Out with the old, but where’s the substance?
With ‘micro targets’, too bad for voters who want more
Chris Hipkins jettisoned so much of his predecessor’s agenda on Wednesday you wondered if he was about to announce the cancellation of his own surname and a plan for a commission to look into a new one beginning with “L”.
The merger between RNZ and TVNZ and the biofuels mandate were axed, the social insurance scheme was put off to some undefined date of economic prosperity, hate speech changes were fobbed off to the Law Commission to take another look at them and the Three Waters concept will be refined.
And that was only the first set of his “re-prioritisation” decisions.
In political terms, the announcement was a way of putting pressure back on the National Party by robbing them of some of their main attack lines.
But adopting your opponent’s agenda carries the unfortunate sideeffect of making it look like you’ve left the people who voted for you high and dry.
Perhaps to take the sting out of this backslide, the Government handed out some red meat in the form of the largest aggregate increase to the minimum wage since 1997.
But even this chunk of red meat is less appetising than it might appear.
Minimum wage less sizzle than it sounds
A study by Motu in 2021 into minimum wage increases found that it was a poor form of wealth redistribution mainly because it targeted people on the minimum wage rather than people on low incomes.
While these two groups might sound like the same thing, they are not. The study found a significant proportion of people on the minimum wage were actually teenagers living in relatively well-off households.
Wealth redistribution aside, the minimum wage rise also pushes those on the minimum wage into a higher tax bracket if they work 41 hours a week, one where their earnings on top of that threshold are taxed at 30 per cent.
So while workers will earn more from the minimum wage rise, they will also be paying more of their income back to the Government at a higher rate of tax.
While the change affects only a small number of workers, it is also at least arguably inflationary.
Government supporters might also justifiably feel betrayed at the U-turn on hate speech legislation.
Labour campaigned on making the changes in 2020 and they were also recommended by the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Christchurch mosque attacks.
The royal commission highlighted that the mosque attack murderer had figured out a way around laws already on the books designed to catch speech that might result in someone using racist rhetoric trying to rally a mob to target a group of people physically.
In 2018, the mosque murderer was already planning his attack but had hopped on to a white supremacist forum to say the biggest threat to Western society came from nonviolent immigrants who actually made an effort to fit into society. The terrorist said these immigrants would “boil the frog slowly” and “without violence I am not certain that there will be any victory possible at all”.
These comments skirted around existing laws designed to prevent the incitement of racial violence against minority groups. But the commission said from the context the comments were made in, it was likely the murderer was planning an attack and hopping on to the forum to persuade others to join in later.
But the idea of more regulation in this area was unpopular because people feared it would outlaw their own speech, and for a time Kris Faafoi, the former minister championing the legislation, made things worse by appearing not to know if it would or wouldn’t.
Perhaps the Law Commission will come up with a better balance, but given that this has largely been a question of optics and popularity, will the desire to pass this legislation really be any better the further away we are from the events of Christchurch in 2019?
Cloud hangs over big projects
And that is the thing with this current “re-prioritisation”. It is more about taking hot-button issues off the table than addressing large potential costs or projects.
For starters there are two big projects that are still floating around.
The Lake Onslow project, on which a decision to proceed with a substantial $70 million business case is now overdue, didn’t even warrant a mention.
Then there is the Auckland light rail project. Over the past few weeks several moves have been made that have made its future look less likely in its current form. For starters, Jacinda Ardern resigned and then Phil Twyford was ejected out of Cabinet.
These actions removed two political players closely aligned with the project. The third was Michael Wood, a transport minister previously ebullient about the prospect of tunnelled light rail, who would suddenly only commit to highquality public transport.
If these two ideas go, then what will be left?
Perhaps Hipkins wagers that if it comes down to a contest of two parties with virtually indistinguishable agendas, the public will prefer his own, and judging from recent polls he may not be wrong.
Thursday’s mass-jettisoning has the makings of creating an environment for not just a small target election but a micro-target one.
Those who wanted better have every right to feel annoyed.
Adopting your opponent’s agenda
carries the unfortunate sideeffect of making it look like you’ve left
the people who voted for you high
and dry.