Monthly Archives: January 2023

Northern Advocate Column

Do Ardern and Labour have the courage to tax the wealthy?

13 May 2020

It seems like an age, but cast your mind back to Jacinda Ardern’s address to the nation on Sunday, March 21 announcing the Covid-19 response levels and preparing us for lockdown. You might have noticed a framed photograph of a man on the shelf behind the Prime Minister. It wasn’t there by accident, it was a deliberate placement of a symbolic visual cue. Of the kind Jacinda and her team are skilled at using. The photo was of Michael Joseph Savage, the first Labour Party prime minister. He came to power in 1935 in the middle of the Great Depression and on the back of mass civil disobedience and political agitation by worker unions and the unemployed.

What Savage and that first Labour government are most known for, is the Social Security Act of 1938, which secured a free public health system, the unemployment benefit and universal superannuation. The act was fiercely opposed by industry and newspapers of the day. But on the back of popular support, the first Labour government established a social contract with New Zealand citizens. The state would play a role in securing the wellbeing of all. Savage died 18 months later. He was genuinely mourned by Māori and working-class people.

Positioning Savage’s photo behind the Prime Minister’s shoulder suggested continuity between him and Ardern. The message was that this Labour-led government would also look after us in a time of crisis. They could have done more, and may still need to, but they’ve acted so far in broad accordance with the principles laid down by Labour in the 1930s.

What often goes unacknowledged, however, when looking back at the Michael Savage government, is that the social security spending was funded by a new tax surcharge. The rate was one shilling in the pound, or 5 per cent. Increasing taxes doesn’t quite capture the imagination. But if the 21st-century version of the Labour Party wants to claim continuity with the first Labour government, then they too will need to address the issue of tax.

Tomorrow, Finance Minister Grant Robertson will be delivering what he’s dubbed the “Recovery Budget”. The Budget will starkly present the Government’s ballooning expenditure, coupled with deflating revenue from GST, income tax and company tax. The shortfall will be covered by ramping up borrowing to levels never seen in New Zealand’s history. In the not-too-distant future, we’ll have to start repaying this mountain of public debt. Which means more tax.

With incomes for many of us falling – and the tax we pay falling simultaneously – where’s the extra tax revenue going to come from? It has to come from those New Zealanders who are hurting the least and can most afford it. Labour has backslid once on tax reform. Faced with opposition to a capital gains tax they folded. With Winston Peters perhaps playing a decisive hand. That was then, this is now. A fair response to paying off debt, while maintaining social spending, would be to increase tax on the wealthiest 20 per cent of New Zealanders. There will be opposition from the usual quarters. Though even some of our richest citizens must see the moral imperative of contributing more to the collective pot. Selfish opposition to extra taxes on wealth or higher incomes may not look good when so many have paid a high price to win against Covid-19.

The grounds of the debate have clearly shifted since a capital gains tax was knocked back. Heading into the September election, all parties will need a coherent tax policy. Will Labour and Jacinda Ardern have the political courage to present a vision of tax justice that sees the wealthiest among us pay more tax? Will a majority of voters think that’s fair?

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Northern Advocate Column

Composting and the ways of the force

13 January 2018

The compost bin should be the centre of any good garden. Coffee grounds, tea bags, carrot ends and peel, cabbage left too long in the fridge, lettuce that’s brown at the edges, grass clippings, tree prunings and raked autumn leaves—all into the compost bin. Where a few million critters, living bacteria, annelids and arthropods (worms and bugs), will do their work. You can think of the critters in your compost bin as your pets, or perhaps more accurately your working livestock. You’re a rancher of worms, a farmer of bacteria.

A compost bin needs to be moist but not sodden. Getting this right comes from experience. A good guide, if you’re going for a slow-burning composting process, is plenty of worms. A beginners mistake is to overload your compost with grass clippings, which if green will have lots of nitrogen, potentially upsetting the balance of your bin, producing a soggy, ammonia smelling goo. To maintain a balance, add lots of carbon, dried leaves, wood chip, or shredded paper even. If you want to get fancy, you can arrange green and brown in layers. 

With your compost bin filled with decaying organic material and what’s come out the rear end of various organisms, you’re dealing with the icky realities of the cosmos: death, decay and new life. Perhaps, as you enjoy the warm rays of the thermodynamic dispenser in the sky, following a morning spent working in the garden, you can meditate on your compost bin. Close your eyes, imagine all the crawlies, slitherers and multipliers doing their work. See if you can hear them with your mind’s ear. 

If you wish to reach further towards gardening nirvana, imagine yourself as part of this process, one day taking all your bodily bacteria with you into the compost universe, breaking down into constituent parts, fed on and giving birth to new life.

In composting, as in all else in life and gardening, you’ll only learn (and understand) by doing. Seek advice, but use your own brain to observe what’s happening. And one day you’ll have built up so much intuitive knowledge that you’ll be a Jedi of the backyard, understanding the ways of the force. 

While you might not be able to lift a wheelbarrow off the ground and spin it around using the power of your mind, you’ll be well on the way to growing food for yourself organically. In turn, you, a compost master, will be able to dispense gardening knowledge like a Yoda, “Turn the compost with a fork you do, much aeration that way, good results you’ll see.” 

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Poetry

A farmer’s idyll

There’s a rabbit,
not Peter, who visits
my vegetable patch,

a gangland garden
of my clan that pays
a lease to the earth.

And I should refuse
the rabbit, not Peter,
my hard-grown cabbages.

A stomping, swearing,
shooting Mafioso
of the poor clay soil

my role, locked in debt
like a crazy gambling
Cortez, driven to

exterminate—
but what is a spoiled
cabbage or two,

that can be saved
for eating by the chop
of a knife: coleslaw

for the dinner table;
a dewy morning feed
for the rabbit, not Peter.

And it’s that way
that I sometimes have
the heart to refuse.

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