By Chris Trotter*
“Bills” by LunchMoney Lewis, must be the all-time strangest theme-song ever chosen by a National Party leader.
Christopher Luxon made the whole weird musical theme even weirder by attempting his own personal rendition of LunchMoney’s tongue-in-cheek tribute to the world of work.
Now, the lifestyles and values of rap artists are about as far from the hardscrabble existence of the average working family as one could imagine. LunchMoney Lewis has bills to pay, no doubt, but they are for products and services well beyond the reach of most African-Americans! This artist is also a businessman.
Now, it would be nice to think that Luxon gets LunchMoney’s joke. That he understands the Kiwi battler’s bills, and his bills, are truly chalk and cheese. Such sly self-knowledge and brutal political honesty would be refreshing in our hyper-mediated world.
By bounding onto the stage to LunchMoney’s rap, Luxon would be admitting (sub-textually) that a man who owns seven houses, and the centre-right party he leads, are cats every bit as fat as the Florida rapper. Such transparent inauthenticity would, paradoxically, make the Leader of the Opposition a more – not less – authentic politician.
But, that would be too much to hope for. In all probability, Luxon took LunchMoney’s lyrics at their face value. “Bills”, as heard by Luxon, is a cri-de-cœur from a hard-working man determined to pull himself and his family up by their own bootstraps. It simply wouldn’t occur to him that LunchMoney’s rap was a tribute to his own escape from the bills ordinary people gotta pay, and the “work, work, work” they “gotta do to fill the mouths they gotta feed.
Luxon’s crude literalism, is reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s use of Bruce Springsteen’s anthem “Born in the USA” in his re-election campaign of 1984. The Gipper simply had no idea that Springsteen’s song was about the tormented existence of a Vietnam veteran robbed of his buddies, his peace of mind, and the possibility of a good life, by the murderous demands of Uncle Sam.
“America’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts”, intoned Reagan. “It rests in the message of hope in songs of a man so many young Americans admire, New Jersey’s own Bruce Springsteen. And helping you make those dreams come true is what this job of mine is all about.”
In the end, being born in the USA was the only thing the song’s hero had left. Far from being a hymn of praise to Reagan’s “shining city on a hill”, Springsteen’s song is laced with bitter irony and bankrupted hope. It is, however, doubtful that Reagan ever realised his mistake.
Doubtful, too, that Luxon’s journey into the bright lights and dark alleys of popular culture will be a long one. Doubtless, there is a huge amount to learn from the rappers and hip-hop artists of South Auckland. Who knows what insights he might come away with if he sat down with them in a place without cameras, without microphones, and just listened to the life-stories of these often spectacularly successful artists and businessmen?
That is, after all, what another National Party leader, Rob Muldoon, did, more than 40 years ago, with representatives of Black Power and the Mongrel Mob. The Project Employment Programmes which, in part, grew out of these encounters, set many young gang prospects on a new path, leading them away from crime, and towards steady employment, family life, and an altogether more productive existence.
Rob Muldoon had sat his final accountancy examinations in between fighting the Germans in Italy. He was a moderately successful businessman, comfortably off, but not rich: an Auckland suburbanite with a family bach at Orewa. The National Party he came to lead was a huge organisation, filled with people very like himself.
The experience of “The War” bound National Party members together in those days – as it did Labour’s. What came to be called the “RSA Generation” understood that, when the bullets start flying, who your father is and where you went to school doesn’t matter a damn. Character is not determined by class – but by courage.
Luxon’s speech to the National Party’s annual conference could have used the Covid-19 Pandemic – the closest contemporary New Zealanders have come to the solidarities and vicissitudes of war – as a new starting-point for the state’s efforts to get disengaged young jobseekers into the habits of learning and working that the whole country so desperately needs them to acquire.
He came close:
“National believes those closest to the problems should be closest to the answers. That’s why we back community-led solutions. For example, the Covid vaccine roll-out showed that bureaucrats in Wellington don’t always know best how to reach people. Just ask the Māori organisations who had to take the Government to court so they could get people vaccinated.”
If young New Zealanders are to re-engage with learning and working successfully, it will be through the efforts of autonomous, community-driven initiatives akin to those that ensured Māori rates of vaccination matched those of the rest of the population. The key words here are “autonomous” and “community-driven”.
Sadly, however, National’s policy-makers lacked the courage to trust the poor to take charge of their own destiny. Luxon’s plans for moving young jobseekers “From Welfare To Work” (where have we heard that slogan before?) by contracting “community groups” to “coach” the long-term unemployed out of their “welfare dependency” and into paid employment, will undoubtedly be met with the approval of conservative New Zealanders. Many will welcome the reappearance of Bill English’s “social investment” approach. But, will it work?
