It begins...

A couple of months ago, National announced that it was trying to re-introduce bulk funding of New Zealand schools. And now they're getting the natural response: industrial action from teachers:

Meetings for 60,000 teachers will be held across the country during school hours next month in opposition to the Government's proposed funding review.

The paid union meetings are the first time the New Zealand Education Institute (NZEI) and Post-Primary Teachers' Association (PPTA) have undertaken joint meetings of such a scale.

The unions say the Government's latest funding proposal, part of an attempt to fix the stigma attached to the current decile model, would be a "return to the failed bulk-funding experiment of the 1990s".

"It could result in fewer teachers and larger class sizes.

This is only the beginning. Last time the government tried this, they faced years of strikes and stoppages across the education system, and schools which accepted bulk funding were blacklisted. And all of that will happen again if National tries to re-impose this policy. If they want the education system to function, they need to work with teachers, not against them, and give up on the stealth cuts of bulk funding.

Same shit, different name

Back in the 90's, the last National government tried to introduce bulk-funding for schools. It was a scam-policy, designed to allow funding cuts while dumping the responsibility for them in the laps of powerless school boards (see also: DHB's). Fortunately, teachers resisted, and the policy was overturned.

But twenty years later, National is trying it again:

In consultation documents published on the Ministry of Education's website, the department proposes a new funding system with "the potential to increase flexibility in schools' use of funding while simplifying funding arrangements".

The change would set a "global budget" for each school, delivered as cash instalments for school expenses, and a credit system for salaries.

They say its different, but its the same thing: schools would be able to decide how much to spend on teacher salaries (rather than having staffing levels and therefore student ratios set centrally), and would be able to spend any excess from their salary portion on other things (such as, say, a new office for the principal). It therefore creates direct incentives for understaffing and over-working staff. Adding an extra layer also allows the government to pretend it has nothing to do with the decisions it has incentivised, freeing them from responsibility when they cut or cap funding and run down the state education system to allow for tax cuts for their rich mates (oh, and create a competitive advantage for the private snob-schools they all send their kids to). Its the same old shit, just with a different name.

Fortunately, teachers aren't going to take this lying down. Bulk funding was defeated in the 90's by protests, strikes, and blacklisting. I have no doubt that any attempt at reintroduction will result in similar action.

Gutting the state housing system

One of the reasons the New Zealand public have such a dim view of politicians is because they have shown time and again that they are cheats and liars. They set themselves performance targets (whether explicit or implicit) in opposition, then juke the stats and distort the facts in government so they can claim they met them. National did it back in 1990 with its promise to remove student fees (they didn't; they simply devolved responsibility for charging them to the universities), and Labour did it with hospital waiting lists in the 2000s (by the simple expedient of throwing people off and making them wait again - "solving" the problem in the statistics, but not in reality). And now National looks set to repeat the latter trick with state housing. Faced with growing waiting lists for state houses, despite their attempts to discourage people from applying, they are going to just chuck people off the list and forbid them to reapply rather than do anything to deal with the housing crisis.

It is cynical. It is unethical. But its what politicians will do to avoid a bad headline. Which is why people think they're scum. Anyone who thinks their reputation and/or re-election is worth more than the housing prospects of 4,700 needy families is either a colossal egotist or has a black hole for a heart (and probably both).

National is of course trying to downplay the status of those it is going to abandon. But Housing NZ's own assessment categories [DOC] make it clear that they will be denying help to those who need it. This is what they call "moderate need":

The household is disadvantaged, and this is likely to compound over time due to housing circumstances that are unsuitable, inadequate or unsustainable. The household is unlikely to be able to access or afford suitable, adequate and sustainable housing without state intervention.

Under National, these people will not even be allowed to apply for a state house. They will be left to the market, which Housing New Zealand has said will not provide for them. As for the state housing system, it will become a system for emergency accommodation for the truly desperate only, people who are actually homeless or living in garages. These people should obviously be the priority, since their need is greater - but the system should provide for more than that. And its here that National's true goal becomes apparent: they're planning to effectively gut the state housing system and reduce it to a rump. And having "reduced" demand (by defining it out of existence and making it someone else's problem), they're promising to privatise the "surplus" state houses, while removing income-related rents for the remainder if re-elected.

This is an outright abandonment of a core government responsibility. But National isn't interested in a government that meets its social obligations - instead, they want more profit opportunities for private landlords. Those profit opportunities will come at the cost of homelessness and overcrowding, with all the consequent health and educational problems and misery, just as it did in the 90's - but National don't care. Their mates will be making money. And that is all they really care about.

Back to the 90's

Is anyone else getting a horrible sense of deja vu? National is in power, the economy has tanked, they're talking tax cuts for the rich and privatization. Which means some election-year beneficiary-bashing is right around the corner.

And as if on clockwork, we have National's latest plans to demonise and victimise the poor and unfortunate, and drive their faces even further into the mud. All predicated on magical thinking that jobs somehow become available if only you beat the poor enough. Its cruel, its sadistic, its irrational. But its so very, very National, isn't it? A bunch of rich pricks sitting their on their fat piles of cash, shitting on the people beneath them.

While every government wants to get people off benefits, the idea that you can do so when there is 6.6% unemployment is simply madness. Of course, Treasury thinks that will drop, and 170,000 jobs will be delivered by faeries with magic wands over the next four years. And if you believe that, I have an ugly round building in Wellington to sell you. Even when unemployment was at record lows under Labour (remember that?), the numbers on benefits other than the unemployment benefit continued to rise, because these people have problems that are not economic in nature. The problem is not that they won't work, but that they can't. Solving those problems requires investment: investment in healthcare, mental health services, and addiction services, to solve those underlying problems which are ruining people's lives; investment in training, to upskill people who have been abandoned by the government; investment in childcare and disability services, to enable people to work. And this investment is expensive. While the government is making a few noises in this area, they're not going to follow through on it. Being cruel is cheaper (and gets more votes, which is what this is primarily about: a blatant play for the arsehole vote).

Still, as Gordon Campbell points out, it does put an end to the idea that John key is moderate. having sold us a continuation of Labour's polices in 2008, National is now aiming to drag us back to the insanity of the 90's. Fortunately, we have a chance to stop them in November.

Resurrecting the 90's

Before the election, I blogged that one of the choices on offer was between a government which used monetary policy to create a labour shortage to drive wage increases, and one which used it to create unemployment to drive wages down. Unfortunately, we got the latter sort - and they've wasted no time about changing things to ensure lower wages for ordinary New Zealanders and higher profits for their corporate backers.

How? This morning, the government signed a new Policy Targets Agreement with the Reserve Bank. So where previously we had this:

The objective of the Government's economic policy is to promote sustainable and balanced economic development in order to create full employment, higher real incomes and a more equitable distribution of incomes. Price stability plays an important part in supporting the achievement of wider economic and social objectives.

Now we have this:

The Government's economic objective is to promote a growing, open and competitive economy as the best means of delivering permanently higher incomes and living standards for New Zealanders. Price stability plays an important part in supporting this objective.

The difference is obvious: employment and equity are now no longer part of the Reserve Bank's equation. And the result will be a return to the neo-liberal mindset we saw in the 90's: that low wages are good for growth, and unemployment must be maintained at high levels in order to produce them and prevent "wage inflation" (ordinary people getting a share of those higher living standards the government claims to want). This has severe social consequences, and ensures that a large slice of New Zealand society - most of us, in fact - miss out entirely on the benefits of economic growth. Instead, their rich mates get it all - just like they did in the 90's.