That wage gap

The Standard has a good piece on the Trans-Tasman wage gap, pointing out that it grew under National due to their policies of slashing wages and labour-market deregulation, and that it has not grown under Labour. As for why,

The reason for this is simple. National’s policy on wages was deliberately designed to remove minimum employment conditions, restrict the ability of workers to bargain for higher wages, let the minimum wage fall behind inflation and use high unemployment as a lever to put a lid on wage increases. The catchcry then, as now, was ‘flexibility’, a term that gave bosses the power to ‘reduce labour costs’ by cutting your pay and gave you the right to go to bed at night not knowing if you’d have a job in the morning.

As a result, most Kiwis’ average weekly earnings dropped or stagnated under National...

But the rich made out like bandits, so this was called "success".

They also have a very enlightening graph of average wages, which is worth repeating:

Under National's policies (which they want to restore), wages stagnated. Under Labour's, they have grown. Which would you rather have?