The Coalition Government is aware of the electorate’s needs – why won’t it meet them?

By Chris Trotter*

Those who enter politics for idealistic reasons are generally disappointed. With a dispiriting consistency the ordinary voter remains stubbornly indifferent to great causes and grand schemes. The key democratic motivator: the maker and breaker of left- and right-wing governments alike; is whether the politicians have made it easier, or harder, for the ordinary voter to get by.

If the research of the American psychologist Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) is to be believed, humanity’s interest in great causes and grand schemes becomes politically decisive only after its individual members enter the upper stages of his famous “hierarchy of needs”. Employ these individuals, pay them well, give them a house to live in, keep the prices of basic household items and services affordable, and ensure the ready availability of quality health and education services. Only then: only when these basic material needs have been satisfied should politicians start pitching big ideas to the electorate. Who knows, with the basics taken care of, the ordinary voter might even be ready to listen.

Clearly, just moving most citizens off the two lowest of Maslow’s five levels would be an extraordinary accomplishment for any political movement. By the time most of us feel confident that friendship, family and sexual intimacy are set to remain permanent aspects of our lives, then a fairly large chunk of any government’s work should probably be considered done.

If a large number of citizens remain trapped on Levels 1 and 2, however, no government should feel secure. When basic physical needs – food, shelter – are not met. Where personal safety and a sense of belonging are lacking. These are the circumstances in which democratic governments struggle to retain office.

The National-Act-NZ First Coalition Government seems to be aware of this need to respond to the electorate’s basic needs, but adamantly opposed to adopting any of the measures most likely to meet them. Over the last 40 years huge ideological roadblocks have been erected in the path of measures which have, historically, proved remarkably effective at lowering the cost of living. Neoliberal economics, the reigning paradigm in both Labour and National since the mid-1980s, has anathematised direct government intervention for the purposes of keeping prices in check.

Let’s begin with basic food items: milk, butter, cheese, bread, meat, and vegetables. The prices of these staples have soared over the past twelve months. Bringing those prices down by government decree would, of course, play havoc with the profitability of New Zealand’s agricultural producers. Why should a farmer make food available to domestic consumers for less than he could receive from foreign buyers? On the other hand, why shouldn’t the state purchase enough foodstuffs to satisfy the domestic market at the international price, and then make it available to consumers at a price they can afford? Why not subsidise food?

Subsidies played an important economic role in the immediate post-war period in many countries – New Zealand included. The exigencies of wartime had elevated the basic needs of the working population to a point where it seemed both ethically and politically risky to downgrade either of them. Nation states wore the losses incurred by subsidisation because the notion of placing the profitability of private actors ahead of the public’s ability to feed itself at a reasonable price was dismissed as unacceptably extreme. The passage of 30 years was required before the doctrine of putting profits before people could be presented as reasonable.

Of course the New Zealand economy of 2025 still features a significant amount of subsidisation. Employers are excused from paying their workers a wage commensurate with their basic needs by the state support made available to employees via the Working For Families scheme. Landlords are similarly subsidised by the Accommodation Supplement – a state provided top-up payment for tenants unable to pay their rent on account of either inadequate wages or meagre social welfare benefits.

The alternative to subsidisation – prior to the triumph of “market forces” – was direct price control. Indeed, when the free-market revolution got underway in late-1984 New Zealand was still enmeshed in the wages and prices “freeze” imposed upon the entire New Zealand economy by the National Party Prime Minister (and Finance Minister) Rob Muldoon in June 1982.

Conceived as a means of keeping consumer goods affordable, and breaking the wage-price spiral which continuing high inflation made inevitable, the Freeze was at least partially successful. Inflation, running at an eye-watering16.1 percent in 1982, had plummeted to just 6.1 percent in 1984 – an inconvenient truth buried deep beneath the rubble of “Muldoonism” by generations of Neoliberal myth-makers. Four years of monetary mayhem and a stockmarket crash would be required to bring the rate of inflation back to the low point it reached during Muldoon’s last year.

Certainly, Muldoon’s Freeze produced a more tangible result than Labour’s “Maximum Retail Price Scheme” (MRP) of a decade earlier. Introduced in 1974 under the Labour Government of Norman Kirk, the MRP was intended to place a ceiling on retail prices and thus encourage that scourge of the capitalist profit system – competition by price. Resisted ferociously by the serried ranks of the Right (many of whom, Bob Jones in particular, were already scenting the heady possibility of a major electoral reversal courtesy of its then admired attack-dog, Rob Muldoon) and unsupported by the computer technology that would have obviated the massive bureaucracy required to administer it, the MRP was timed-out logistically, politically, and electorally.

In the struggle to contain the cost of basic consumer goods and services there is, however, one sector that offers a long and proud record of success – publicly-owned and provided insurance. In both the life and property aspects of the industry, it soon became clear to New Zealand’s political leaders of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries that affordable insurance could not be provided to ordinary New Zealanders by any other entity but the state. Government Life was established in 1869 and by 1877 was larger than all the other life insurance companies combined.

The State Fire Insurance company opened for business in 1905, and was immediately faced with a coordinated effort on the part of private insurers to drive it from the field. By 1920, however, the state-owned company had, according to Te Ara Encyclopaedia “insured more property than any other general insurance company in New Zealand.”

Naturally, faced with the extraordinary danger of a good example, the Neoliberals of the 1980s and 90s lost little time in privatising these state-owned guarantors of affordability. The names of these now private companies may stir echoes of a less ideologically hidebound age, but the ever-rising premiums currently confronting New Zealanders have yet to convince the leaders of National or Labour that the example set by their more pragmatic predecessors, if followed, might bring substantial electoral rewards.

Professor Maslow was puzzled by the unwillingness of practical politicians to do all within their power to lift the mass of their voters up to the top three levels of his hierarchy of needs. There has never been any question that the capitalist system could do it. Indeed for millions around the world the “self-actualisation” for which Maslow encouraged us all to strive is there for the taking – if only they would reach for it.

Could it be that if happiness is available to all, then it’s value, as both a goad and a goal, will be diminished? Perhaps it is only possible for human-beings to enjoy the view from Maslow’s First Level by reminding themselves that there are four, increasingly unhappy levels, below them.

*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.