Those on the receiving end of policies setting them up as “suitable cases for treatment” are seldom grateful. Community organisations funded by the tax-payer have a long history of offering their “clients” little more than the condescension of middle-class professionals. Before successful coaching can begin, it is necessary to have a team. If National could only find the courage to allow these teams to form themselves, with sufficient resources to hire their own coaches, then the party’s social investment policies just might succeed.
Taken in its entirety, LunchMoney Lewis’s rap is not the positive statement Christopher Luxon obviously believes it to be. In the accompanying video, the artist makes clear his scepticism that the “work, work, work” of ordinary people will ever get them out from under all those bills. Rappers speak of a world rigged by the Man, for the Man. That’s why they portray working for the Man as a fool’s game. Luxon and the National Party would have a lot more credibility if they offered the young unemployed the chance to become their own bosses.
Then they’d be businessmen. And businessmen don’t have bills – they have accounts payable. And, as the former CEO of Air New Zealand knows, the larger your pile of accounts payable, the more likely it is that someone else will pay them for you.
*Chris Trotter has been writing and commenting professionally about New Zealand politics for more than 30 years. He writes a weekly column for interest.co.nz. His work may also be found at http://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com.
76 Comments
Throughout history, the elites have taken charge of the poors' destiny.
Every Empire thus constructed has collapsed, every rune is silent, every Long Count... doesn't.
Reckon the poor have a better chance, left alone. As it is, they're just another commodity; just another chance to commandeer the Commons. That weekend speech was from a dinosaur.
Luxon may be a dinosaur, but the rest of us are trying to figure out how we have massively higher benefit numbers and supposedly a record low unemployment rate.
As for the poor sorting themselves out, there seems to be a steady flow of the more entrepreneurial souls on the news between the hours of 6:00pm and 6:05pm offering free security audits for local retailers. Meanwhile, the rest of us are told "You just keep getting up at 5am to beat the traffic each day and go to a job that it takes an hour to get home from each night, eventually they'll figure it out".
Why is that, again?
2017:
Super - 13.7billion
Housing - 2.26 billion
Benefits (jobseeker, single parent etc) - 5.9 Billion
Student Allowance - 1.95 billion
2021:
Super - 16.6 billion
Housing - 2.3 billion
Benefits (jobseeker, single parent etc) - 6.5 Billion
Student Allowance .6 billion
Source: MSD Annual Reports
Some of those numbers are static if you factor in inflation (definitely not what I'd call "massively higher"). Probably only Super that's ballooning. It would appear on the surface that a lot of the student population have migrated into employment.
We did however spend 10s of billions of dollars tiding over jobs during covid. Middle class welfare I guess.
I think from memory Super is going to climb well above 20 billion in this decade - no one is brave enough to look at means testing this, raising the age, longer term adding in Kiwisaver to reduce it etc etc.
Easier to try and reduce something reducing anyway and spend less on education.
I think we should address Super and free up more money to invest in education - without more into that its a slippery slope downwards. Easy to say if you don't need to get elected by the majority who cant see past their nose it seems.
So apart from chasing a few young unemployed ones around whats the bright new plan and vision???
The numbers for the year at the end of June showed a 9.7 percent decrease in work-ready people on jobseeker support compared to the previous year.
That was 100,086 people, about 60 percent higher than the 63,030 when Labour took office in 2017 but down from the peak 2020 year when the number was 123,966 people.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/471369/jobseeker-benefit-numbers-d…
Maybe bad reporting.
If we look at the MSD's numbers, there's been over 100,000 people on jobseeker constantly since 2014. What we can see though, is a jump between late 2019 and late 2020, most of which you can put down to Covid layoffs. Which is now decreasing. Maybe the devil is in the description "work ready", I presume there are people on jobseeker who aren't work ready.
https://www.msd.govt.nz/documents/about-msd-and-our-work/publications-r…
You seemed to be making out there's been some sort of unexplainable explosion, doesn't seem overly unusual when you look at the source's figures.
If you look a bit further forward than December, many indicators are stagnating, suggesting the recovery between this point and where we were is going to require structural fixes and arguably has little to do with Covid - you can see most of the post-Covid mop-up is well behind us and we're into a 'new normal' that's much higher than the pre-Covid numbers.
https://www.mbie.govt.nz/business-and-employment/employment-and-skills/…
Two thirds of this article is about the chosen symbolism? Somewhat wasteful?
