www.geocities.com/nzwomen/AnneElse/200108SundaySuppl.html
Sunday Supplement
Radio New Zealand
August 2001
script © Anne Else
The news item wasn’t tiny, but it was buried well at the back of the paper, squashed between ads for food and chairs. A disabled Wellington man was threatened with having his power cut off. He had arranged to pay a regular amount each month, on the understanding that higher bills in winter would be offset by lower bills in summer. He appreciated this, because he has to run a dehumidifier for his asthma.
Suddenly he got a letter telling him that if he didn’t pay what he owed immediately, he would be cut off. There was a new policy. Customers who used the direct debit system were expected to pay any outstanding amounts by the due date. There would be no negotiation of accounts in arrears. This disabled man would be shown no leniency, said a spokesman. However, the company would give customers notice of arrangements it now wanted to terminate. That’s really big of them.
The company was FreshStart. It is privately owned by Todd Energy. The Todd family is the richest family in New Zealand. Thanks to Max Bradford’s electricity reforms, their empire was able to enter the electricity supply business.
There’s something pretty repulsive about this episode. Here are Todd Energy’s employees standing over a member of the poorest group in the country, someone with no prospects of a better life, demanding that he cough up, so to speak, for having inadvertently broken their rules and used too much of a vital necessity.
But it’s also a clue, I think, to what really lies beneath a problem that has been widely talked about recently. New Zealanders just don’t have what it takes, we are told. They don’t care enough about working hard at their jobs. They aren’t out there riding the knowledge wave. They invest too much in houses and not enough in business. And strangely, they just don’t look up to and admire the rich.
I see it a little differently. Perhaps New Zealanders are just sick and tired of being lied to and ripped off. Electricity is a good example. We were told that the electricity reforms would mean cheaper electricity. Instead it’s grown steadily more expensive – particularly for those who use the least. We were told that if we were unhappy we would be able to shop around for a better deal, and that would keep suppliers up to the mark.
Instead we find that it takes months of effort and frustration to change suppliers; the prices go up anyway; and then suppliers either refuse to take new customers, or sell their existing ones to someone else.
Ordinary people, the ones who are constantly berated for not saving enough or working hard enough, have been expected to put up with an awful lot of pain over the last fifteen years or so. We were repeatedly told that it was necessary for the sake of the economy. Now we are told that the economy is such a basket case, we are in danger of falling out of the OECD. The only way to avoid this awful fate is – you guessed it – to make yet more sacrifices for the economy, from cutting off benefits to abandoning the provinces.
Yet the facts show that ordinary people have done more than enough already. A new study from the Social Policy Unit shows that in 1998 dollar terms, household incomes fell through the 1980s to reach a low point between 1992 and 1994. They have recovered a bit since then, but they’re still below their levels in 1988. Incomes for households with children and dependent young people – New Zealand’s future – cluster in the bottom 40 percent. The only group to make substantial gains between 1988 and 1998 was the top 10 percent. Their mean household income rose by 36 percent. Could this extraordinary and unprecedented income shift have something to do with our economic woes?
We have responded valiantly to calls to cut electricity use. After all, it’ll cut down on our power bills. But somehow I can’t see a surge of popular enthusiasm for the latest calls to tighten belts and belt beneficiaries. Going by recent experience, in another ten years the Todd families of this world will turn out to be the only ones better off.
Anne Else
Honorary Research Associate in Women's Studies
Victoria University of Wellington
email [email protected]