Simon Bridges. Photo: Radio NZ: Rebekah Parsons-King
Simon Bridges. Photo: Radio NZ: Rebekah Parsons-King

PoliticsSeptember 25, 2018

The dumbfounding nastiness of Simon Bridges’ ‘meth crooks’ remarks

Contributing writer
Simon Bridges. Photo: Radio NZ: Rebekah Parsons-King
Simon Bridges. Photo: Radio NZ: Rebekah Parsons-King

The National position on compensation over the meth contamination scare is incompatible with the party’s values, and reeks of weak and desperate leadership, writes Danyl Mclauchlan

Let’s take a stroll over to the National Party website and cast our eyes over their core values. They’re the kind of thing you’d expect a conservative, centre-right party to stand for. Equal Opportunity. Personal Responsibility. Strong Families. Limited Government. All good stuff, if you’re into that sort of thing. One of Key’s strengths as a leader was his ability to personally symbolise those values: state house; solo mum; worked hard; became insanely rich: the system worked. If you give everyone “equality of opportunity”, the John Key story went, but kept the dead hand of the state from interfering in people’s lives more than it needed to and reward those who work hard, anyone can make it.

I think that’s why I find National’s current position on the meth contamination issue to be so dumbfoundingly nasty. The backstory here is that the National government spent over $100 million dollars testing state homes for methamphetamine contamination, evicting residents without any kind of due process if the test came back positive, and after taking them to the Tenancy Tribunal, billing them for the enormous costs of decontaminating the property.

This was very controversial, with reporters like Benedict Collins and Russell Brown breaking stories that strongly suggested that Housing NZ were using a flawed standard of testing for methamphetamine contamination, revealing that the Ministry of Health had repeatedly told the organisation it was misusing its guidelines and that a lot of the state house tenants who were being evicted looked suspiciously unlike meth cooks and an awful lot like elderly pensioners and young families whose lives were being ruined by a cruel and incompetent bureaucracy while leaving hundreds of state homes empty in the middle of a housing crisis.

But the meth testing policy was ferociously defended by the housing minister at the time, Paula Bennett – who is now deputy leader of the National Party – and who celebrated the policy by loudly and repeatedly congratulating herself for getting tough on drug dealers.

One of the first things the new government did was ask Sir Peter Gluckman, the Prime Ministerial Science adviser appointed by John Key, to look into the meth testing regime. Gluckman quickly discovered that the entire enterprise was a scam. He characterised it as ‘meth hysteria’ and pointed out that no one had ever been harmed by the ‘forensic’ levels of contamination Housing NZ were evicting people for. The agency was forced to apologise – bafflingly no one resigned, or was fired; the head of the agency simply dodged the media until the cycle moved on – and this week announced they’d be paying token amounts of compensation to the eight hundred tenants they’d thrown out of their homes for no reason whatsoever.

National leader Simon Bridges’ response to all this is to attack the government for paying compensation to people like Rosemary Rudolf, an 87-year-old grandmother who’d lived in her property for sixty years, or Dianne Revill, a solo mother who has been homeless for two years after being wrongly evicted, separating her from her daughter who went to live with another relative, because they are, in Bridges’ words, ‘meth crooks’ who deserved to be evicted.

There’s an obvious thought experiment here. How should we feel about a future John Key who lived in a state house with his mother but was evicted because a bunch of public servants and politicians made mistakes, so went on to live in a car or sleep on some relative’s couch, and so failed to have any of the opportunities Key took advantage of? Bridges seems to feel that that would be a just outcome: the state doesn’t make mistakes, in his conception of the world, and a cruel and incompetent bureaucracy that tears up families, crushes the elderly and wastes $100 million dollars of taxpayer money – it took over 10,000 workers on the average wage an entire year to pay for the costs of Paula Bennett’s great meth testing debacle – is somehow compatible with the values of the National party under his leadership.

One of the core principles of modern conservatism is that the socialist state is too powerful, too innately corrupt and too unaccountable to be compatible with a free society: that’s why you need families and communities and free markets. So why is the National leader out there advocating for the epitome of a destructive and wasteful bureaucratic catastrophe that separated families and destroyed lives?

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    Two reasons. The first is that Bridges and his strategists have decided to define the struggling National leader as ‘tough on crime’. Which makes sense: he was a former criminal prosecutor; Labour are embarking on another of their periodic, doomed attempts to reform the criminal justice system; National are competing for votes with New Zealand First, who are both attractive to older, low-information voters who are perpetually terrified of drugs and criminals. Pride and fear are two of the most powerful emotions in politics: you can’t go wrong exploiting peoples’ fears.

    But Bridges is also competing for media-space with Judith Collins, who was first out of the gate attacking the meth compensation announcement, declaring that the tenants were all evicted because of their ‘criminal activity’. Bridges seems to feel that he needs to match Collins’ rhetoric on this issue. Collins has built her career making weird, frightening, provocative statements; it means she has a high media profile and a following among the activists on the fringe of her party. It’s also the reason she failed to come close to winning either the leadership or deputy leadership in either of National’s recent leadership contests.

