Worsening poverty and social misery in New Zealand

Tom Peters

Last week New Zealand’s Treasury released a Child Poverty Report, which forecast that the proportion of children living in poverty will increase from 17.7 percent in 2024 to 18.4 percent in 2029.

The report was released along with the National Party-led government’s austerity budget, which starves public services, while cutting workers’ wages, reducing government contributions to retirement savings and barring thousands of unemployed teenagers from welfare.

The government is seeking to solve the worsening economic crisis by ramping up the exploitation of the working class, while protecting the fortunes of the super-rich.

New Zealand Finance Minister Nicola Willis [Photo: Facebook/Nicola Willis MP]

Asked by a TVNZ interviewer why the government had not done more in the budget to address child poverty, Finance Minister Nicola Willis declared: “there is not actually a magic money tree that allows me to show such generosity that I can solve every problem at once.”

Year after year, successive Labour and National Party governments have trotted out this refrain, even as they have handed tens of billions of dollars to the corporate elite through tax cuts, subsidies and bailouts, and spent billions on the armed forces.

The National-led coalition government—with the support of the opposition Labour Party—will spend an extra $13 billion over the next four years as part of its plan to double the size of the military and integrate New Zealand further into US-led imperialist wars.

Sarita Divis of the Child Poverty Action Group, a non-government organisation, pointed out in a New Zealand Herald column last month that the $3 billion annual increase in defence spending is exactly what the Treasury itself estimated it would cost to halve the level of child poverty by 2028.

The government’s Child Poverty Report actually understates the extent of child poverty. Its data is more than a year old, covering the period from July 2023 to June 2024. Over the past year, the number of people in full-time work has fallen by 45,000 as unemployment increased from 4 to 5.1 percent, and living costs have continued to rise while wages stagnated.

Moreover, the government defines poverty as less than 50 percent of the median household income after paying for housing costs—an extremely low bar.

While the percentage of children below this poverty line was unchanged in the year to June 2024, the number of children living in “material hardship”—the poorest of the poor—increased by almost a third between 2022 and mid-2024, from 10.5 percent to 13.4 percent. “Material hardship” is defined as lacking access to six or more “essentials,” such as decent housing, heating, healthy food, warm clothes and shoes, etc.

Another survey, by the Ministry of Health, found that last year 27 percent of children “lived in households where food ran out often or sometimes,” up from 21 percent the year before.

Numerous reports illustrate an increasingly severe social crisis. The Christchurch Press wrote on May 22: “Some families have moved into one heated room to keep warm, while others are taking out loans to pay their power bills as costs rise and temperatures drop.”

It noted that last year, “Consumer NZ estimated 140,000 households had to take out a loan to pay their power bill, and a further 38,000 households had their power cut at least once as they couldn’t pay their bill.”

In Wellington, the Post reported on May 10 that “Food charities are facing an unprecedented surge in demand from struggling middle income earners.” In February, one soup kitchen “served 7930 meals, 1200 more than across the same month in 2024.”

Nationwide 500,000 people, one tenth of the population, relies on food banks on a regular basis.

Homelessness continues to become more visible in every major centre. The government has boasted about reducing the number of emergency housing places from 4,000 in September 2023 to around 500 in December 2024—despite the 2023 census finding that 112,496 people, or 2.3 percent of the population, are “severely housing deprived” (up from 99,462 people in 2018).

According to government data cited by the Press, “the number of emergency housing special needs grants, which fund temporary accommodation for people in need, have dropped from 8873 in July 2023, to just 1338 in March 2025.”

Growing social misery and hopelessness is reflected in an unprecedented surge in the use of dangerous drugs. In Northland, the poorest region, as well as Southland and Otago, wastewater testing shows methamphetamine use has tripled in the past year. Nationwide, the amount of meth consumed between October and December 2024 was 78 percent higher than the average over the previous 12 months.

There is also a profound mental health crisis, particularly affecting young people. A May 14 report by UNICEF revealed that New Zealand had the worst youth suicide rate of the 36 countries in the OECD, with 17.1 suicides per 100,000 people aged 15 to 19 (based on data from 2018–20).

UNICEF appealed to the government to increase welfare payments for families with children and to address food insecurity by expanding the provision of free school lunches. The government has made cruel cuts in both areas.

