In a fiery exchange between a mainstream media lackey and CounterSpin Media host Kelvyn Alp, Alp summarised the desire of the Wellington protesters and the freedom movement more generally: a system that we can all be proud of. In the absence of any better suggestion, this essay outlines what such a system might look like.
There is one big problem with the current New Zealand system: the vast majority of the benefits from all the work performed go to a very small number of people. Under our current economic arrangement, the benefits of labour don’t go to the labourer but to the owner of the land upon which the labour was performed. This is called capitalism, and if you don’t like it you’re responsible for tens of millions of deaths by starvation in Russia and China.
It’s an ugly system. It’s not much different to medieval feudalism, in which the vast majority of people were serfs beholden to a lord. The serfs worked all day, and then the lord came in and took their productivity away for his own purposes, leaving the serfs with barely enough to get through to the next tax day (if they were lucky).
Being a New Zealander is a constant humiliation.
Not only must one deal with the fact that one’s wages hardly go anywhere, but one must also deal with the pettiness of average New Zealanders. This pettiness follows from being a small, isolated country infested with the slave morality of Christianity. There’s nothing we love more than ripping our neighbours down once they make something of themselves. Anyone with any self-esteem has to be destroyed.
Nothing about the way our system is run engenders pride. We have to aim higher.
A system that we can all be proud of would entail change from the ground up. It would require a total paradigm shift from a mentality of profit before all, to a mentality of alleviating the suffering of the New Zealand nation. It would require raising solidarity between the various communities of New Zealand, rather than setting them against each other.
The first step in bringing this about is to restore basic dignity to the average worker by making it possible for them to get ahead.
As of right now, the average New Zealand worker has no chance of ever owning their own home. Wages are so low in comparison to house prices and rents that the average house now costs over 25,000 hours of labour at the average wage. This contrasts rudely with the average house price in 1992: 7,000 hours of labour at the average wage. Not only does the average worker have trouble buying a house, they have trouble saving at all.
It’s impossible for the average worker to be proud of a system that exploits them to such an extent. It’s like asking a plantation slave to be proud of the plantation system. Our economy must be completely redesigned, so that it once again becomes possible for the average worker to buy a house and raise a family on their wage.
To this end, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand ought to be given an entirely new remit: to alleviate the suffering of the New Zealand people. This new remit would replace the existing focus on inflation and unemployment. The problem with this existing focus is that it inclines the Reserve Bank to drop interest rates to the floor for the sake of encouraging borrowing (and thereby spending), but these low interest rates just lead to ballooning house prices.
Also to this end, the mass importation of cheap labour must stop immediately. There is nothing that has lowered the standard of living of the average Kiwi worker more than having been forced to compete with imported cheap labour. Increasing the supply of cheap labour inevitably lowers the price of that labour, and New Zealand’s historical addiction to it is one of the prime reasons why our wages are in the toilet. We have to go clean.
A final step is that tax incentives must be used to attract investment in productive capital. A land tax must be introduced to shift investment from land banking to business. New Zealand’s productivity is infamously low, the result of many things, but foremost among them is the lack of capital investment. Because New Zealand employers have historically always been able to import cheap labour, they have not been incentivised to invest in productive capital.
None of these suggestions require jingoism, supremacy or xenophobia. New Zealand doesn’t need to denigrate other nations in order to create a system that we can all be proud of. But we have to give our own people a fair deal. And this starts with giving the everyday Kiwi a fair standard of living for full-time work. That a full-time worker can afford a decent house that they can raise a family in could be the basis of a system that we could all be proud of.
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