As to Luxon's increasingly debated policy about getting young people into work, I feel there are some big gaps. I like the incentives he talks about - make it worthwhile in the pocket for them as they get started, and soon they will learn there are more benefits to working. But there are still gaps that he is not apparently addressing. Minimum wage jobs are too close to the benefit, and too thankless for many young to consider them worthwhile. Working conditions need to be improved (40 hours p/wk, overtime rates etc), but most of all there must be the jobs available for people to have in the first place. Teaching a work ethic needs to be better. The current starter jobs tends to make too many feel like slaves. More could be done.
I feel like nothing is really going to happen in this area until abatements are sorted out and the cost of childcare is massively massively reduced. Having a stay-at-home parent on a benefit seems preferable to having an absentee one that has to work so many hours they never see their kids, just to be able to afford the childcare to allow them to work in the first place.
There is a real trap there for young people (in fact, most people, particularly those with children) where going to work probably doesn't stack up.
Yes, agree. When you allow this type of employer and accommodation https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/129496019/blatant-exploitation-migrant… to exist, you would be safer and financially better of to not work at all.
i did join TOP right at the beginning for about six weeks as I thought their economic policies a breath of fresh air. It's only afterwards did I find out about their Maori policy and resigned. Maybe its worth another look based on what Labour is surreptitiously doing with no reversal by the Nats likely should the Nats get in.
Yes, well National were pretty happy when they signed the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2010.
The statement in support of the declaration:
- acknowledges that Maori hold a special status as tangata whenua, the indigenous people of New Zealand and have an interest in all policy and legislative matters;
And people wonder why Labour is incorporating Indigenous people aka Maori in "all policy and legislative matters".
https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/national-govt-support-un-rights-dec…
I haven't been voting that long, but feeling a bit miserable about it all myself.
Both options are different ends of the same stinky turd.
Vote National/ACT for more boomer-tier bene bashing that won't solve the underlying issues, kowtowing to the demands of the big business lobby (i.e. flooding the country with low paid workers to try and drive down wages) and no punches being pulled in trying to restart the property speculation engine for the benefit of a select few in society ... all with a an added serving of environmental degradation.
Vote Labour/Green for trying to get more people hooked on the government money crack pipe so they can't ever leave (whether that's benefits, WFF, or dubiously-beneficial back office public service roles), unending demonisation of private enterprise - because it's not like businesses create economic activity that allows for all this tax revenue to be extracted - absolute non-delivery against almost every conceivable promise made, the destruction of "one person one vote" (because 'democracy has changed', don't ya know), and the only thing trending up being the number of ram raids and violent crimes. Oh and don't forget they will probably need TPM to get over the line next time - a party which comes out with genuinely insane statements like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/newzealand/comments/wi2tmh/comment/ij9nqw7/
Decisions, decisions.
Odd, I thought he'd been a rare outspoken critic of the left, and on the left:
eg
- https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2022/05/12/getting-on-with-co-governance-wit…
- https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2022/04/22/no-good-options/
etc
Sounds like a rerun of beneficiary bashing unfortunately. I felt very encouraged by the the many examples of our Maori communities taking control of their own destinies with regard to Covid -19 vaccinations for our populations in both urban and rural environments. These groups have a such valuable knowledge of their own communities and the individuals residing in them. Possessing the right communication skills, motivation and ability to interpret government policy into everyday trustworthy language for their communities. Trust is such a precious commodity in these scenarios. As Chris says all they need are the resources to get on with the job of supporting their communities. My question is are there equivalent community groups within Aotearoa that can reach disaffected and skeptical individuals in the rest of the population? Perhaps not as far as I can see. Church groups certainly. What about the rest? The things that unites us Maori in my experience is our shared culture, lived experiences and stories passed on to us by our forbears of their suffering. Even those of us like myself who was not brought up immersed in the culture.
What about the Northland marae which gave sanctuary to one of the two rogue sex workers who used fake papers to cross the Auckland boundary? (What happened to them, by the way?) Or the mass flouting of restrictions in South Auckland. Your comments have a big sprinkling of bull dust, unfortunately.
Yep Phase 1 beneficiary bashing. Phase 2 promise to get tough on crime. Phase 3 promise tax cuts. Phase 4 plan election victory speech.
But don't look over here at the white collar crime, lobbyists, large corp tax evasion, monopolies etc etc (not that either party would know what to do or actually enact anything regarding useful when it comes to these issues).
A Job Seeker 20-24 can get 309.73 gross per week plus another 70 for accommodation supplement and they could work 7.5 hours a week at minimum wage for another 160. Total gross 540 week 28 k per year.