The government has deflected blame for young people’s poor mental health onto social media. It is seeking to ban under-16-year-olds from social media platforms. This has nothing to do with protecting children but is aimed at strengthening state control over the internet and stopping teenagers from accessing political material, especially socialist articles explaining the real causes of inequality, poverty and war.

While the Labour Party has criticised the latest budget cuts, this is entirely hypocritical. Homelessness, child poverty and the cost of living all became worse during the 2017–2023 Labour government, which is why it lost the 2023 election in a landslide. Labour transferred tens of billions of dollars to the super-rich through corporate bailouts, subsidies and quantitative easing measures during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Last year’s National Business Review Rich List, profiling more than 100 of the country’s richest individuals and families, showed that their collective wealth increased from $72.59 billion to $95.68 billion in just one year. More than half of this figure, over $50 billion, was held by just 10 billionaires.

This enormous wealth, accumulated by exploiting the labour of working people, must be expropriated, along with the money being wasted on war, so that it can be used to eliminate poverty, expand schools and hospitals and meet all other social needs.

UN reports slowing human development and growing inequality, promoting AI as a solution

Jean Shaoul

The 2025 United Nations (UN) Human Development Report published earlier this month reveals an unprecedented slowdown on the Human Development Indices (HDI) in all regions of the world, along with growing inequality between the imperialist and former colonial countries. It claims that Artificial Intelligence (AI) could reignite development.

Instead of a sustained recovery following the world’s greatest recession induced by the COVID-19 pandemic, still ongoing if barely reported, there has been exceptionally little improvement in human development. While global HDI is set to reach a record high in 2024, the rise is minimal and the smallest—apart from the crisis years of 2020 and 2021—since 1990.

United Nations Human Development Report [Photo: UN]

The UN’s HDI is a crude yardstick for measuring a country’s human development in three key dimensions: health, knowledge, and standard of living.

Health is measured by life expectancy at birth. Knowledge is measured by the average (mean) years of schooling and expected years of schooling. Standard of living is measured by Gross National Income (GNI) per capita expressed in international dollars using purchasing power parity (PPP) terms—which aims to provide a more accurate comparison of income levels between countries by considering the real cost of goods and services rather than simply using exchange rates. Countries are then classified according to their HDI value as being of low, medium, high, and very high human development.

As well as the alarming rate of slowdown in global development, the report found that inequality between Low HDI and Very High HDI countries grew for the fourth successive year, reversing a long-term trend that had seen inequalities between rich and poor countries decline.

Introducing the report, Achim Steiner, United Nations Development Programme Administrator, said, “For decades, we have been on track to reach a very high human development world by 2030, but this deceleration signals a very real threat to global progress.” He added, “If 2024’s sluggish progress becomes the ‘new normal’, that 2030 milestone could slip by decades—making our world less secure, more divided, and more vulnerable to economic and ecological shocks”.

The report notes—without further explanation or data—that the countries with the lowest HDI scores are caught by the debt crisis, “increasing trade tensions that limit exports” and the rise of “jobless industrialisation” due to automation.

Even this is a very muted presentation.

The debt crisis is acute, as data from the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) shows. The external debt of the “developing countries” has quadrupled in two decades to reach a record $11.4 trillion in 2023, equal to 99 percent of their export earnings. This has been fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic and volatile commodity prices as countries borrowed heavily to offset the economic fallout and fund public health measures. Their debt levels have grown twice as fast as in the more advanced capitalist countries.

Debt distress looms over more than half of the 68 low-income countries eligible for the International Monetary Fund’s Poverty Reduction and Growth Trust—more than double the number in 2015. Soaring interest rates—two to four times that of the US and six to 12 times higher than Germany—have worsened the burden. In 2023, the poorer countries paid $847 billion in net interest, a 26 percent increase on 2021. These blood sucking payments come at the expense of essential public services, so schools are underfunded, hospitals lack supplies and infrastructure falls apart.

In 2023, a staggering 54 countries, nearly half in Africa, spent at least 10 percent of government revenue on debt servicing. Today,  3.3 billion people—41 percent of the world’s 8 billion population—live in countries that spend more on debt payments than on health or education.

Children eat porridge prepared at a feeding center in Mudzi, Zimbabwe, on July 2, 2024. In Zimbabwe, an El Nino-induced drought is affecting millions of people, and children are most at risk. [AP Photo/Aaron Ufumeli]

Despite acknowledging that industrialisation has often failed to bring greater human development for the mass of the population in the former colonial countries, the 2025 Human Development Report claims that their surveys show that people are hopeful that AI—the focus of its report—will create new opportunities, although it provides no evidence to support such wishful thinking. This is despite the fact that half of respondents think their jobs could be automated.

