Richard Wagstaff
It was incredibly jarring to hear the hubris from the Prime Minister during his recent state of the nation address. I had just spent close to a week working though the stories and thoughts shared with us by nearly 2000 working people as part of our annual Mood of the Workforce survey. And the picture they paint of the state of the nation could not be further from the claims of prosperity and wellbeing that Luxon has been patting himself on the back with.
The overwhelming sense among working people – the people who are the majority of Aotearoa New Zealand’s voters – is of uncertainty and insecurity. We asked them about their work lives, about their health, their housing, what they thought of the tax system, and we asked them about the performance of government leaders.
The results that came back were the least positive we have seen since we started the survey in 2019. At first I was taken aback by how angry and fearful of the future people are, but then the governing party’s very own polling company, Curia, released polling showing the majority of people feeling that the country is on the wrong track. It clearly is.
If that Curia poll was a snapshot of the country’s mood, our survey is a high-resolution close-up photograph of why. As I read story after story of people losing their jobs, or having their workload grow as their colleagues lost theirs, and having their employers leverage the unemployment rate to get more out of them, the workplace statistics and the anger started to make sense.
Reading the stories of people whose businesses are in trouble, who are in fear of losing their homes, or are having their families pulled apart as their children leave Aotearoa in desperate search of a better life, the sense of fear becomes palpable.
And reading the truly awful stories of people with serious and life-threatening illnesses having to wait endlessly for treatment, and the health system staff who are burning out as workloads increase and jobs are cut, it became easy to understand why so many respondents feel like this Government simply doesn’t care about them.
That sense of a Government that is only looking after a privileged few and doesn’t care about the rest of us pervades the mood of the workforce this year. The austerity policies of the Government and the recessionary spiral it has put our economy into is being felt first hand by working people, and it is hurting them.
Finance – and now “growth” Minister, Nicola Willis, scored badly in last year’s survey, but there was a sense from respondents that people were willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. Now, a year later with the damage of austerity sinking in, and her appalling and incredibly costly mishandling of the Interislander ferry replacements, her numbers are even lower. That drop was mirrored across nearly all party leaders and deputies.
In fact, the only leader to improve their score on last year’s survey was Winston Peters. It’s not clear why that is, but the issue of his commitment to publicly owned rail and rail-ferries got more than a few mentions.
Amongst the anger and the hurt, there are some things to be hopeful about. The massive support for a fairer tax system (87.7%), and in particular a capital gains tax, shows there is a constituency for doing things differently and better. Given the disproportionately high number of recipients who own their own homes (70%), and the handful of respondents who said they would be among those paying a CGT but wanted one anyway, this is a strong signal to politicians who misguidedly fear that a fair tax system could cost them votes.
There is also a strong appetite for change among working people. For policies that put people back at the centre of decisions, that unite rather than divide us as a people, and that grow our public wealth and use it to ensure we use it to determine our own futures in our own interests. Democratically and together.
Working people did not ask for policies that enrich the few at the expense of the many, or even policies that maintain the unfair status quo while only rounding off its sharpest edges. They want real transformational change that benefits and unites us all. That’s a message that politicians of all political stripes ignore at their peril.