrible shame if the new Government failed at the first chance to prove its own.

The Post: Innovative, technologically savvy – not words you’d normally associate with councils

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For Nat Fraser, a vision-impaired resident of the Tawa hills, getting the groceries home used to be a tricky business. Living well away from conventional bus routes, she struggled with the long uphill walk home laden with shopping bags.

“I still need to have one hand using my cane,” she says – so carrying the shopping in the other created a safety hazard. “I don’t like not having one hand free. Then if I trip up, I haven’t got anything to save myself.” Her limited budget, meanwhile, largely ruled out taxi use.

Then, in May 2022, came Tawa’s trial of “on-demand” public transport: five 14-seater minivans that don’t follow fixed routes but can be hailed, using an app, from 600-odd locations around the suburb. Rides are a flat-rate $2.50.

I tested the service myself a few weeks back, in the company of Greater Wellington Regional Councillor Thomas Nash. Having caught the train to Tawa, we downloaded the app, requested a ride, and waited a few minutes for a minivan to hove into view. “It’s a big Uber, basically,” Nash said cheerfully as we climbed on board.

The comparison is inexact but telling, because – love it or loathe it – Uber is widely held to be everything governments are not: innovative, disruptive, technologically savvy. We typically think of the state as slow, out of touch, unable to deliver anything except bog-standard, mass-manufactured services – like conventional public transport.

The Tawa on-demand trial, however, tells a different story. Like any innovator, the regional council had spotted a problem. While standard bus routes served many Tawa residents well, other homes were as much as 25 minutes’ walk from a stop.

The suburb’s steep hills often made walking and cycling impractical. And, in the absence of public transport for the “last mile“ between the train station and home, some residents were driving the whole way into town, worsening congestion and emissions.

But cost and geography – Tawa’s winding roads can defeat standard-length buses – made adding normal bus routes infeasible. So the regional council turned to the on-demand services increasingly used by public bodies the world over.

The results, according to a council paper from June last year, were impressive. Patronage rose from 500 trips in the first month to 5500 a year later. Customer satisfaction was 96%, and surveys suggested almost two-thirds of users would otherwise have travelled by car.

When Nash and I did our test run, we were the only people in the minivan, but the regional council says just under half of all on-demand trips involve multiple passengers – and thus genuinely look like a public-transport service, or perhaps an Uber Share, rather than just a cheaper taxi.

Like all innovations, the on-demand service has thrown up surprises. Commuters, expected to make up the majority of users, in fact hail just one-third of all rides.

Other major patrons include schoolkids and – more strikingly – the socially isolated. During lunch at the Tawa café where the minivan deposited us, Nash told me most users “are actually older people and people who otherwise would have struggled to get around”.

They may not be able to drive, or cannot afford to, or cannot physically manage the walk to a bus stop. Nash had heard “really touching stories” of people who wouldn’t otherwise leave the house “being way more socially active” thanks to the service.

Given the immense social cost of loneliness, which can be as bad for your health as smoking, this is good news not just for the individuals concerned but also the public purse – and society as a whole. “Public transport shouldn’t just be about people who work Monday to Friday going to their jobs,” Nash said. “It should be about connecting people.”

It’s not cheap, of course: the on-demand service costs $12-$13 per trip, as opposed to $9.90 for standard bus trips. But the regional council hopes to bring that figure down.

Delighted by the trial’s results, the council has extended the service for another year, and rolled it out to parts of Porirua. A “game-changer”, Nash added, is that Labour, before it lost power, made on-demand services eligible for the same central-government subsidies as conventional buses.

The service will have to keep evolving: I was told, anecdotally, that the app doesn’t perfectly fit together the jigsaw puzzle of multiple journey requests, and sometimes drivers have to override it to make sure everyone gets to their destination in time.

But innovation is almost always incremental. Users like Nat Fraser say they “just love” the service. And it’s a signpost towards a world where public bodies rapidly innovate, and, far from being helplessly buffetted by global forces or retreating to conventional answers, they find new ways to solve the public problems that life constantly throws at us.

