Will you look at that. The National-led coalition and their media cheerleaders, popping champagne because New Zealand’s unemployment rate (currently languishing at a grim 5.1%) hasn’t quite fully spiralled into the abyss they’ve been digging.
Bravo, you absolute legends of mediocrity! The mainstream media, ever the loyal lapdogs, are fawning over this “stability” like it’s some grand economic triumph, while conveniently ignoring the wreckage caused by this government’s boneheaded policies.
Under Christopher Luxon’s reign, the coalition of chaos has been slashing and burning with the glee of a pyromaniac with a can of petrol at a house fire. Their crowning achievement? Sacking thousands of public sector workers like they’re clearing out last season’s wardrobe. Over 15,000 public servants are reportedly at risk, with cuts already gutting essential services like health and education. Because who needs nurses, teachers, or functioning hospitals when you’ve got tax cuts for landlords? The result: unemployment has climbed steadily from a low of 3.2% in 2021 to its current sorry state, with forecasts predicting it could hit 5.4% by late 2025.
Then there’s the genius move of halting state house builds. In a country screaming for affordable housing, the coalition decided to slam the brakes on hundreds of school building projects and mothball thousands of social housing initiatives to “save” a few billion dollars. Never mind that this exacerbates the housing crisis, leaving families on the streets and construction workers jobless. It’s almost as if they want people to suffer to keep the “reserve army of workers” ready for their corporate mates to exploit. After all, high unemployment keeps a desperate workforce too scared to demand better wages.
And yet, the right-wing propagandists are out there penning love letters to Luxon’s economic “prudence.” They’re practically doing cartwheels because the unemployment rate hasn’t worsened this quarter, ignoring the fact that it is already terribly high. How low is the bar when maintaining a jobless rate that’s crushing Kiwi families is cause for celebration? This is the same media that parrots the coalition’s line about “growing the economy” while ignoring the human cost: Māori and Pacific Islanders facing disproportionately high unemployment, and migrant workers trapped in exploitative conditions.
The coalition’s austerity fetish, cheered on by their media sycophants, is a deliberate attack on the working class. Slashing welfare, imposing punitive “work tests,” and indexing benefits to inflation instead of wages, policies straight out of ACT’s libertarian script that nobody voted for, are designed to grind workers down. Meanwhile, the media spins this as “fiscal responsibility,” as if Kiwis losing their livelihoods is just collateral damage for a balanced budget.
So, congratulations, National and your media fan club, for keeping unemployment “steady” at soul-crushing levels. Truly, you’re the heroes we don’t deserve. Maybe next you’ll throw a party for not setting the entire country on fire. Until then, spare us the self-congratulation and start bloody fixing the mess you’ve created.
