For an election ostensibly fought over a “cost-of-living crisis”, there was a strong unspoken consensus between the two major parties: most people’s living standards needed to reduce to thwart inflation. Regardless of the election result, a form of austerity was always going to win.
Both National and Labour essentially agreed with the Reserve Bank hiking interest rates to bring down inflation – a crude market discipline likely to cause redundancies, suppress wages, and increase debt and inequality.
Such policies – classically neoliberal, specifically monetarist – are presented as if there is no alternative. Yet other countries have successfully used other measures to protect living standards, including wealth taxes, rent caps, windfall taxes on excessive profits, and major subsidies on energy payments.
