The Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand recently released its alternative 2025 budget, a document that has been lauded by many on the liberal-left as bold, transformative, and progressive. With proposals including a wealth tax, inheritance tax, tax-free income brackets, and significant investments in healthcare, education, and climate infrastructure, the Greens have positioned themselves as the party of redistribution, sustainability, and social welfare.

But for anarcho-communists—who seek not the reform of capitalism but its abolition—the Green Budget raises fundamental questions about the limitations of parliamentary politics, the persistence of capitalist logics under a green veneer, and the ongoing domestication of radical political potential by electoral parties.

1. Taxing the Rich… to Save the System?

At the centre of the Green Budget is a new suite of taxes aimed at the wealthy: a 2.5% annual tax on net assets over $2 million (or $4 million for couples), a 33% inheritance and gift tax above a lifetime threshold of $1 million, and higher income and corporate tax rates. The goal? To raise $88.8 billion over four years to fund a sweeping expansion of the welfare state.

On the surface, these are popular policies. The idea that the ultra-wealthy should pay more in a country where inequality has surged is appealing, particularly in the face of deepening poverty, a housing crisis, and crumbling public services. But the deeper problem is that these taxes still operate within a system where private property is sacred, wage labour is the norm, and wealth remains the measure of human worth.

We must ask: what does it mean to tax wealth while leaving the class structure that generates it untouched? A 2.5% wealth tax may redistribute a small fraction of what has been expropriated from workers, but it does not question the legitimacy of wealth accumulation itself. Nor does it challenge the capitalist state’s role in protecting the material interests of capital. At best, this is a policy of redistribution without expropriation—reform without rupture.

The Green Budget also avoids confronting the role of landlords, speculators, and banks in the everyday extraction of value from working people. These sectors—central to New Zealand’s financialised economy—remain largely untouched. In fact, by depending on ongoing economic growth to fund welfare spending, the Greens reaffirm capitalism’s central contradiction: the need for endless accumulation on a finite planet.

2. Free GP Visits and Childcare: Welfare or Pacification?

There is no doubt that the budget’s investments in health, education, and social security would materially improve people’s lives. Free GP visits, restored free prescriptions, 20 hours of early childhood education from six months of age, and an income guarantee of $395 per week for people not in work or study all represent real steps toward a more liveable and humane society.

But these reforms are not revolutionary—they are the minimum that a wealthy settler-colony like Aotearoa should provide. In fact, many of these proposals simply aim to restore the social-democratic protections dismantled over the past 40 years of neoliberalism. Their return is welcome, but their framing as “bold” or “transformative” risks reinforcing the extremely low bar of contemporary political expectations.

Anarchists must remain critical of how welfare states have historically functioned—not just to alleviate poverty, but to regulate it. Welfare has often served as a tool for disciplining the poor, pacifying dissent, and reproducing the labour force. Under capitalism, social services are not universal rights but contingent privileges tied to state surveillance, bureaucratic eligibility, and productivity metrics. Unless radically democratised and decommodified, the welfare expansions promised in the Green Budget risk becoming mechanisms of pacification rather than liberation.

3. Climate Capitalism and the Green Growth Illusion

The Greens’ environmental agenda includes reinvesting in regional rail, light rail in major cities, restoring the “Jobs for Nature” programme, and modifying the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) to exclude forestry and include agriculture. These policies reflect a sincere desire to address the climate crisis—but again, they remain tethered to the ideology of green capitalism.

At no point does the Green Budget challenge the root cause of climate breakdown: capitalism’s demand for infinite growth and profit maximisation. By framing climate solutions in terms of market mechanisms, investment incentives, and infrastructure expansion, the Greens reinforce a logic that treats the earth not as a commons to be stewarded collectively, but as a resource to be managed for long-term economic stability.

From an anarcho-communist standpoint, the ecological crisis is not a failure of policy but a structural inevitability of capitalist production. True climate justice requires not technocratic tweaks or eco-Keynesian investment, but the abolition of fossil capitalism, the end of private property, and the restoration of collective autonomy over land, water, and food systems.

4. Electoralism and the Politics of Containment

The 2025 Green Budget must be understood not only as a fiscal plan but as a political performance. It serves to position the Greens as the moral conscience of Parliament—more compassionate than Labour, more competent than Te Pāti Māori, and more visionary than the reactionary coalition of National, ACT, and NZ First. But this role is not a threat to the system; it is its left flank.

Anarchists have long critiqued the trap of electoralism: the idea that meaningful change can be achieved through participation in bourgeois parliamentary democracy. The history of social democracy across the world shows how radical energy is often captured, defanged, and institutionalised by parties that promise transformation but deliver only management.

The Green Budget is a textbook example. By presenting itself as a “realistic” and “fully costed” alternative, the Greens reassure capital that they are responsible stewards of the system. They propose tweaks, not rupture; fairness, not freedom. And while their policies are frequently attacked by the right as “Marxist” or “radical,” they are nothing of the sort. No factories will be collectivised. No land will be returned. No bosses will be expropriated. The social order remains intact.

5. What Could Real Transformation Look Like?

If the Green Budget reflects the ceiling of what parliamentary politics can offer, anarcho-communists must look to the horizon. What would a truly radical reorganisation of society look like in Aotearoa?

Abolish Capitalism: End the wage system, dismantle corporate control, and collectivise the means of production under workers’ democratic control.

Decolonise Now: Return land to tangata whenua, honour tino rangatiratanga, and dismantle the structures of settler colonialism embedded in the state, legal system, and economy.

Destroy the State: Replace top-down bureaucracies with federated, decentralised, directly democratic assemblies rooted in communities, workplaces, and marae.

Care as Commons: Decommodify health, education, and housing—not as state services but as commons managed collectively by the people who use them.

Ecological Reparation: End fossil fuel extraction, industrial monoculture, and car dependence. Rewild land, support indigenous ecological knowledge, and build resilient, low-carbon communities based on care, reciprocity, and sufficiency.

These are not budget lines or policy planks. They are revolutionary transformations that can only be achieved through mass collective action, direct democracy, and the dismantling of both state and capital.

Conclusion: The Budget Is Not Enough

The Green Party’s 2025 Budget is a mirror to the contradictions of our time. It offers real improvements for people suffering under the current regime, and it rightly identifies the obscene concentration of wealth in Aotearoa. But it cannot and does not challenge the foundations of that regime. It is a programme for managing inequality, not abolishing it; for greening capitalism, not ending it.

Anarcho-communists must resist the temptation to see the budget as a stepping stone toward revolution. History teaches us that reform is not a ladder to liberation but a cul-de-sac that saps energy and neutralises dissent. The task before us is not to vote smarter or lobby harder—it is to build dual power, organise in our workplaces and communities, and dismantle the systems of domination that no budget can fix.

The future we need cannot be budgeted for. It must be seized.

AOTEAROA WORKERS SOLIDARITY MOVEMENT
aotearoa_anarchism@riseup.net
15.5.25

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