Dragging the Grim Reaper out of the Crypt for one last hurrah

Ruthanasia destroyed the social safety net, doubling poverty. She's back for more.

In 1991 Finance Minister Ruth Richardson delivered the Mother of all Budgets for National, a scheme to redistribute money from the poorest groups of New Zealanders to the richest.

She and her accomplices supercharged the destruction of the social welfare state (taking cues from Thatcher and Reagan), almost single-handedly doubling child poverty in NZ. The injury lasted more than a decade. She was deeply, deeply hated by the public once they got to see her policies in action. They were quickly termed ‘Ruthanasia’, and she helped crater her National party from an 18 seats majority to just 1. And cause the splintering off of Winston Peters from the National Party to create NZ First.

Unemployment skyrocketed, and public healthcare suffered.

Sounds familiar.

She sold off our public assets, and deregulated industries, including our energy industry…which we are still paying for today through scandalous (‘record-setting’) profit margins to our private energy companies and unaffordable heating expenses for our households. She wrecked unions and stripped legal protections for workers in New Zealand. These have never recovered.

In short, she was the worst Finance minister, and perhaps second most financially and socially damaging politician of the last 50 years.

But rest assured, her National government brought profits to the largest corporations, even as it weakened New Zealand for regular Kiwis.

And now we have Nicola Willis, Luxon, and de facto prime minister David Seymour’s ACT party, and their publicity organ, the Taxpayers (fake) “Union”, unearthing her from her slumber.

She’s just become their Chair.

I think it’s safe to assume she will again try do as much damage to the bottom 90% of New Zealanders as she’s allowed to get away with. I think it’s also safe to assume we will see National/ACT continue to run up the debt to record or near-record levels, higher even than Labour’s…but without any worldwide Covid pandemic costs to account for.

This time around our surging debt is simply to pay for a giveaway of taxpayer money to property investors, high-income earners, Big Tobacco, weapons spending, and Big Oil.

It seems the bad old days are back, and Gollum has crawled out of his cave.

Our only hope is that in the next 18 months Winston realises that his collusion with Atlas’s ACT party should come to an end. Leaving these people in charge is just not healthy for NZ’s wellbeing. Or its finances.

And the greatest irony of Ruth Richardson’s Reign of Terror?

That all the hysteria and fear-mongering that she spread over the budget (including talk of national bankruptcy) was fake news to allow her to slash spending and destabilise the country, priming it for profound privatisation.

Debt at that point was just 42% of GDP. Guess what it is now, while Ms Willis attempts to stir up the same hysteria in order to push deeply unpopular austerity policies? 42.6%.

Literally lower than Australia, Ireland, US, UK, Canada and South Korea. Quite modest and manageable by international standards, though you’d never know it from listening to the current govenrment’s politicians.

Lying about the debt will allow another round of spending cuts for essential public services, and another round of taxcuts for the very wealthy.

Some things never change.

-Gary Payinda