Last Straw

While the rest of the world attempt to stim­u­late their eco­nom­ies with gov­ern­ment spend­ing, the ideo­lo­gic­ally ham­strung National/ACT gov­ern­ment of New Zea­l­and is arbit­rar­ily slash­ing depart­mental budgets by 10%.¹

No Right Turn:

And it looks like the slash and burn has already begun, with con­firm­a­tion that the gov­ern­ment is plan­ning to slash 500 to 1000 people from the Min­istry of Social Devel­op­ment - the very people who are going to be needed to help oth­ers dur­ing the reces­sion. But as usual, they’ll be told to “do more with less”. In the 90’s, that philo­sophy — of impos­ing arbit­rary budget cuts in pur­suit of some arbit­rary fiscal tar­get — led to crum­bling schools, roads, and hos­pit­als, to chron­ic­ally under­paid doc­tors, nurses, and teach­ers, to grow­ing pub­lic health wait­ing lists and high bar­ri­ers to get­ting social sup­port. It also led to a gov­ern­ment which out­sourced core func­tions to highly paid con­sult­ants while let­ting its internal capa­city wither — to the extent that it was even­tu­ally unable to run an elec­tion prop­erly due to the rel­ev­ant people not being budgeted to do it. Even after nine years in power, Labour was unable to heal all of that dam­age. And now it looks like National is going to do it all again…

So, when your local school starts fall­ing down and you can’t find a doc­tor, just remem­ber: that’s the price you pay for elect­ing a National government.

1. Such acts are designed to make any­thing fun­ded col­lect­ively by the tax­payer inad­equate, so that people lose faith in demo­cratic pub­licly fun­ded ser­vices and turn to the private sec­tor. [↩]