Concrete for the Criminals, Crumbs for the Rest
Money goes to jail.
If you’re homeless, sick, poor, elderly, or just unlucky enough to be scraping by in this so-called civilised nation, the Government has a simple message - there’s no money for you. No funding for your mouldy flat, your chemo waiting list, your power bill, or your empty fridge. Fiscal discipline demands sacrifice. But if you’re a politician addicted to photo ops of handcuffs and sirens? The coffers open like the Red Sea.
This is the coalition’s masterpiece of cruelty - cut every thread of the social safety net, while spending like drunken sailors on ambulances parked at the bottom of cliffs they themselves keep building higher.
Treasury, bless them, keeps timidly whispering that it costs a fortune to shove more human beings into prisons. $150,000–$190,000 a year, per prisoner, in fact. But ministers, drunk on their own morality plays, simply shrug. Nicola Willis can’t scrape together dollars for early childhood centres or for pensioners choosing between heat and food, but the minute Mark Mitchell yells “more cops!” or “bigger prisons!” she’s practically throwing cheques out of the Beehive windows like confetti.
So what’s the result? Schools crumble. Hospitals wheeze. Social services starve. Thousands sleep in cars or skip meals. The mentally ill queue endlessly for help that never arrives. But don’t worry - Waikeria Prison will soon have space for 1,850, all lovingly housed at taxpayer expense. Because nothing says “compassionate government” like a billion-dollar cage.
It would almost be funny if it weren’t soaked in misery. The contradiction is staggering - savage cuts for those at the bottom, bottomless spending for the business of punishment. Luxon and Mitchell preen about “public safety,” while ordinary New Zealanders are left unsafe in every conceivable way - unsafe from poverty, from illness, from cold winters, from despair.
This is not fiscal responsibility. It’s a moral abdication. We’re told the country “can’t afford” food grants, warm homes, decent wages, or accessible health care. But somehow, magically, there’s always an unlimited slush fund for baton-wielding theatre and a swelling army of Corrections officers.
It’s austerity with brass knuckles. Austerity that doesn’t save money, but actively burns it to fuel the illusion of strength and the people paying the price aren’t the white-collar policymakers or the smug ministers in their chauffeured cars. It’s the grandmother choosing between rent and medication. The teenager bouncing between couch-surfing and a cold prison cell. The family at the foodbank while their taxes bankroll yet another prison wing.
Bill English once called prisons a “fiscal and moral failure.” This government calls them “a growth sector.” The hypocrisy is not just grotesque - it’s lethal.
The coalition wants us to believe it is both penny-pinching and tough. In reality, it is neither. It is wasteful and cruel - a government that tightens the belts of the weak until they suffocate, while shovelling mountains of gold into the machinery of punishment.
We could choose another way - prevention, housing, healthcare, dignity. But that would take vision, compassion and courage - three things this government has cut harder than any budget line.
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