Welcome to the end of neoliberalism: privatisation

I’m not really sure what to say about this. What else is there?

But I think it needs to be acknowledged, and acknowledged angrily and loudly: the end goal of neoliberalism was always privatisation, and National seem to think New Zealand is ready for it right now. After three decades of starving the public service of funds and crowing about our debt limit while it remains one of the lowest in the OECD (53% compared to the 120% average), National and ACT have decided now is time to pull the drapery off the Margaret Thatcher statue and reveal that Rogernomics really was everything it was accused of being: an excuse to put state assets and cash into the hands of private enterprises so they can profit off the populace.

Our frankly impressive fiscal balance.

Neoliberalism ends in one of two ways: either with the private sector achieving a total stranglehold on what used to be government-run services, or with the country wresting back its essential infrastructure from people who want to charge us for things we paid to build.

New Zealand has a relatively high opinion of our public service. Even our esteem of the judiciary, notably low in comparison to other facets of government, sits well above the OECD average. Our administration is similarly viewed, and education is only just below the average, while healthcare is much lower (and soon to plummet into the depths).

But that’s okay, Luxon’s working very hard to undo that excellent satisfaction with our administration by firing our staff, making the remaining ones hate being there, not giving services anywhere near enough money to function, and privatising the hell out of anything he can possibly make the state pay for while channeling funds into his mates’ pockets.

We are only following the trajectory of the UK, who’s collapsing NHS is the visionary system National are driving us towards.

In 2012, the Tory party passed the Health and Care Act which removed responsibility for the government to provide healthcare to all. This would be the death spiral of the NHS.

In 1948, it was launched as a service that was available to every man, woman and child in the UK, free at point of use and covering all health needs, including dentistry. It was described to the UK as not an insurance scheme, not a charity, but a service that users have already paid for: “You are all paying for it, mainly as tax payers, and it will relieve your money worries in time of illness.”

For fifty years, it served this purpose admirably. But neoliberalism, introduced to the UK as Thatcherism in the 70’s, hates taxes. Taxes mean services are being provided at cost to the public, without profits going to private companies, across all industries the government put their nose in (usually essential ones to society and life).

Social housing means less landlords like Luxon to charge private tenants (and the state, via subsidies like the accommodation supplement). Public education means parents aren’t having to pay for private schooling, and the government funds it within their own budget with little money spilling over into the private sector (thank God Seymour is introducing charter schools to funnel taxpayer money into organisations like Destiny Church, who have been hanging out for that taxpayer mullah since the last time he tried to launch it). Public roads, water, electricity, transport all have the same issue of just not costing the public enough excess money. Thats why public private partnerships have become the buzzword for all our remaining state-owned industries; the populace have become too wise to the consequences of selling off entire sectors like electricity generation at massive discounts for wealthy shareholders to profit off, and so a new scheme must be launched: pretending we’re broke and need cofunders.

Economists must be sick of hearing their own voice at this point. I know I am. Never has there been more insistence from the government that our economy is in crisis while the people who are usually responsible for judging such things scratch their heads and say, “…What??”

Relying on consumers to be feeling the pinch from inflation (that we are facing specifically because of efforts that have kept New Zealand in a strong financial situation), Luxon & co have hammered the message home that we are flat broke and need private finance to bail us out, while bond-buyers basically beg us to let them lend us the money to see us out of infrastructure crisis that has been caused by neoliberalism’s philosophical under-investment in public services.

I can only assume this is why the government has begun lying about everything they possibly can get away with (and a few things they definitely can’t): the more their opponents accuse them of perpetuating mistruths and false realities, the more such criticism becomes just background noise. And what a noisy time we are living in, with such discourses deeply gripping the US.

If you need an example of how neoliberalism works, look no further than Luxon’s mandate workers return to offices. Without money spilling into private businesses, it becomes the governments job to artificially make this happen, at the cost of the people who are actually paying for it. Thats us, and other individual citizens like us who make average wages and deserve have their needs met like food and transport without having to struggle afford the mortgage neoliberalists have also artificially inflated via manipulation of market forces.

The 2012 change to UK healthcare allowed the NHS to contract services out to private providers, (a thing the New Zealand Health System has been doing for some time) as well as charging migrants for healthcare use, selling patient data, and sending patients to private hospitals.

Aotearoa has in fact quietly been in step with this to an alarming extent: I know that in Christchurch, for example, we have stopped buying radiology equipment, so now a huge amount of scans are sent to private clinics who have invested in that machinery and are now making bank off efforts to reduce the public waiting lists that are naturally growing due to lack of capacity. I recently had a lovely lung scan that must have cost the taxpayer a fortune — you can bet you all paid for the fantastic service I received.

But I’d take grumpy nurses and long appointments any day over knowing that I was participating in a pipeline that was actively contributing to the collapse of public health.

This is a snowball. Though not so much in health, which was better protected, in many other ways the UK are ahead of us in their pathway to privatisation; neoliberalism there had a good decade headstart thanks to Thatcher. But even in healthcare, where legislative protections prevented serious headway for some time, small charges were slowly added from the 80s up, like parking, catering and portering.

In the five years to 2015 the private sector was awarded the following:

• 86% pharmacy contracts

• 83% patient transport contracts

• 76% diagnostics contracts

• 69% GP out of hours

• 45% community health contracts including children and AWLD

• 25% mental health contracts

New Zealand already has a system that farms out such services. Given that, and given the speed this collation are proceeding at across every industry, we can expect New Zealand’s privatisation to occur much faster.

Enjoy your vision of the future: a fucking expensive one.