Austerity

• Regardless of the election result, a form of austerity was always going to win.
• While National and Labour both offered targeted support for those struggling to get by, such as tax cuts (National) or the removal of GST from fruit and vegetables (Labour), such mitigation seems paltry by comparison.

Radical incrementalism?

• Many contend Labour has abandoned the free-market fundamentalism associated with “Rogernomics” that it adopted in the 1980s.
• Under the Labour governments led by Jacinda Ardern and then Chris Hipkins, there was an attempt to ameliorate the worst excesses of market capitalism.
• Hipkins, for instance, insisted Labour’s policies were not simply about “tinkering around the edges of the neoliberal model”.

The ‘third way’

• A rough scholarly consensus has emerged that neoliberalism has shown a remarkable ability to evolve.
• Labour – and to some extent National – have rejected the harsh “vanguard neoliberalism” of the 1980s and ‘90s.
• For example, the Labour government’s COVID business support and wage subsidy scheme was supposedly undertaken to protect workers from unemployment.
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Intervention for the market

• In this sense, the various palliative reforms made by the Ardern-Hipkins governments do not represent a fundamental swing away from neoliberalism.
• She said Labour accepted the need for government intervention in the market.
• Rather, at its core, it is about imposing a global and state framework that favours business and private property.

The underlying consensus

• National is more business-friendly and seems poised to make deeper cuts to public services.
• To differing degrees, National and its probable coalition partner ACT reject the “progressive” aspects of what feminist scholar Nancy Fraser called “progressive neoliberalism”.
• But beneath those apparent ideological differences there remains an underlying neoliberal consensus.
• This is especially so with the election success of parties promising to reduce government spending.

• Notably, former chancellor George Osborne claimed that austerity had a “positive” effect on the UK’s ability to withstand the pandemic.
• Our reading of the evidence is that the austerity policies initiated after 2010 weakened the UK, allowing COVID to do more damage than it otherwise might have.
• Austerity measures seek to reduce government deficits, usually through a mix of public spending cuts and increased taxation.
• While there’s continued disagreement about whether these measures really help the economy, the evidence is clear that austerity in the UK has been bad for health.
• Osborne’s 2010 austerity budget cut billions from public and welfare spending.
• One recent analysis estimated that austerity policies pursued between 2010 and 2019 were associated with £540 billion less public spending.

Preparing for the next crisis

• Austerity policies shred the safety nets that those most economically vulnerable would otherwise depend on.
• Then, when people fall ill, these measures weaken the ability of health services to care for them.
• One of the best things we can do to prepare for future pandemics is to avoid a return to austerity.

• So even where vaccine rollouts are slow and lockdowns are still in place, IT budgets are going up.
• A full three- quarters of companies are planning IT operational budget increases, with only 16% planning budget cuts.
• "Of course, fighting inflation beats fighting the pandemic," said David Wagner, senior research director at Computer Economics, a service of Avasant Research, based in Los Angeles.
• The study provides IT spending and staffing benchmarks for small, midsize, and large organizations and for 28 sectors and sub-sectors.

• In the neutral language of accounting, it highlights that there is no actual plan to fund needed health care services in the Ford governments budget.
• They make clear that, in the Ford governments plans, the LTC commitments cannot be met without starving other vital parts of health care.
• The Health Coalition calls for the Ford government to drop its plans to return to austerity budgets for health care post-pandemic.
• The indisputable evidence is that Ontario has a severe health human resources and capacity crisis across hospitals, long-term care, home and community care.