What Kind of Country? Election 2026 - We Get to Choose
Updated: 42 minutes ago
Every few years, we get to choose what kind of country we want to be. I want one where everyone has a fair go: a decent home, good healthcare, an income to live on. This year, the biggest thing standing in the way is inequality.
“The reason your living standards are falling. The reason your kids can’t buy a house. Is because of growing inequality.” – Gary Stevenson, economist
Recently:
In France, student protests about neglected schools spread to wider protests about climate change, inadequate incomes and the cost of living.
In Aotearoa, we’re struggling with a neglected health system, a cost-of-living crisis, rising unemployment, especially among young people, and housing that's still out of reach for many. And here we are, in election week, many of us hoping and praying for genuine change. We're worried about our kids. Will they head to Australia? Will they still be living with us when we're retired? We're worried about the holes in care for our ageing parents. We all know someone who visited A&E and had a hellish experience.
Different countries, same story: private wealth growing while the things we share — schools, health, a decent income — are left to run down. But it shouldn’t be like this, and it doesn’t need to be. Galbraith saw it coming nearly 70 years ago.
In 1958, economist John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) wrote The Affluent Society, examining how private wealth could coexist with neglected schools, infrastructure and public services. Sound familiar? His work focused on who holds economic power and whose interests the economy serves. He believed in the necessity of government regulation, redistribution and trade unions (collective power) to rebalance power and allocate resources fairly - halting the tendency for wealth to concentrate upwards, leaving the majority increasingly impoverished. In his book The Good Society (1996), he argued that human freedom comes from society sharing wealth, security and opportunity - in other words, from redistribution of our common wealth for the good of all.
One can only imagine what Galbraith would have made of the first quarter of the 21st century. He couldn’t have foreseen today’s tech billionaires, but he’d have recognised them. Not only has the promise that generations of workers and unions fought for in the 20th century - a decent living, safe work, a home, healthcare and support when life goes wrong - remained largely unfulfilled, but here we are in what some are calling the Age of Oligarchy - a time when extreme wealth threatens democracy itself.
Which is exactly the warning Gary Stevenson - former global finance trader turned inequality campaigner - brought to Tāmaki Makaurau in March, at a talk hosted by the Wellbeing Economy Alliance Aotearoa. During his visit, Gary asked a question more and more of us are asking:
Who is our economy really serving and who is being left behind?
Seems like some questions never really go away, eh?
Why is housing becoming more unaffordable? Why is wealth concentrating at the top, and why is this an urgent problem? Gary answers all three in this video. It’s absolutely worth your time - watch it and pass it on.
Gary's key message: if we keep taxing working people, and we don’t tax the very wealthy, ordinary Kiwis will, over time, own nothing.
Still not sure what “wealth concentrating at the top” actually looks like? This short story uses a bag of chips to show how New Zealand’s wealth is shared out - and it’s hard to unsee.
(Click to see the whole story on Facebook)
So why does the pile keep growing at one end? A big part of the answer is how we tax. It’s the question Gary left us with: why has New Zealand developed, and accepted, such an unequal tax system?
A new report, Income, Wealth, and Tax at the Top - supported by Tax Justice Aotearoa, the Better Taxes for a Better Future campaign and the World Inequality Lab (co-directed by Thomas Piketty) - spells out just how out of whack our tax system is: the very wealthy now pay less than half (about 47%) of the effective tax rate of the median-wealth adult, and the gap has widened.
Other significant points:
Those who earn their income as salary or wages don’t have the flexibility to move their income into lower-taxed forms. As pay rises with inflation, it pushes them into higher tax brackets.
Close to two-thirds of the very wealthy’s total income, including capital gains, goes untaxed - so raising tax rates doesn’t touch it.
If the very wealthy earned the same balance of taxed and untaxed personal income as the median, they would pay about $605m more a year. The same calculation applied to the larger group of the top 1% would generate an additional $7 billion a year in tax revenue (a mechanical estimate, not a forecast of any particular reform). That’s about four times Pharmac’s entire medicines budget.
If we’re going to relieve pressure on the middle and generate the revenue we need to fund more nurses, teacher aides and emergency housing, we need to change what we tax: taxing income comprehensively, including income from capital gains, and taxing wealth as a necessary and powerful complement.
Tax is not a swear word. Tax has a formidable role to play in making our society fairer, and our country one where everyone can thrive.
I believe the most important question this election is simple: who would close the gap? Look for plans that ask the wealthiest to contribute more, lift incomes at the bottom, and put more money into health, housing and income support. Plans that cut services, or that offer tax relief mostly to those already well off, will widen the gap. Before you vote, look at who each party would tax, and who would benefit.
Here’s a quick guide, put together by Closing the Gap. It’s not a full breakdown. For each party’s detail, see Where the Money Goes.
Advance voting is open now — find out where at vote.nz
Inequality is not gravity. The economy is ours to shape.
What kind of country? We get to choose.
People first. Vote on that.
Opinion piece
Tracey Sharp - Auckland, NZ
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