A Fair NZ - what a “decent country” would actually look like

How do policy settings affect the most vulnerable?

1. The Problem Statement

I grew up in a New Zealand that liked to tell itself a particular story.

We were the “fair go” country. Not perfect, but basically decent. Nobody got too rich without someone taking the mickey. Nobody was left too far behind, because “we look after our own”.

At 64, after decades in and around boardrooms, workshops, lunchrooms and WINZ queues, I’m not so sure the story matches the footage.

On paper, we’re a wealthy, stable country. In practice, some people live in a very different New Zealand to the one we keep talking about. In their version, the month is longer than the money. The rent turns up like clockwork and the pay doesn’t. The car WOF is a crisis, not an errand.

The problem is not that we have rich people and poor people. Every country does. The problem is that our rules – tax, welfare, housing, health, education – still let people fall a very long way before anyone notices they’ve hit the floor.

That’s what this series is about: not point-scoring, but an honest look at how our policy settings land in real lives, and what a “decent country” would actually feel like if we meant it.

2. The Conditions On The Ground

A few weeks ago, I left a client’s office after a tidy session about margins, debt covenants and growth plans. Good people, trying to do sensible things. The board papers were full of graphs and forecasts, written in that careful, tidy language we use when we want banks and shareholders to sleep at night.

On the way home I stopped at the supermarket.

In front of me at the checkout was a woman in a hi-viz vest, buying a small basket of very ordinary food. No treats. No brand names. The eftpos machine beeped, declined. She took out a loaf of bread and tried again. Declined. She stood there for a moment, shoulders tightening, and then quietly asked the checkout operator to cancel the lot.

The same day, my client’s management team were discussing “labour availability” and “wage pressure” in completely abstract terms.

This is how the country feels from the middle seat. You see both films in the same afternoon. In one, we’re managing EBITDA, optimising tax, tightening spend. In the other, someone with a job can’t buy groceries.

None of this is an accident. It’s the downstream effect of decisions made in Wellington, over many years, by governments of different colours. Tax choices, welfare rules, housing settings, school funding, health priorities. Each tweak seems small in isolation. At the checkout, they all arrive at once.

3. The Current Government Choices

To be fair, no government wakes up in the morning and says, “How can we make life worse for people on the edge today?”

They talk about balancing the books, restoring confidence, rewarding effort, protecting the vulnerable. This one is no different.

On the big dials – tax, spending, welfare, housing – the current settings lean towards tightening the government belt, giving earners a bit more back in their pay packets, and putting more emphasis on “getting people off benefits and into work”. There are still commitments to reducing child poverty and building more social housing, but they compete against pressures to cut costs and show short-term results.

From a Treasury briefing note, these all sound perfectly reasonable. Encouraging work. Rewarding effort. Focusing on “those most in need”. If you read only the press releases, you’d think we were well on our way to being the Scandinavian South Pacific.

But the test for any government choice isn’t the slogan. It’s how it feels to the person at the supermarket checkout who has already taken the bread out of the basket.

4. The Alternate Choices

There are always other paths we could take. They are not costless or easy, but they exist.

We could decide, as a country, that nobody in paid work should be in material hardship, and adjust tax thresholds, wage floors and benefit abatement rules until that’s actually true.

We could decide that the bottom 20 percent of households get the first claim on any spare fiscal room, not the last. That when there’s enough in the pot for tax cuts or benefit increases, we tilt towards the people with the least buffer, even if they’re not the ones who write opinion pieces.

We could treat secure, warm housing as infrastructure – like roads or power lines – and invest with that same long-term seriousness, instead of hoping the private market will quietly sort it out.

We could also decide that any major policy change has to pass a simple test: “Have we checked how this will land on the person with the least power in this system?” Not as a slogan, but as a line item.

None of this would make us a utopia. It would just make the landing gentler when life goes sideways.

5. Why It Is So Confusing

One of the reasons people give up trying to follow politics is that the story keeps changing depending on who’s talking.

One day, a minister tells you inflation is easing, wages are up, and tax relief is on the way. The next, your power bill jumps, the rent climbs again, and the school sends a note home about unpaid fees.

Commentators argue about whether child poverty is up, down or flat depending on which measure they favour. Some say we’re spending too much; others say we’re not spending nearly enough, just in the wrong places. Numbers are plucked from different reports like cherries off a tree.