The Post: How we progress by reaction and counter-reaction

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As the year turns, my thoughts turn likewise to the withering appraisal that the poet John Dryden, writing in 1700, delivered on the century that had just passed. “All, all of a piece throughout,” he wrote in The Secular Masque. “Thy wars brought nothing about / Thy lovers were all untrue / Tis well in old age is out / And time to begin a new.”

In a similar vein, few New Zealanders will look back on 2023 with fondness – except perhaps those leading the National Party, for whom the exultation of electoral success may rapidly be eroded by the frustrating grind of actual governance.

National will also find that an unfeasibly large part of 2024 is taken up with an ugly debate about the political importance and meaning of the Treaty of Waitangi/te Tiriti o Waitangi. It is not a debate that I suspect Christopher Luxon really wants, but since he has agreed to support – at least to a first vote – ACT’s bizarre attempt to rewrite the Treaty along libertarian lines, it is a debate he is going to get.

This move, alongside attempts to rewrite legislative references to the Treaty and reverse schools’ guidance on gender and sexuality education, has led some to proclaim this the most right-wing government since the 1990s. But although true, this simply implies that Luxon is more right-wing than John Key – hardly a very high bar.

Luxon’s agenda is also a predictable reaction to recent politics. Governments always push against their predecessors, and Jacinda Ardern’s administration was – in intent if not in delivery – more left-wing than Helen Clark’s one. Recent attempts at co-governance and devolution to Māori, however half-hearted, have surpassed anything Clark initiated; and so the backlash is stronger.

This can make life frightening and unpleasant for Māori, transgender people and others. But it doesn’t have to spell bad news forever.

When negative steps are taken, progressives tend to fear they will be made permanent, as if the immediate past was the peak of a mountain that will never be regained. And some societies do decline, for long periods, if their self-correcting mechanisms are inactive or overridden.

A free and trusted press, for instance, plays a vital role, informing the public and curbing power’s excesses. Societies where the media are either repressed, as in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, or distrusted by half the electorate, as in America, can suffer permanent damage.

More commonly, though, history progresses by reaction and counter-reaction. In 16th-century Europe, the Protestant Reformation challenged a corrupt Catholic Church. This was met by a Counter-Reformation that sometimes took violently negative forms, as with the Spanish Inquisition, but also positive ones, as the church reformed its worst practices.

Backlashes always occur. Indeed when I was at university – a slightly more recent bit of history than the Reformation, even if it seems an eon ago – one of the key political texts was a book by Susan Faludi entitled, quite simply, Backlash, which described the 1980s counter-reaction to the 1970s women’s movement. As Faludi wrote last year, that backlash “has never relented” – but progress can be achieved in spite of it.

Very little of this ebb and flow is easily predicted. Most people have famously limited foresight, largely because they take a single trend and extrapolate it remorselessly forward. Professional futurists, by contrast, provides scenarios in which competing forces vie: a less satisfying, but more accurate, way to think about the years ahead.

The near future may, for the rights of Māori and others, prove to be a step backwards – but also a platform for progress. Opposition to co-governance and Māori political structures may stem partly from racism, but many New Zealanders are simply unsettled by change or unclear on the concepts. This is hardly surprising, given the last government’s notorious reluctance to actually define or defend co-governance.

The upcoming debate will be a chance to explain that ‘by Māori for Māori’ services and structures – in education, healthcare, welfare and elsewhere – are simply the means for an indigenous people to recover the ways of governing themselves that they enjoyed pre-colonisation; that they do not imply ‘segregation’, since there will be countless social spaces in which different ethnicities continue to mix; and that, by allowing Māori to live more authentically and healthily, co-governance and devolved services will create widespread benefits for everyone. Attitudinal surveys, which show New Zealanders becoming more accepting of the Treaty over time, are a solid base on which to build such arguments.