In the customary bland and under-stated language of such official publications, the report acknowledges that “the real divide will hinge on how effectively AI complements and augments what people do”.

Pedro Conceição, Director of UNDP’s Human Development Report Office, said, “The choices we make in the coming years will define the legacy of this technological transition for human development… With the right policies and focus on people, AI can be a crucial bridge to new knowledge, skills, and ideas that can empower everyone from farmers to small business owners”.

AI is indeed a major advance in technology, with the potential to enormously develop the productivity of labour and promote the social advancement of humanity. But the report blissfully ignores the vast evidence about who benefits from technological advances, including AI, under capitalism.

The development of AI under social relations based on the private ownership of the means of production, including intellectual property, and the extraction of profit by maximising the exploitation of the working class, will exacerbate already widespread poverty, particularly in the poorer less educated countries, and global social inequality.

In a back-handed way, the report acknowledges this, saying it is necessary to ensure that “no one is excluded from emerging possibilities” because of a lack of access to electricity and the Internet. But it fails to mention that 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa alone lack access to electricity and obviously does not explain how this is to be changed.

As the Center for Global Development explains, AI may not only fuel within-country inequality. It could also slow or reverse the gains previously made in reducing between-country inequality, because countries will vary in their ability to harness the benefits and mitigate the disruption. AI is automating low and mid-skill jobs, particularly in the manufacturing, services and administrative sectors that form the backbone of many developing economies, while creating new jobs in digital, data, and AI-related sectors. Urban, educated populations will be in a better position to adapt than rural or informal workers.

As in previous technological waves, the more economically advanced countries will be more able to harness the benefits than countries with a less developed digital infrastructure and limited access to the Internet.

In the garment industry, AI and robotics are already being integrated the manufacturing process, from automated sewing to fabric inspection and cutting. These technologies boost efficiency, reduce costs and potentially improve quality and the corporations’ profits, but they also threaten to throw thousands of workers onto the scrapheap. In the case of Bangladesh, up to 60 percent of jobs in the garment sector could go due to automation by 2030.

While the rise of AI-driven mobile applications has led to new jobs such as app development, digital marketing, and cybersecurity, routine, low-skilled tasks are increasingly being automated. In Kenya, the automation of customer service operations in the telecommunications industry led to a 13 percent reduction in call centre jobs over a two-year period.

In agriculture, the adoption of AI-driven techniques such as automated irrigation systems and robotic harvesting favours large, well-capitalized farms. The smallholder and subsistence-based farms and pastoralists that characterize agriculture in many parts of the world and even specific regions within developed nations, frequently lack the capital, technical expertise, and reliable connectivity to implement and benefit from AI systems. This will accelerate the buildup of vast estates run by agribusiness, as already evidenced in countries such as Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia, driving the rural poor off the land and exacerbating social tensions and the geopolitical conflicts and tensions already provoking numerous wars.

The only way that the progressive potential of AI technology can be harnessed for the benefit of humanity is through the internationally unified struggle by the working class seize power, expropriate the wealth of the giant corporations and financial institutions and reorganise economic life based on globally planned production to meet human need, not private profit.

US Supreme Court gives Trump green light to deport over half a million legally residing immigrants

Jacob Crosse

A U.S. Marine Osprey is flown over the border Friday, Jan. 31, 2025, near San Diego. [AP Photo/Jae C. Hong]

In a 7–2 ruling on May 30, the US Supreme Court granted the Trump administration’s request to stay a lower court’s injunction preventing the termination of the CHNV (Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Venezuela) humanitarian parole program. The decision effectively gives the Trump administration a green light to deport over half a million people to countries currently under US sanctions or trade restrictions.

Those now facing deportation live legally in the US through the CHNV program, which began under the Biden administration in January 2023. As of 2025, roughly 211,000 people from Haiti had entered the US through the program, followed by 160,000 from Venezuela, about 87,000 from Cuba, and 73,000 from Nicaragua.

In order to qualify for the program, applicants were required to have a valid passport, a financial sponsor in the US, submit to invasive biographic and biometric security screenings and not be a resident or dual national of another country.