    There’s been a lot of talk about strength and weakness, recently, with sacking MPs or ministers defined as the criteria for strong political leadership. But selling out your own party’s core values to win a slot in the media cycle, and because you’re afraid of a creature like Judith Collins feels to me like a total failure of leadership; the act of a weak and desperate leader who is playing the fear card because he himself is obviously afraid.

    Keep going!
    Image: Getty
    Image: Getty

    PoliticsSeptember 24, 2018

    After years of neglect, public servants want to see real tax reform, not tinkering

    Guest writer
    Image: Getty
    Image: Getty

    The government call for a ‘revenue neutral’ package of reform from the Tax Working Group, combined with refusal to relax the Budget Responsibility Rules, reveals a failure to pursue a fairer system that properly funds public services, writes the PSA’s Erin Polaczuk

    There’s a lot of good stuff in the Tax Working Group’s interim report: the recognition that our current tax system is unfair and unbalanced in its treatment of income from capital; the proposals that aim to increase retirement savings for people on low and middle incomes; and the acknowledgement that the tax rates and/or thresholds of people on low to middle incomes may need to be lowered.

    One thing the PSA is very concerned with, however, is the request from the minister of finance that the TWG present a “revenue neutral” package of reform. This will constrain the opportunity for genuine tax reform, with the added backdrop of a stubborn refusal to relax the Budget Responsibility Rules.

    In its original submission to the TWG the PSA put forward two major recommendations for reform of our tax system. First, we need to increase tax revenue to adequately fund the high quality public services that make our communities strong, and second this additional revenue needs to come from currently un-taxed income and wealth.

    Revenue from taxation funds the essential services that our members work in, and that we all depend upon. The level of revenue that the government collects from tax impacts directly on the quality and availability of these services: if revenue sinks too low and government spending is reduced, services decline and the jobs and working conditions of our members are compromised.

    Our public services, sometimes called the “social wage”, are vital to the health and wellbeing of individuals, families, communities, our society and our economy, and are part of the redistributive function of tax. The integrity, availability and quality of these services, and the important role that they play in ensuing the health and wellbeing of our communities, risk being eroded if they are not funded properly.

    Our members who are delivering these essential services have the right to decent pay and conditions that reflect the value of the work they do. Too often public service and community workers bear the brunt of government decisions to freeze or reduce revenue gathering and spending, through low and stagnant wages, insecure work and redundancies. People working in public and community services have faced nine years of stagnant wages, and workforce shortages that cause significant stress to workers.

    With the dominance of women in low paid occupations within the community and public sector – such as care workers, social workers and administration and clerical workers – there is a compelling argument to be made that female workers have long subsidised our public services through receipt of wages that don’t represent the value of their work. The PSA’s long-term commitment to equal pay for women workers is an attempt to rectify this long-term discrimination; achieving this goal will rely on government raising adequate revenue from taxation and being prepared to allocate sufficient government spending to close the gender pay gap.

    Many of our members on low to middle-incomes struggle to make ends meet, particularly after housing costs have been accounted for. While this is largely a problem of low and stagnating wages and the high cost of living, the tax system is currently inadequately structured to address income and wealth inequalities. Our key concerns relate to the high and uniform application of the regressive GST, the steep introduction of the lowest and middle tax rates at relatively low-income levels and the absence of a capital gains tax. The sharp clawback of government transfers, such as Working for Families means that many of our members see little net benefit from wage increases.

    Our current tax settings are unfair: most of our tax revenue comes from wages and salaries and from the regressive GST. Conversely, people who derive income from owning capital – the wealthiest among us – pay very little tax (if any) tax on that income. The result of this is that the New Zealand tax system has very weak “equity outcomes”, among the poorest in the OECD.

    The PSA supports an extensive and comprehensive tax on capital to tackle this inequity, and we urge our political leaders to tackle this thorny beast once and for all. Arguments against a capital gains tax because it is too complicated and complex need to be put to rest. The fairness, equity and balance imperatives of a capital gains tax must triumph over bureaucratic considerations. Besides, we have a great deal of confidence in the capability and skills of the public servants at The Inland Revenue Department to implement the most complicated of tax reforms efficiently and effectively.

    Alongside this, we would like to see a reduction in the amount of tax paid by people on low to middle incomes and a reduction in the rate of GST. These reforms, twinned with a possible increase in the tax rates on very high incomes, and the introduction of a capital gains tax, would go a long way to restoring the progressivity and fairness of the NZ tax system.

    In its Future of Tax: Submissions Background Paper the TWG notes that current revenue and expenditure settings at 30% of GDP will not allow for the maintenance of public health and superannuation at current levels. In other words, we will either need to increase revenue or cut expenditure.

    The health and wellbeing of our people and our communities will not be enhanced by cuts to health and superannuation, or to any other essential public services. More revenue does need to be raised, but it needs to come from those currently not paying their fair share.

    Erin Polaczuk is the national secretary of the Public Service Association

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