Why not say to any Job Seeker who has been unemployed more than 6 months. You can keep all of your main benefit 16 k per year. Work as much as you want. Full time minimum wage 44 k per year. No abatement for 12 months. But you need to work at least 12 months solid. You get 1/2 the benefit amount in the hand per week. The other half as a lump sum after 12 months. You can also get accomodation supplement in those 12 months as well. So you can gross 60 k per year . More if you want to work OT.
Then we will see who wants to work.
I have no issue for my taxes to go towards super (as long as the person receiving it has worked in NZ themselves for at least 10 years), mental health or disability allowances, and WFF. But if someone does'nt want to work as they can't be are**, then I respect their right, but also they should'nt expect my taxes to pay for that choice.
Youth unemployment is the result of poor educational outcomes. Surely an announcement on raising the standards in all schools would have been more of a vote winner than beneficiary bashing. As Tony Blair said (education, education, education). Charter schools would help some, raising standards in all schools would help everyone.
"Youth unemployment is the result of poor educational outcomes." Disagree. The problem is much too complex for a simplistic statement like that. Many kids are just average and quite a few less so. Out employment environment must be prepared to provide opportunities for them too. No every one can be a potential Einstein or go to Uni. Kids of all walks of life deserve an opportunity to have a job that pays decent wages, with decent working conditions. Many people don't learn what they are truly capable of until they hit the workforce. The neo liberal 'free market' work place has destroyed most of that. Luxon is correct that it needs to change. I doubt he has the courage or smarts to make it work though.
Add add another factor. Minimum wage and health and safety. Gone are the days when the young person could be paid what he's/she is worth - which is often b-all.
So Jimmy can no longer be paid a few buck and hour to sweep the flour, make the tea and have the old fella let him have a crack on the tools/machines when it's quiet - and gain some skills and work ethic.
We have penalised the youth - making it illegal to employ them if they don't have high value skills.
Youth advocates should be taking a Human Rights case against mim wage.
It was probably too simplistic but education is not just about kids going to university. 40% of kids in this country are functionally illiterate. Education is more than just academic, it should inspire kids and open their minds to a world of opportunities. Whether that is trades, university or entrepreneurship.
Alternatively, many of the places that used to employ teenagers and slightly older - as well as pensioners - now seem to have developed an over-reliance on cheap, controllable migrant labour.
Raising standards in all schools might be useful. Perhaps investing in them. Charter schools...seems too much like a charitable treatment of private businesses if they're not required to deliver to educational outcomes other schools are.
I actually think Luxon's approach was *fairly* nuanced, appreciating that it was essentially red meat to the base - he certainly came across a lot better than Ardern's entirely evasive and combative pitch on RNZ this morning. Still not sure I'd vote for him though.
In general , there is a paucity of ideas from both main political wings. The time to be radical is now. Why not just bite the bullet and get on with;
1. UBI + whatever earning up to a $40k tax free threshold (CPI adjusted), some additional allowance made for dependent children added to the household threshold, ditch all other benefits and NZ super - transfers entrench welfarism, when a huge amount of well-being can be addressed by simply leaving money in peoples pockets rather than requiring them to go through byzantine and dehumanising processes to receive entitlements
2. CPI adjusted tax brackets, wider ones and more of them - top tax brackets no higher than company tax to disincentivise avoidance
3. Getting rid of additional supplements unless a person is incapable of work (mentally or physically) and requires additional support because of that
4. Tobin tax and wealth / land taxes introduced, reduce GST. Reintroduce gift / death duties - no dependent needs more than $2m gifted or inherited within their lifetime. Anything more is just embedding unearned wealth transfer and allowing an entrenched plutocracy to form.
5. Start smashing tax evaders to the full extent of the law, including strict elimination of transfer pricing for multi-nats; if you earn a dollar from NZ you pay tax in NZ
6. Massive disincentives for commodifying housing (taking a maximalist view, a 50% Stamp Duty on any housing transaction that not demonstrably for your primary residence?) and education (no more stealth taxes via Student Loans; ditch them completely).
That'll do more for people than any other tinkering and dog-whistling.
Death duties are bullshit, but if we set up a competent tax system, you wouldn't even need them. The Tobin tax is inherently inflationary, there's no getting around that. I feel like we're at the point where we need incentives to decommodify housing - I've written about a ZIRP product for owner-occupiers before, perhaps we could even comp losses into Kiwisaver accounts if they're selling at a negative position.
And if were mature enough to have a chat about WFFTC and the accomodation supplement, we could redesign almost everything.
"Death duties are bullshit, but if we set up a competent tax system, you wouldn't even need them."