Sponsors of CHNV immigrants were also required to meet a series of conditions, including being a US citizen or lawful resident and submitting financial paperwork to the government to demonstrate sufficient income.

Under the program, immigrants could live and work in the US legally for two years and apply for a Social Security number. While it did not grant a “pathway to citizenship,” immigrants granted CHNV parole status were allowed to apply for other forms of protection, such as asylum.

In Friday’s dissent, written by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Jackson stated that the lawyers for the immigrants had shown “that tangible, imminent, and significant harm is likely to befall them if this Court grants the application and issues a stay.”

The Supreme Court as composed June 30, 2022 to present. Front row, left to right: Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., Associate Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., and Associate Justice Elena Kagan. Back row, left to right: Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Associate Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, Associate Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, and Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. [Photo: Fred Schilling, samling av USAs Høyesterett]

She noted that immigrants using the program “have integrated into American neighborhoods and communities in the hopes of eventually securing long-term legal status.”

Jackson wrote that the government failed to show what harm would be caused by lifting the lower court’s injunction, while lawyers for the immigrants demonstrated “irreparable harm” if the stay was granted.

“The Court has now apparently determined… that it is in the public’s interest to have the lives of half a million migrants unravel all around us before the courts decide their legal claims,” she wrote.

She concluded:

Even assuming a likelihood that the law permits the Government to terminate parole grants in this fashion, I would let the courts decide that highly consequential legal issue first…. Instead, the Court allows the Government to do what it wants to do regardless, rendering constraints of law irrelevant and unleashing devastation in the process.

Speaking at the White House on Friday alongside billionaire fascist Elon Musk, President Donald Trump hailed the Court’s decision, saying it was “very important on immigration that we be able to get people out without having to go through a long court case.”

The aspiring dictator made clear he intended to use Friday’s decision to further trample on everyone’s right to due process: “We can’t keep them for years here as we go through trials, we have to get them out rapidly.”

He added, “And we know who they are, and we are very careful about who they are.”

The CHNV humanitarian parole program was an expansion of an earlier initiative, called Temporary Protected Status (TPS), created by the Biden administration in October 2022 for Venezuelans. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court issued a stay on a lower court’s injunction blocking the Trump administration from revoking TPS protections for some 350,000 Venezuelan immigrants. As was the case in Friday’s emergency request, the majority did not explain their decision.

In order to secure Republican votes for nearly $100 billion in military aid to Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan last year, Biden and the Democrats attempted to broker a “border package” that would greatly expand the immigration deportation apparatus while providing no additional protections for immigrants under CHNV or TPS.

Now, less than 150 days into the Trump administration, some 900,000 workers and their families are at risk of being kidnapped by a militarized immigration Gestapo, detained in a for-profit prisons, and sent to a country they may not have been to in years—or ever—where they may face political persecution, gang violence, or US-backed private militarized repression.

As of this writing no prominent Democrat, including New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, have issued a statement denouncing the court’s latest anti-immigrant ruling.

While Trump’s plans for mass deportations have broad support in the Supreme Court and in both big business parties, millions of people throughout the United States are outraged over the daily injustices, disappearances, and kidnappings of their friends, family, and co-workers.

The arrest of 20-year-old Dylan Josue Lopez Contreras earlier this month has provoked mass outrage in New York City. The young man from Venezuela, along with his mother and two younger siblings, entered the US legally using the CBP (Customs and Border Protection) One app under the Biden administration.

Despite following the legal process, Dylan was arrested when he showed up to a mandatory immigration hearing on May 21.

“It seems like a dirty game on their part,” Raiza, Dylan’s mother, told Chalkbeat. “When someone appears in front of a judge, it’s because they don’t have any criminal record, they want to do the right thing,” she said, adding, “The only thing he wants is to study.”

Dylan had been attending high school at Ellis Prep Academy and was in the process of seeking asylum. Although he had already graduated from high school in Venezuela, he enrolled at Ellis to improve his English in preparation for hopefully going to college.

Following Dylan’s arrest, approximately 500 New York City high school students walked out on Tuesday to protest his detention. On Wednesday, 23 people were arrested outside the U.S. Immigration Court in Lower Manhattan while protesting the arrest of Dylan and other immigrants.

All workers must take a stand in opposition to the bipartisan mass deportation campaign. The militarized measures and trampling of due process rights used against immigrants today will be used against striking workers and all those who protest the rule of the financial oligarchy.