The Rich Get Richer
When I watched TV3’s Thursday night “Inside New Zealand” documentary I was delighted, but saddened anew, to find that the subject – “Mind the Gap: A special Report on Inequality” – brought out some of the same issues I’ve raised in my blogs about the rich getting richer and the poor getting worse off in New Zealand.
The doco’ blamed it all on neo-liberal concepts of government that have involved privatisation and deregulation which have failed our country over thirty years.
Columnist Jane Bowron (Dominion Post August 31, 2013) reviewed the doco’ and lamented: “The sickening unfairness and failure to bring [rich] tax evaders to justice would have had many tax-burdened [middle-class] viewers throwing their dinner scraps at the screen.” The poor would doubtless have a better use for their scraps.
Only a “crippling apathy” among the poor and middle class, Jane Bowron says, has prevented a change to “the rotten status quo”.
What will give way first? The greed of the rich, the forbearance of the middle-class, or the patience of the poor? For the sake of New Zealand it had better be the first. We have to tackle poverty and social injustice now.
The doco’ blamed it all on neo-liberal concepts of government that have involved privatisation and deregulation which have failed our country over thirty years.
Columnist Jane Bowron (Dominion Post August 31, 2013) reviewed the doco’ and lamented: “The sickening unfairness and failure to bring [rich] tax evaders to justice would have had many tax-burdened [middle-class] viewers throwing their dinner scraps at the screen.” The poor would doubtless have a better use for their scraps.
Only a “crippling apathy” among the poor and middle class, Jane Bowron says, has prevented a change to “the rotten status quo”.
What will give way first? The greed of the rich, the forbearance of the middle-class, or the patience of the poor? For the sake of New Zealand it had better be the first. We have to tackle poverty and social injustice now.
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