Very far from comfortable

Sunday column

One of the more startling moments of the 1987 election count was the spectacle of National party voters in Remuera so enthusiastically embracing the Labour government. 

Affluent Auckland was not only very much at ease with Rogernomics, it was up for a whole lot more.

In politics you do want to be taking as much of the nation with you as you can. But there can be moments that will make you ask: Did they shift, or did we?

Last election’s huge Labour vote was a ringing endorsement for a Covid strategy that shielded us all from harm; gratitude to a government that had stepped in and looked after us when catastrophe loomed.

Tallying-up has since given us a clearer picture of just who got looked after, and how much. It turns out it was a very good time to be established and affluent.

Affluence, property affluence in particular, got some very kind hothouse protection. Many flowers have bloomed.

But if you weren't well-established or affluent? Not so much.

The cost of rent or buying a house is now more forbidding than ever. It’s plain to see that protecting the comfortable middle has had adverse consequences. A government that wants to see everyone well-protected and decently cared for might want to remedy that as a matter of urgency.

If that were a bit too much to ask, it might at least be saying,
we don't want to see this imbalance amplified, so let’s hold off an any more work that comforts the comfortable and protects them from life's harsh adversities until we have made big progress on protecting the people who are most harmed by them.

Okay, now let's talk about social insurance.

What we heard this week sounded appealing enough. What’s not to like about having insurance against losing your job? You pay a levy, not all that large, and then if you're well paid and you lose your job, a good chunk of a good salary will keep rolling in. Beats being on the benefit, have you seen how meagre that can be? And dealing with WINZ? Forget about it. 

But if you're poor, underemployed or not in work; if you're not white, male and prosperous, all of life can be more of a headwind. So much can become precarious. No comfortable hothouse for you.

I’m about to repeat something I wrote last year, because nothing has really changed in twelve months. It’s simply intensified. The comfortable have become more comfortable, the precarious more precarious.

What I wrote was:

I have had on my mind: ACC, and the concept of extending it to Health; a Universal Basic Income; workplace bargaining reforms and where the hell we might be going and how we share the wealth, and how we share the risks and how we make the prospects decent for everybody.

And then I shared some writing I'd done about, one about today’s workplace and another about how we might adapt to the future of work. If you didn't see them then, I offer them now for your consideration.

Where we are, where we might be headed.

But if you’d prefer to just jump right to the punchline, it’s this. I propose we make remake our economy by providing Universal Basic Services.

As the types of jobs change profoundly and bring inevitable dislocation, could a Universal Basic Income assure people of a more liveable transition towards something better? Maybe yes, maybe not. The concept is deeply appealing, but the funding of it presents no small challenge. It has been said that an affordable UBI is inadequate, and an adequate UBI is unaffordable. 

Maybe a better answer is this:  Finland not so long ago conducted a universal basic income trial and concluded that maybe a better idea would be to go instead for universal basic services, that is to say: making more and more things free. Healthcare and education are obvious examples, but you could also go much further: transport, housing, food, broadband– everyday essentials made available to all.

You would treat all these things as vital infrastructure and fund them accordingly, the way we do today with roads and drainage but extended to other vital needs: an e-bike, an e-car, a place to live. We’ve actually done this before with state housing, we still somewhat do it, but arguably insufficiently, given that year upon year house affordability becomes ever poorer. What if the state were to adequately provide free or subsidised housing, such that market  demand is fully met and the market levels itself out to some kind of non-maniacial equilibrium?

One by one, these things could become free as part of a clean-tech transformation: generating  wind and solar and hydro and storing it in abundance, putting home power generation tools into every household, lighting up vehicle charging networks and car-sharing schemes. There's also the possibility of the circular economy: you make a thing well, you use it, you share it, you reuse it, your neighbourhood has a library of tools to share, the concept of endless wasteful consumption becomes a toxic landfill memory.

Must our society, our democracy, our late-capitalist waking nightmare, be forever arranged in the way it is? Or could there be better options?

David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity - the intriguing work I mentioned as my summer holiday reading - offers so much to see with fresh eyes. I want to offer just fragments for now. It’s rich, and a little goes a long way.

They are not emphatic in this work, they are simply proposing the possibility that much of what we have assumed about history and progress could be wholly mistaken.

These are tentative propositions, developed through interpretations of fragments of history and archaeological discovery. But they offer fresh conceptions of worlds long gone.

The prevailing view of human history holds that it has followed an upward arc of accomplishment and accumulated knowledge culminating in the enlightenment and the ascendancy of Western culture and democracy and the state of things today in a capitalist liberal democracy as the most desirable, most propitious arrangement of human affairs.

Who ever accomplished more than mankind has done in the past century, one might ask, what arrangement of society but ours could have put an Apollo mission into space and split the atom?

Seen in that way, the scale of our accomplishments implies our model of society to be surely the One True Way.

But The Dawn of Everything offers a more complex picture, one of other societies long gone that may have been more harmonious, more inclusive, more rewarding, ones that found other better ways of living, other ways to share power, other ways to share the fruits of their toil, societies that may be gone now but nonetheless flourished. They offer models for us, suggest other choices.

Free stuff for everybody? Entirely remake our society?

I’m dreaming right? You can't even get showerhead nozzles changed without being dragged into a culture war.

It’s surely worth asking the questions, though. The way we are right now is just lovely for many well-established and secure people, and not remotely so for people too near the edge of the bed for the blanket to reach.

Traditionally a Labour government was most concerned with those who were most precarious and the least comfortable.

You wouldn't want them to get too comfortable in the warm middle and forgetting about the ones on the edge.