The crisis deepens under a Tory government
Many think the 2026 Aotearoa election is a chance to throw out the most right-wing government we have had since the early 1990s. The deeply pro-business National-ACT-NZ First coalition government has been brutal to workers and unions. Life has got tougher and tougher. Wages or benefits don’t keep up with rising prices. The OECD has estimated real wages have been cut by 6.4% since 2021. This is the worst of any OECD country. Tens of thousands have lost their jobs. The government has deepened the recession by massive cuts to government spending.
The government has also introduced a slew of anti-union and anti-worker legislation by repealing pay equity, cutting health and safety requirements, enabling bosses to deduct full pay during a partial strike like a go-slow, enabling bosses to fire at will new workers within 90 days, reducing sick leave for part-time workers, attempted to stop the bogus ‘self-employed’ like Uber drivers from being classified as workers, and more. It has also attacked Māori, transgender people, and more.
Their overall strategy has been to place the main burden of the current crisis in capitalism on workers, while freeing up business. The government has done everything requested of it from capitalists to cut red tape on business – by slashing ‘protections’ for workers, environmental protections, allowing fast track development, and cutting regulations through the Regulatory Standards Act.
Under right-wing neoliberal theory cuts should produce growth and jobs. Of course it has not. Everybody, following the government’s lead, is cutting costs as the slump deepens. We are in a major economic crisis the likes we haven’t seen since the early 1990s with falling profits, the bursting of the speculative housing market bubble, and stagflation (inflation plus low growth).
Vote Labour?
So we should vote Labour or Greens, right? They won’t be much better. The Labour Party remains a party run by lawyers and technocrats that is mainly for well-paid white-collar workers. It remains committed to managing neoliberal capitalism: having a small government with little debt that does not scare business, except with a few of its rough edges taken away with things like free medicine prescriptions and public transport subsidies.
The Greens are not much better – they just want a green, electrified capitalism and a weak updated version of old fashioned social democracy with a bit more attention played to the environment, Māori, poverty, inequality and unions, while leaving the structures of power largely untouched. They lack enough support to even enact those policies. Both parties want a respectable, professionalised party that works within the capitalist parliament, and neither party genuinely want power for the working-class.
Most unions in Aotearoa remain tied to the Labour Party. Despite unions these days claiming to be ‘organising’ and ‘campaigning’ unions, their main strategy is actually to lobby Labour politicians for law changes that mainly benefit union bureaucracies, or to campaign to vote for Labour in election year like now. This is disempowering. It is genuine grassroots and flaxroots union organising and agitation, based on direct action, that quickly gets wins against bosses, and builds up confidence and leads to grassroots and flaxroots change.
We need systemic change, not a new government
We are currently in a major capitalist crisis globally, as evident in wars, the cost of living crisis, AI threatening even more unemployment, and deepening class and racist inequalities. There is a climate crisis too, leading to damaging weather, mass migration, and further inequality. As the system is becoming more unstable as it is simply not working for the vast majority.
Yet all elections and political parties offer is technocratic tinkering with the status quo.
To deal with these multiple crises, we need radical, systemic change. Not a few reforms. Loans for rooftop solar panels won’t avert the climate crisis nor the cost of living crisis. The parliamentary system, or political parties seeking government power, will never really address these crises because power does not fundamentally lie in the government.
Power largely lies in capital – especially in the wealth created by millions of wage slaves and unwaged slaves toiling away in workplaces, communities, and homes. The entire system needs to be changed based on workers collectively owning, controlling, and distributing wealth according to need within environmental limits.
What capitalism fears the most is not electing a ‘left-wing’ Labour-Greens-Te Pāti Māori government, but widespread, effective, and coordinated workers’ resistance at work. Without our toil, capitalism would stop. That’s one major reason why the IWW promotes direct action by workers, rather than supporting the indirect action of electing parliamentary representatives who can do little to change a system which is largely built against workers.