NZ Politics

Is a while > 7 years?

What's happening is really just a repeat and double-down of the Key Government. The key highlights from those years were:

• Tax Cutz for rich people
• Roadz of National Party Significance
• Tax rises (GST) that disproportionately impacted poorer people
• Budget "surplus" aka austerity by not doing infrastructure investment and structurally under-funding public services
• Vanity clipart flag project

And a fair bit of that was just a repeat of the National Governments of the 90s too. Basically all my life since about high-school on, which is just after the 80s & early 90s neo-liberal reforms had been bedded in has been a cycle:

• National Party led government gets in, starts doing policies that are to the benefit of a small number of richer, older people paid for by unfunding Public Services & Infrastructure and running it down. Economy drags along with most benefit accumulating with people who are already doing ok.
• Labour Party led government takes over and usually start immediately trying to catch back up from the unfunding over the last x years. They do this by mildly increasing costs on people who have grown wealthier and things get better for the poorer & working class but never catches up from the gap formed over the last government's term.

The net result is over each 15-18 year cycle the wealthy have done extraordinarily well and have now embedded their advantage as it is the children of the wealthy who start off wealthy and get wealthier.