National's New Zealand

National came to power in part because it promised to reduce the cost of living of ordinary New Zealadners. But two years in, the reality is different. Stuff today reports that we are paying 80% more for food than the Australians are, despite (or perhaps because?) farmers telling us they're "feeding the world". And meanwhile, RNZ reports that people with jobs are forced to live in cars:

Lower Hutt vinyl layer Dylan Holdaway, 35, said he had been sleeping in his silver Toyota Wish for the past five months.

He told RNZ that living this way had led to him losing 25 kilograms and dealing with several infections.

[...]

He worked 30 hours a week, and said living in his car made it hard to maintain his appearance on the job.

This is National's New Zealand: a country where we are gouged by landlords, supermarkets, banks, and power companies; where ordinary people with jobs can't afford a place to sleep and are slowly starving to death because they can't afford food. Because National's low-wage, cartel-dominated economy doesn't provide the income for people to have even the basics anymore, and their gutted government doesn't provide the services to make up for that.

In 2016, similar stories shamed the Key government into actually doing something to ease homelessness. But this bunch are shameless. They have made things this way deliberately, grinding down working conditions, giving a green light to gougers, gutting Kainga Ora, and giving away the government revenue which could have helped solve this to landlords with gratuitous tax cuts. They are not going to fix this, because doing so would mean admitting they were wrong - and because they and their mates are profiting from the misery they are inflicting.

The only way this will change is if we change the regime. But that's not enough, because the next government needs to actually do something about it, rather than just trying to perpetuate the grossly unjust status quo. And that means restarting Kainga Ora's building program, to build the homes people need; forcibly breaking up the cartels and regulating the fuck out of the pieces to prevent price-gouging; regulating landlords to prevent them gouging for rent; restoring the benefit system; and taxing wealth to pay for it all. And if Labour won't promise that, then you should vote for someone else who will.