We Need Universal Basic Services to Rebuild Our Fractured Society

The centre-left will fail to deliver for working-class people if it doesn't embrace universal basic services. We can only tackle the housing, inflation and inequality crises by decommodifying and guaranteeing the essentials of life for all. The Sixth Labour government has failed to grasp this, leaving them floundering without answers to the issues they campaigned on addressing. This is because despite the apparent failures of the neoliberal experiment, the Labour government, particularly the Minister of Finance Grant Robertson, remains wedded to the idea that the market should be embedded in all aspects of our lives. This idea means the government shirks its responsibility to provide the basics of life for all; instead, we are left to compete in a privatised, competitive marketplace for the necessities of life. This is neoliberalism's real legacy. Our public services were dismantled and sold off for parts so the rich could get richer; the public services that do remain are mainly inaccessible by design through means-testing, fees, and generational underinvestment.

This is not a sustainable way to organise society or deliver essential services. Despite this, the centre-left continues to cling to the myth that funding universal basic services would be wasteful and unpopular and that communities are better served by "efficient" and "targeted" government spending. What that translates to is that the centre-left wants to tinker at the margins to try and lessen the worst impacts of market forces. Still, they don't want to confront the elephant in the room that the commodification of essential services has been a failure. We have decades of experience that demonstrates how privatisation and inaccessible/underinvested in public services have resulted in rising wealth inequality, an explosion in poverty, environmental degradation and social polarisation.

The housing crisis is an excellent example of what happens when a basic necessity of life, a roof over your head, is treated as a financial commodity. The consequences couldn't be starker; most of us are losers in this equation facing unprecedented housing insecurity and precarity, all so an incredibly wealthy small real estate investor class benefit. We have to fight for an alternative: universal basic services. What this means in practical terms is that the necessities of life, these basic goods and services, are brought under public ownership and universally available to all for free at point of access.

This is not far-fetched; it is pragmatic and urgent. It is a fundamental principle that the centre-left must return to if it wants to be transformative and re-build our society. The piecemeal, stitched-together public services we currently have are designed to be a hostile labyrinth. It is an expensive bureaucratic nightmare that makes it difficult for the most vulnerable to access assistance when they need it, even though targeted and efficient spending is supposed to ensure the opposite. In addition to this, the reliance on means-testing and targeted spending to drive down costs create social backlash and polarisation. Those struggling just over the arbitrary thresholds and means-testing set by faceless accountants in Wellington are basically told their struggles are not valid; what else does this achieve if not hostility and anger towards the government and the marginalised.

The only benefactor of a cruel system like this is the wealthy, whose wealth is left untaxed and untouched by the state. That's the point of the over-emphasis on the government's budget and spending and the generational underinvestment and inaccessibility of public services. It ensures the wealthy don't have to pay their fair share. If the government increases its spending, all of the wealth currently being accumulated by the already obscenely wealthy might have to be redistributed to our communities, and we couldn't have that, could we? I don't think we should give them a choice. The truth is, though, that there is more than enough wealth in this country to fund Universal Basic Services for all. Go for a drive in Remuera or Parnell, maybe a road trip to Queenstown, the excess of the ultra-wealthy is there on display. It seems to me they have more than enough; it is time to share. Don't give an inch demand Universal Basic Services and nothing less.

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