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.

Or tax landlords a little more maybe.