This is not to imply that the coming years will be all sunshine and roses. The nastier side of the New Zealand psyche is no doubt emboldened. But there is also a chance to create, out of the current backwards ebb in politics, a forward-moving flow. The future is never pre-written.

The Post: Time to hold the Government to account for the social costs of its spending decisions

Read the original article in the Post

The problem with left-wing governments, Margaret Thatcher once said, is that they always run out of other people’s money.

What the Iron Lady wouldn’t admit, of course, is that if Labour parties’ budgets get stretched, it’s generally because they’re cleaning up the social and environmental messes left by their conservative predecessors. And that’s something to watch when our new Finance Minister, Nicola Willis, delivers her mini-Budget next week.

One of the most profound problems in New Zealand politics, and one that retards our national progress, is that financial deficits are eminently visible but social and environmental ones are not. If the government spends more than it earns, the result is unambiguous: a single number, universally relevant, written in black and white (and red). It’s easily grasped, as is the consequence of running one such deficit after another. So that’s what we talk about.

Inside government, the same problems apply. To borrow an example from Craig Renney, Grant Robertson’s former right-hand man, the Treasury can tell you, just about down to the last brick, how much it is costing us to build Dunedin Hospital – but not what it cost the city’s health all those years we delayed construction, services worsened, and people sickened and died.

Some social – and environmental – deficits can of course be defined, and have numbers attached to them. But there are thousands of these issues, they are poorly measured, people disagree about which ones matter most, and often – because they affect the most vulnerable – they remain invisible to the median voter.

So they don’t receive the same obssessive attention, inside or outside government, as the need to turn red ink to black. Labour tried, tentatively, to fix this with its wellbeing approach, but got stuck with 100-plus measures of social and environmental failure – too many to ever be tractable.

All this has a troubling consequence: it lets conservative parties off the hook. The last National government ran a tight financial ship, but was permitted to pile up appalling social deficits.

State houses were sold off, allowing the shortfall to rise by another 14,000 homes. Middlemore Hospital had sewage running down the walls. Dirty dairying left the country with sick, algae-ridden rivers and lakes, some of the most polluted waterways in the developed world.

Cold, damp housing filled children’s lungs with respiratory illnesses. Countless social services went unfunded. National’s books were balanced – but on the backs of the poor. And because social and environmental deficits always become financial ones – sick children need costly hospital care, polluted lakes require multi-million-dollar clean-ups – it also bequeathed us a long-term budgetary hole.

That’s not to say that Labour came in and spent every cent wisely. It didn’t. Funding for health and education has doubled, or nearly so, sometimes with little to show for it. Hence a core dilemma of New Zealand politics: the unpalatable choice between a National Party willing to run up social and environmental deficits and a Labour Party with no clear idea how to close them.

But, in Labour’s defence, it did wipe $1.8 billion of district health board deficits. It settled billion-dollar pay-equity claims for health and education workers, and built or bought 13,000 public homes. It doubled capital spending, helping close New Zealand’s colossal infrastructure deficit, and raised beneficiaries’ incomes. Yes, it ran financial deficits post-Covid – but so did National post-GFC.

Next week, Willis will emphasise Labour’s alleged financial woes, but our attention should be on any social and environmental shortfalls she sets in train. To rework Thatcher’s famous line, the problem with conservative governments is that they always run into other people’s misery.

To hold National to account, we will need to continue the project of measuring the wellbeing impacts of every decision – and, as with Dunedin Hospital, non-decision.

Beyond that, we may need to choose, collectively, 10 indicators that matter to us most profoundly – issues where failure cuts deepest and success is most precious – and, by reporting on them repeatedly, give them the same weight as the budgetary numbers.

These 10 targets, spanning – for instance – employment, life expectancy and river quality, could be enshrined in legislation, just like their financial counterparts.

