Among the raft of serious issues – and there have been plenty of them – created by the coalition government that have affected me directly, superannuation is close to the top.
Why is this so?
Because the income I receive from superannuation – my entitlement to which, to quote the Prime Minister, I am ‘entitled’ – is my primary source of income, and since the government has re-determined how superannuation is calculated, I find myself with less, to quote the Minister of Finance, ‘in my back pocket’ than I had before with the likelihood that this will be reduced even further once she figures out how to do it.
Socio-politically, me and people like me, are an easy grab and I’ve no doubt it’s coming.
I’d like to tell Nicky-No -Boats to her face that I don’t have back pockets, mostly I don’t have pockets at all, and that the idea of a few bucks left at the end of the week for a coffee with a friend just doesn’t happen anymore thanks to her unctuous need to give tax breaks to already wealthy landlords, and Llareggub to anyone else. Apologies for trying to be funny: Llareggub is the small Welsh seaport town in Dylan Thomas’s magically imagined Under Milkwood’ and, in case you haven’t worked it out, it’s ‘bugger all’ spelt backwards.
None of the government’s promised improvements to the cost of living have happened for people like me, just the glib, oft-repeated, sad-faced quip that ‘we know New Zealanders are doing it hard right now’ and, when challenged on what happened to their promises, we’re told of the terrible mess Labour left and that it’s all Labour’s fault.
Sound familiar?
How about, ‘Americans are doing it hard right now’ and it’s all Biden’s fault.’
International right wing talking points.
It’s not ‘all Labour’s fault, of course, we all know that. We might be old but we’re not stupid. We are ‘but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, we know a hawk from a handsaw’, and we also know, without any shadow of doubt, that the country only went into recession after a year of fallacious financial flubbery by the three-headed hangover from hell.
All jokes and literary lunacy aside, getting by day by day is now actually a real challenge and if it weren’t for the fact that both Cushla and Finn are frugal managers and I contribute my monthly income from my other work, insignificant though that may seem, we’d not get by at all. The promised tax cuts, cruelly exaggerated (we’d already worked that out), that were supposed to make life so much easier for all of us, haven’t helped me at all. In fact, they simply haven’t eventuated. For me, the tax cuts, advertised as being around $270 a week, turned out to be $1.50, and it takes a month for me to save enough to buy a cup of coffee let alone a dozen eggs. Add that they’ve brought back the prohibitive prescription charges that Labour had mercifully removed – this becomes much weightier as you get older and even worse once you’ve reached my advanced years – you visit your friendly pharmacy almost as often as you go to your economically ill-disposed and wildly over-priced supermarket.
And don’t get me started on how much doctor’s visits have gone up.
I say ‘friendly pharmacy’ because mine has flatly refused to reinstate the charges and has given a resounding middle finger to the government by absorbing the adjustments internally.
Is it all a bit disappointing, isn’t it?
You bet it is!
dykiegirl 