Cam Slater: Add Inept to the List

Following on from Michael Bassett’s description of this government as the worst in living history, Matthew Hooton has also finally realised that this government is inept as well.

The Ardern administration has finally confirmed — were confirmation required — that it is the most incompetent New Zealand Government in living memory, and perhaps ever.

It’s a big call. Jenny Shipley’s shambolic National Government was propped up in 1998 and 1999 by a bizarre bunch of party-hoppers including one from the far-left Alliance.

Labour embarrassed itself in 1989 and 1990 with two changes of Prime Minister.

Yet, for better or worse, those governments had competently executed change and maintained some sense of direction even at the end.

National’s Muldoonist era might rival Jacinda Ardern’s circus. But, however controversial, the Clyde Dam, the Waitara and Motunui methanol plants and the Marsden Point expansion were built — in contrast to Ardern’s 100,000 KiwiBuild houses, the $30 billion Auckland tram, and the $6.4b Let’s Get Wellington Moving programme, for which the Government has allocated a further $120 million for yet another business plan.

Perhaps we’re better off those projects are doomed. But the Ardern Government’s inability to deliver anything it says it values is surely unique.

NZ Herald

All this government has managed to deliver is increased crime including gun crime, record-breaking inflation, a beggared economy, a health system in crisis, a tertiary education sector at sixes and sevens, and a long march towards apartheid, segregation, and policing micro-aggressions and free speech.

Not a single one of their flagship policies has even remotely come close to delivery. Worse, their policies are now delivering real-world pay cuts because they caused rampant inflation with their profligate spending:

Since inflation was tamed after Labour’s Reserve Bank Act 1989 and National’s Fiscal Responsibility Act 1994, wages have risen faster than prices in almost every quarter, under National and Labour, with unemployment remaining relatively low.

It took this Government’s special idiocy to decide that which wasn’t broken should be fixed, by moving the Reserve Bank away from its laser-like focus on inflation, approving the appointment of Adrian Orr as Governor and signing the so-called dual mandate in March 2018.

Meanwhile, it accelerated increases to the minimum wage and began putting greater shackles around the labour market, including abolishing automatic 90-day trial periods, and restricting access to foreign labour and preparing the ground for 1970s-style national payment awards for workers.

After all this — and most likely because of it — real wages rose by just 1.5 per cent in Ardern’s first three years, before any effect from Covid.

NZ Herald

Labour used to represent workers. Now they don’t know who they represent other than elite Maori interests. They’ve become out of touch, arrogant and racist to boot. Hardly endearing stuff if you are looking for re-election.

Infamously, ultra-loose monetary and fiscal policy transferred about $1 trillion to property owners at the expense of wage earners and savers. Now the data is in on real wages.

From mid-2020, real wages began falling and have done so for eight quarters. Since the Labour Cost Index (LCI) began in 1992, that has never happened before.

By mid-2021, real wages fell below where they were under National. A year later, they have fallen a further 3.7 per cent, so that New Zealand wage and salary earners have experienced a 3.3 per cent cut in their real wages since Ardern has been Prime Minister — the worst five-year change since the series began 30 years ago.

Idiotically, the response to the real-wages crisis was throwing more borrowed money on the inflation bonfire with Robertson’s $350 cost of living payment, the centrepiece of this year’s “wellbeing” Budget.

It can only push real wages lower.

NZ Herald

Wages dropping, rents and mortgages increasing, just means this Government is becoming unelectable at the next election.

Prolonged border controls destroyed the international education industry, putting the viability of universities at risk. Trades training faces collapse following the bizarre project to set up a Wellington-based super-polytechnic, at a cost so far of $200m, with nothing to show for it.

No one knows what the billions for two new health bureaucracies in Wellington will deliver. We don’t know where the $1.9b for mental health went. There is wild talk of writing off student loan debt as an election sweetener.

It won’t work. The defeat of the Ardern Government is increasingly likely, and more than deserved.

Labour governments can do many things and survive. Enriching property owners while slashing workers’ real wages isn’t one.

NZ Herald

That’s, of course, if we even have another election.

Cam Slater is a New Zealand-based blogger, best known for his role in Dirty Politics and publishing the Whale Oil Beef Hooked blog, which operated from 2005 until it closed in 2019. This article was first published HERE