The biggest tragedy with all of this Labour Party distraction is that things are actually getting much worse for many people on middle to low incomes.
The inflation figures released by Statistics NZ showed that the cost of early childhood education rose by 11.7% last year.
The government has tried to claim it is not to blame, but that's nonsense.
It was this government that slashed early childhood education subsidies, forcing providers to increase their fees.
It was this government that increased GST.
For middle to low income families with kids in early childhood education that increase alone will have wiped out any benefits gained through the tax cuts. Some early childhood education centres have increased fees by up to $40 a week.
These families are clearly financially worse off under National.
As the cost of inflation outstrips the average wage increase, whatever benefits most people received from the tax cuts (for most people that wasn't much) have disappeared. Meanwhile, economic growth is stagnant, and our government has no plan for our economy other than to flog off some assets and hope that things magically improve.
And despite all of this most people think Mr Key is doing a splendid job. We live in strange times.
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
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It's pretty hard to imagine anyone doing a worse job of managing a recession, except Phil Goff (who can't even manage a stage-managed speech at a party conference), which is the problem.
ReplyDeleteA problem is that so many countries botched the financial crisis and its aftermath that Key &c. don't look so bad in comparison. The UK for example started out handling the crisis a bit better than we did, but have ended up notably worse.
ReplyDeleteThen again, there might be a more general growth in disconnect between performance and popularity. The only Western country to stay out of recession was Australia. Look where that got Kevin Rudd.
My boss is upset about the childcare costs going up, he cleared 600k last year and his wife likes to drop the kids off for 20 free hours so she can do her girly stuff. We spend 1.4 billion on childcare subsidies on top of WFF, intrest free student loans so Goff should advocate childlessness to put us back into surplus.
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