We ran too long without a recession. Everything needs to reset, government charges included. We have hit a ceiling on what's realistically affordable in this country.
I think a big part of the problem is that a huge chunk of consumers’ income is now committed to “fixed” costs, mostly either government or quasi-government in nature.
Consider someone who’s an employee on fairly normal wages:
Income tax, GST on most purchses, business taxation built into the price of everything you buy, registration and licenses just so that you can own and drive a car, fuel excise on top of that, stamp duty on various things, council rates and so on.
All those are either not optional at all, or can be avoided only by not having a car etc and between them government’s taking a huge chunk of the average worker’s earnings.
Then there’s the unavoidable expenses such as utilities, public transport fares and so on with most of those having gone down the track of charging more rather than reducing costs.
Don’t even mention land prices.
End result is that business costs are uncompetitive and consumers have stuff all left for discretionary spending after they’ve paid the long list of taxes and other essential costs.
The only solution I can see requires a broad reset. Throw out most of the ideological stuff, focus on real efficiency instead of theoretical stuff, and end the practice of taking with one hand and simultaneously giving to the exact same people with the other.
A big mistake which has been made over the past 30 years is to equate moving something off the government’s books with small government.
If you take something that’s done by a team of say 500 workers actually doing the physical work and outsource it to a contractor at what ends up being triple the price then that’s an increase in the size of government not a decrease. You might have 500 fewer workers on the books but the tax which needs to be collected has gone up not down if the overall cost is higher.
I’ve seen that exact scenario by the way when I worked in the PS as such. Things outsourced at higher cost but it was driven by ideology to cut staff numbers not to save money. The end result is higher taxes which then become a burden on real private enterprises, those actually creating wealth, as distinct from those which are merely privately owned government departments in practice.
I don’t advocate abolishing the PS or anything that drastic but I do advocate actual efficiency and cost reductions not silly ideology which says that spending $1 million a year to get a single tradesman on $80K off the books is a good idea. It’s not a good use of resources and sadly it’s not a hypothetical example.