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We could do much better
CTU Media Release
21 December 2012
We could do much better
2012 was a hard year for many people. It didn’t need to be so hard. Bill Rosenberg, CTU Economist said “yes, we live in difficult times, but government policies should be judged by how it dealt with those difficulties, not by the lazy criterion: “we muddled through”.
In 2012 –
• We saw income
inequality reach its highest ever in New Zealand despite
increasing international evidence that it drives many
economic and social problems. The Ministry of Social
Development also showed that in 2011 two-thirds of
households had falling incomes. Median weekly incomes in
2012 had their smallest increase since 1999.
•
Levels of poverty among children continued at levels
described by experts as “unacceptable” when our aging
population makes it more important than ever that we should
be helping all our children make full use of their abilities
for their own and society’s wellbeing.
• A
just released report from the Tertiary Education
Commission[1] showed that student numbers fell by an
astonishing 11% in 2011 at a time when we should be
increasing skills and encouraging people into education and
training.
• Unemployment reached a high of 7.3
percent not seen since 1999, deteriorating from 3rd lowest
in the OECD in 2006 to 15th lowest, with many more jobless
or seeking more work, despite New Zealand escaping the bank
failures that hit other countries. It is now not far below
the falling 7.7 percent rate in the US – the heart of the
bank failures.
• The economy continued to
stagnate, with little sign of rebalancing away from reliance
on property investment and low value commodity exports
towards productive high-wage high-value industry and
exports.
It doesn’t need to be like this. The
Government could be
• Moving from employment
relations which see workers and good pay, job security and
working conditions as costs to be reduced, to treating
workers as valuable assets and encourages collective
bargaining, skill creation, and cooperation between unions
and employers to increase productivity as a way forward –
as it is in the highly successful Nordic societies. It
should be scrapping its proposals to further reduce work
protections and union rights.
• Taking its
focus off an unrealistic budget surplus target to job
creation, raising benefit levels to take children out of
poverty, encouraging more people into tertiary education
including industry training, building more good quality low
cost houses and increasing the quality of private rental
housing, providing food in schools, and taxing high incomes
and capital gains (excluding the primary home) to bring in
more revenue and reverse growing gaps between rich and
poor.
• Greatly expanding programmes to assist
people who are jobless through community job schemes, more
help in retraining, matching skills to jobs, and relocation
assistance.
• Assisting manufacturing and
other local employers through government procurement,
expanded support and funding for research and development,
export marketing, and venture capital to create good
jobs.
• Intervening to manage the exchange rate
to make exporting more profitable and less risky.
Bill
Rosenberg said “unfortunately, instead we are likely to
see damaging asset sales, further attacks on working
conditions, unions, and beneficiaries, and industry policies
which look more like a repeat of the failed policies of the
1990s than learning the lessons of those policies and the
global financial crisis. But with the right policies, New
Zealand could do better.”
ENDS
[1] 2011 Tertiary Education Performance Report, Tertiary Education Commission, 20 December 2012, p.24. Available at http://www.tec.govt.nz/Documents/Reports%20and%20other%20documents/TEC-Tertiary-Education-Performance-Report-2011.pdf
New Zealand Council of Trade Unions
Te Kauae Kaimahi
The New Zealand Council of Trade Unions Te Kauae Kaimahi brings together over 350,000 New Zealand union members in 40 affiliated unions. We are the united voice for working people and their families in New Zealand.
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