Why 10, specifically? When I posed this question last year to Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, a godfather of wellbeing economics, he said we should pick a handful of measures “that are at the centre of societal debate”.

These issues could be selected via opinion polling, but to get the public’s considered view – what they think after hearing others’ arguments, reflecting, and shifting their position – the task might be best handed to a citizens’ assembly.

A randomly selected group of 100 demographically representative Kiwis – the nation in a room, as it were – could decide on the 10 measures, their work getting updated every few years. And maybe then the shortfalls facing people and planet might get the same attention as the dollar signs.

The Guardian: Labour failed but New Zealand can’t put a wealth tax ‘back in the bottle’

Read the original article in the Guardian

Licking its wounds from October’s election defeat, the New Zealand Labour party faces an internal struggle over a question that could define its recent past and its future electoral prospects: whether to campaign for a tax on the assets of the country’s wealthiest individuals.

Insiders say party members still feel “anger and disappointment” about the “captain’s call” by leader Chris Hipkins to rule out running on a wealth tax in this year’s election.

At the urging of key Labour ministers, officials had spent nearly a year working on plans for wealth taxes, a policy whose re-emergence on the global scene symbolises a newfound radicalism among leftwing parties.

Until recently, most developed nations have relied on taxing income, including wages, salaries and more irregular forms like capital gains (the profits made on selling assets). But concern about soaring wealth inequalities, and the work of French economist Thomas Piketty, has reignited interest in taxing assets like property and investments.

In the 1980s a dozen European countries had wealth taxes – a small annual levy on the largest fortunes. Today, only Switzerland, Norway and Spain do, alongside a handful of South American nations. France dropped its equivalent several years ago, in favour of a tax on high-value property.

But the idea is attracting renewed interest even in places like the US and Britain. “Wealth taxes have moved from the fringes,” says New Zealand-based tax consultant Terry Baucher. “Piketty has given them a boost … They have come back into vogue.”

The wealth tax contemplated by New Zealand Labour would have required couples to pay an annual levy of 1.5% on any assets they held over a $10m threshold. The estimated $3.8bn in revenue would have funded income-tax cuts for the vast majority of Kiwis. Labour’s potential coalition partners, the Greens and the indigenous-led Te Pāti Māori, ran on similar platforms.

But for Hipkins, known within the party as “Chippy”, the tax lacked popular appeal – “Chippy just didn’t think he could sell it,” one party source says – and he ruled it out in April this year.

This came as a blow to many in the party, including MPs who said on the campaign trail they had “not given up” on a wealth tax.

Nor have party members. Pro-tax reformers are now running for key positions on Labour’s policy council, and seeking to put pressure on the leadership. As one Labour MP puts it: “I think we’ve uncorked something here that can’t be put back in the bottle.”

For them, the policy seems like a slam-dunk. Though hardly anyone would pay the tax, it would generate billions of dollars a year. And in contrast to a capital gains tax (CGT) – something New Zealand also lacks – it would raise revenue instantly, whereas a CGT could take as much as a decade to generate similar sums.

Polls earlier this year showed a majority of Kiwis back a wealth tax. But at the same time, Labour’s pollsters were warning that, in focus group after focus group, support had crumbled because people found the policy hard to grasp and the counter-arguments persuasive.

One person familiar with the findings says: “Leaving aside common mistakes about the way the current tax system works, the moment someone said, ‘What about a farm on the East Coast, what about a tech start-up?’ – or any other scenario they could think of where someone was asset-rich but cash-poor, they started to unload on it [the wealth tax] in a way that was very hard to get them to pedal back from.” By the end of these discussions, very few would support a wealth tax.

An unreleased post-election poll, meanwhile, suggests a wealth tax would have cost the left slightly more votes than it gained. It is, nonetheless, an issue that won’t go away, as Labour – like its global counterparts – seeks to raise revenue for spending pledges without over-burdening standard income taxes.

As one Labour source says: “I can’t see how the party can go to another election without something [on taxing wealth].”