When Prime Minister Chris Luxon talks about Jobseeker cuts, he has a clear picture in his mind. A teenage waster is lying on the couch taking us all for a ride.
That’s it, that’s the policy setting.
We know he lacks the capacity to imagine any other outcome or other circumstance, because he reminds us every day how pedestrian and vanilla and unimaginative a view he has of the world. He’s normie to the core.
In this picture in his mind, can he possibly see a teenager who is disabled? Sick? In severe mental ill health? He cannot, not even when Chlöe Swarbrick paints the picture for him in parliament using those exact words
Oh, he breezes, when you go on a Jobseeker benefit, you’re deemed able and capable of working.
Everything in his mind is simple; everything is cut and dried.
In the actual world where the Jobseeker system is administered there are yes but also and also maybe layers of qualification. These cuts they’re making will indeed apply to young beneficiaries with a health condition or disability who have had to stop work for a period of time or reduce their hours.
Oh, he breezes on, they need to go where the work is, they need to go fruit picking, the orchardists are crying out for people.
Oh really? say the orchardists
Oh really? says everyone who reads the stories about an Ikea opening and getting flooded with job applications, who read about the precious few jobs, and huge competition in a tight labour market, who read about the underemployment of everyone who does have some work but is wanting more.
Our joke Prime Minister just looks right past all of it.
Why the disconnect? Because this is a man of advertising and spin and marketing and mental candyfloss. You can take the plodder out of the marketing department but you can’t take the marketing department out of the plodder.
This is the essential reason this government is so woefully bad, such an abject failure. This is the essential reason our nation’s economy is cruising, still, at 30,000 feet but appears to be at best only gliding: They’re all marketing and no policy. All soundbite and no substance.
Friends who spend time in Wellington talking with cabinet ministers say they will expressly ask you for wins in marketing not in policy or action. They are expressly asking for something that will get them a headline on One News.
These are not serious people; these are headline chasers and bumpersticker thinkers. Anything that you might call policy is rebaked old thinking.
There’s an abundance of fresh thinking and 21st century policy possibilities on offer to us, to make our country something really exciting and special. There’s even a wall of international investment money ready to back it.
But these people just want to reheat old gruel.