Agreed. But until we have such a system that negates unearned wealth transitioning intergenerationally, then it should be taxed away when one shuffles off this mortal coil and go back to the commonwealth.
"The Tobin tax is inherently inflationary, there's no getting around that."
I'd say it's inherently regressive, but not necessarily inflationary (at least in a material sense).
Setting a TT @ 0.5% and massively reducing GST as an offset would seem sensible to me. At the end of the day, all taxes other than ones levied on land are passed on anyway, so it's just a matter of reducing the impact on lower earners, rather than the incidence.
"But until we have such a system that negates unearned wealth transitioning intergenerationally, then it should be taxed away when one shuffles off this mortal coil and go back to the commonwealth."
I'd rather have a system that gives people opportunities at the bottom than punitively taking from people in death.
Taking huge chunks of estates for the sake of propping the up the garbage tier levels of services we are expected to be happy with now (heaven forbid you question whether we get value for money for our ever-increasing personal tax rates via the stealth of inflation) is going to be a hard sell. Articulate a clear vision for what we would fund, set up a decent tax system that doesn't shy away from tough calls and you might find you're not having to wait for people to die because the up-front work on the tax system was in the too-hard basket.
100% agree with your comment overall - setup the tax system well in the first place, then you should be able to tax pervasively, transparently and equitably without need to resort to and end-of-life grab.
I wouldn't consider death duties (you can't logically be punitive towards a deceased taxpayer, only towards the beneficiary) and giving better opportunities to people at the bottom mutually exclusive though.
I'd go so far as to suggest that within the neo-liberal agenda that still sets the tone for political discourse in this country, they're rather tightly connected in a 'pull the ladder up' kind of way.
I wouldn't either. But I know one is much easier for the current idiots to go for, without the wholesale reform you should do at the same time, so there's a high chance we'll get the death duties and the garbage tier outcomes (at least the ones that still get measured, if there's many of those left).
Remember, the low low bar is that we have a tax system where a basic rates review hasn't happened in a decade and the Finance Minister scoffs at the idea of not taxing the inflation component of people's earnings. So it is already fairly antagonistic by design. I wouldn't trust them to suddenly come up with a welfare system and tax system that isn't similarly compromised.
I'm ok with the intent. Getting people off youtube and working is good for everyone, employers and workers alike.
The real issues if that the low cost wage base on many a cleaning or farm tax job don't pay enough to live in NZ mainly due to the costs of rent, so why try. Last nights Sunday program highlighted a Student in Auckland, and her allowance of $330 per week being not enough. I did a quick calc, she is getting quite a bit more than 1990 inflation adjusted equivalent student loan. The real issue is she is paying $250 p/w in rent for a damp moldy rot box, being approx three times student flat inflation adjusted rent from 1990.
This the 6000 pound gorilla. Anyone pitching shooting it with a speculation reset in next years election is getting my vote.
That's the real issue, cost of housing. Might need a societal mindset shift. At the moment, people go on about "Landlords costs this, Landlords costs that" particularly around the deduction of mortgage interest costs because they chose to borrow to the max.
What about the young renting family that is forgoing the equivalent of a full weeks wages just in rent? And need payments such as WFF just so they can feed their children. People are quick to bash WFF and families that aren't net tax payers, and on the same token quick to jump to the defense of Landlords.
Lots (apparently) of young people having their benefits cut off. hmm, that should do wonders for theft rates.
And then somebody has to employ them , I don't know how they distinguish who is employable or not ? Some are definetly not.
Norm Kirk had the right idea with the Ohu's in the early 70's. some people just don't fit in to normal employment. They can be good hard workers , they just can't turn up 9 to 5 regularly, or some other normal requirement they can't or don't want to handle. There needs to be alternative programs for them , and they need the security of the benefit as well.
Depends on which flavour of socialism really.
It's a broad church stretching from Fabian socialists (state influence of the "commanding heights" of the economy as a democratic principle, private property all good) to Communism (command economy, social / worker ownership of the means of production).
If we're talking just about labour though, being your own boss is very socialist!
Actually it is already possible for a beneficiary to start their own business through winz with the $10,000 grant less GST. You can use the grant to buy stuff you need and the rest is paid on a weekly basis at an amount you ask for till the $10,000 is used up. All you have to do is come up with a business plan and do a business course which winz sends you to. It has been around since the mid 90's. I know it exists because I used it when I got made redundant in 1999/2000. It is still in existence see the link below..
https://www.workandincome.govt.nz/products/a-z-benefits/business-traini….
it appears the grant has been reduced to $5,000 probably by the Nats last time they were in Govt.
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