End Inequality
End inequality of wealth, housing and income security.
What Must Be Done
- Ensure all those affected by the major changes outlined here are supported fairly through the transition to new activities with no loss of basic security.
- Guarantee universal access to a minimum income and basic free services, including health care, education, public transport, energy, internet access.
- Guarantee universal access to safe secure affordable housing, e.g. through state/public building programmes, appropriate taxation, stronger protection for renters etc.
- Ensure equity through a progressive income and wealth tax system that taxes the richest to ensure income security for all.
Why
To reduce emissions fast the government must stop coal, oil and gas production, end intensive dairying, and bring in energy rationing for all individuals and organisations.
Such measures will never be accepted unless everyone can see that the pain is spread fairly, that they will still be able to feed and house their family and that there is a fair pathway through this emergency.
We don’t yet have that consensus, even for a public health emergency like Covid, as the Freedom Camp at Parliament showed. Forty years of deregulated, competitive neoliberalism has produced a massive and steadily growing gap between the haves and have-nots in our society. A sizable proportion of the population now have little stake in the status quo, and are disengaged and distrustful of anyone connected to ‘the system’.
NZ’s Freedom Camp, the rise of alt-right populism and fascism in USA and Europe, and European history of the 1930s – all show how easily such extreme and polarising movements emerge when people are angry and hurting and cannot see any other collective pathway forward.
We are putting this Pathway to Survival forward as such an alternative collective pathway.
We cannot tackle these converging crises unless we do it together, with no one left behind.
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Comments, reactions or suggestions you are willing to add to this public thread would be greatly appreciated…
Is Degrowth Aotearoa NZ part of Pathway to Survival? Both very good initiatives. So many people with similar ideas now…and ‘doing it together’ will indeed be key, especially with regard to influencing public policy at national level.
I agree! Private ownership and property accumulation definitely underly the crises we face. I believe though, that transformations as envisaged under the ‘Tiriti Justice and Co-Governance’ tab could enable re-establishment of ‘common wealth’. Property/Assets, not owned by individuals, but administered by processes worked out collectively, to sustain the well-being of the whole; animals, atmosphere, water, humans – the whole amazing biosphere. Hopefully rebalancing for survival rather than creating inequities, once the heirarchy has been broken down 🙂 PS. That is if we humans last long enough to wean ourselves off blind selfish consumption..
To actually address inequality we’d need to address ownership. It’s not that ownership alone creates inequality but it enables the conditions which create it. Private ownership in the workplace creates hierarchies and worker subservience to managers and owners. Private ownership at work allows capitalists to accumulate wealth off the labour of subservient workers. Until we address the hierarchy enabled by private ownership of the workplace we’ll never reach equity, only the constant ebb and flow of never ending wage disputes which we currently have. Only when ownership and income are shared can we really achieve economic equity.
The housing crisis has been enabled through the economic divide created by private ownership in the workplace. As soon as you have the economic conditions which allow for the accumulation of individual wealth – capitalism, the capitalist class can use their economic advantage over workers to accumulate property. Property accumulation then becomes a passive income for owners, especially in the absence of a CGT, allowing for those with multiple properties to accumulate further wealth and further entrench inequality.
We’ll never get to equity until we address these issues. The ability to own multiple numbers of properties shouldn’t be a thing that even exists. Housing is a basic human right.
So is not having to sell your labour on an open market and be forced to be subservient to the whims of a boss who is somehow socially superior enough to dictate how you do so.
For equity to be achieved it first needs to confront and dismantle the institutions which enable both social and economic hierarchy
…decolonisation and mana motuhake would add a bit of complexity to this I guess also as unwinding each could possibly create necessary inequity’s…
There’s good stuff happening on the West Coast currently with Te Puwai Co-operative Society acting as an incubator and support for worker and other co-operatives. We need more organising like this!