If you’re running a small business, you don’t have time to read the full reports. You just know that your wage costs are up, your staff are stretched, your customers are cautious and your own mortgage renewal email has a few zeroes in the wrong place.

So people retreat into tribes. “My team good, your team bad.” Meanwhile, the woman in hi-viz still can’t buy her groceries.

The confusion is not a personal failing. It’s built into a system that talks about people as “cohorts” and “segments”, and rarely admits that every policy setting hurts someone, somewhere.

6. What SME Owners Should Be Considering

From the middle seat, SME owners are in an awkward but powerful position.

You see policy from both sides. You send PAYE and GST and provisional tax off into the ether, and you watch the stress levels of your staff rise and fall with interest rates, food prices and school holidays.

You can’t control the official cash rate, but you can ask yourself some uncomfortable questions:

Who in my business is closest to the edge if something goes wrong?

If rents rise again, or the supermarket creeps up another ten percent, who has absolutely no wriggle room?

If government decides to tighten welfare rules or cut a support programme, which of my people quietly lose their backstop?

It is tempting, especially when your own numbers are tight, to treat all of that as “not my problem”. But if there’s one thing the last few years have taught us, it’s that staff living permanently on the brink is, sooner or later, very much your problem.

People living in chronic stress don’t make great decisions. They get sick more often. They make more mistakes. They leave abruptly. That isn’t a character flaw; it’s physics.

7. How To Make Decisions About The Future

When I sit down with owners at RegenerationHQ, I often pull things back to a very simple frame for decision-making.

First, assume that volatility is the new normal. Costs will keep wobbling. Policy will shift. Governments will come and go.

Second, picture two or three real people in your business who carry the least power and the most risk: the part-time worker with kids, the sole earner on the factory floor, the older staff member caring for a partner.

Then ask, “If I go ahead with this decision – this roster change, this pricing move, this restructure – what happens to them if the wider environment gets ten percent worse?”

If the answer is, “They fall off a cliff,” then it might be worth rethinking. If the answer is, “It will be hard, but survivable,” then you’re probably in the zone where decency and commercial reality overlap.

None of us can see three years ahead. But we can make decisions that don’t assume the most fragile people in the system will magically cope.

8. What A Decent Society Looks Like

In a decent society, the woman in hi-viz at the supermarket doesn’t have to put the bread back.

She may still be on a tight budget. She may still think carefully about every dollar. But the system – tax, wages, welfare, housing, health – does not conspire to tip her into humiliation at the checkout.

In a decent society, a run of bad luck doesn’t mean the kids change schools three times in two years, or mum goes without her medication so the power stays on. The rules recognise that human beings are not spreadsheets and build in some mercy.

For those of us in business, a decent society looks like staff who can focus on the job because the rest of life is not constantly on fire. Customers who can afford what we sell without choosing between dinner and the invoice. Communities where people still volunteer, coach sport, and turn up to local events because they’ve got just enough bandwidth left over to care.

That is not soft-headed idealism. It’s the foundation of a stable market.

9. What We Can Do As Business Owners

We can’t rewrite the tax code. We can’t build thousands of state houses in our spare time. But we do have levers.

We can choose to pay as fairly as we can manage, and be straight with people when we can’t do better yet – including showing them the actual numbers, not hiding behind vague phrases.

We can set rosters that give people some predictability, even if it’s slightly less convenient for us. Stability is worth more than one extra percent of theoretical flexibility.

We can pay on time, every time, especially to small suppliers who don’t have the cashflow to absorb our delays.

We can use our voices: in industry groups, chambers of commerce, local consultations. A quiet email from a business owner saying, “Here’s what I’m seeing on the ground,” carries more weight than most of us realise.

Most importantly, we can resist the temptation to talk about “the vulnerable” as if they are a separate species. In any given month, one of them works for us, sells to us, or looks back at us in the bathroom mirror.

10. A Golden Nugget Takeaway

If you want a simple test for whether a policy, a business decision or a national story is decent, try this -

“Would I still think this was fair if I were the person with the least power in the room?”

If the honest answer is no, then there’s work to do – in Wellington, in the boardroom, and in the back office of every small business in the country.