Cancel state housing projects and light rail. We need to tighten our belt. Thousands of public servants must lose their jobs. Free public transport is scrapped. Disability services and lunch budgets for tamariki face extreme cuts as emergency housing is restricted and beneficiaries are harshly sanctioned. But at the same time as we are forced to make these sacrifices the government has invested billions into ideological pet projects. There's $1.9 billion going into building a mega prison. $15 billion in tax cuts to the wealthiest few. There’s money to spend on roads and boot camps. This isn’t hypocrisy however. It’s a plan.

The definition of neoliberalism as a reduction in the state’s role in the economy is one that is so commonly known it almost feels trite to repeat. Both materially and ideologically, neoliberalism wants the government out of our lives. We should keep all the tax we can. Other people should pay for themselves. We don’t want the government rooting around in our lives or in our pockets.

This is the key line of thought behind these policies that shrink or privatise our public services. New Zealand had around the same proportion of people employed in our public services as the OECD average. Despite this, National campaigned on “Cutting the bloat”, meaning firing thousands of public servants with the express purpose of transferring their wages to the landlord class through tax breaks. However, even under neoliberalism, there is one public sector that never seems to shrink - the Department of Corrections.

In 1978, all “penal institutions” in New Zealand imprisoned almost 15 out of every 100,000 people. Since 1985, prisoner numbers have more than tripled. In 2021, the World Prison Brief data had New Zealand at 164 prisoners per 100,000. This extra prison population carries a huge price tag. In 1978, cost adjusted, the entire “law and order” spend was $1.4 billion - including police, courts, prisons. Today, Vote Corrections alone costs almost $2.5 billion dollars. The police and courts add on more billions.

So how does the state campaigning on the necessity of restricting emergency housing find the money to add another $1.9 billion dollars to the bloated Corrections spend? How can it justify cutting lunches to hungry tamariki when it’s spending $100,000 per child it sends to boot camp?

The answer is that while the traditional view of neoliberalism defines it as cutbacks on government interference in our lives, neoliberalism actually requires more spending and more control - over the poorest among us.

The net effect of cutting our already meager social spending while doing nothing to address the cost of living crisis is that many more people end up in poverty. Benefit numbers have jumped from around 370,000 to almost 390,000 since April this year alone. That’s an increase of twenty thousand people in five months.

This increase in poverty occurs in tandem with a reduction in social spending, and therefore social support. Emergency access to housing has been restricted, draconian benefit sanctions have been proposed and passed. The smaller initiatives that went a way towards alleviating poverty such as school lunches, free public transport and prescriptions have been scrapped.

So how does this necessitate prisons? Even when the economy is going well, there has to be unemployment, as capitalism requires an ‘underclass’ of labour that it can pull upon at short notice, or threaten to make people a part of if they don’t follow the rules. But under neoliberal economic policies this underclass begins to grow both in size and in desperation. People are poorer. Trickle down poverty means public sector employees are outcompeting one another for entry level jobs, while those at the bottom are shunted down further.

These people are not just victims however. This growing underclass begins to represent a threat to those in power. What if those twenty thousand extra beneficiaries took to the streets? What if they stole food from the supermarket so that the executives couldn’t make millions in profit? What if they have to do drugs or undergo mental health crises on the streets because we took away their homes?

To manage this growing unruly underclass, the government must then invest in mechanisms of control: prisons. Angela Davis wrote that prisons don’t disappear social problems, but human beings. But prisons do disappear the pressing social problem of a lot of visible people living in hellish poverty. And they do it in a way that allows the ideological construction of poverty as criminality. People aren’t struggling, they’re criminals. We don’t have to worry about breaking the social contract through state abandonment of homeless hungry kids when we can use the fact those kids broke the law as an excuse to disappear them into boot camps.

And all the while the government makes new roads for private travel, creates telehealth initiatives to manage an underfunded healthcare system and increases privatisation and tax cuts so their wealthy mates can make a quick buck off the destruction of social fabric. Yes it costs more to incarcerate people than house them. Yes it costs more to allow teeth to fester and go bad than it does to provide free dental. Yes it costs more to manage beneficiaries down to the letter than operating on a high trust model. Yes that $100,000 per child in boot camps could keep a small whānau housed and well fed for two years. But that doesn’t matter. Punishment and privatisation is the point. It’s not hypocrisy. It’s the plan.

Lucy Birds is a prison abolitionist based in Tāmaki Makaurau.

Not hypocrisy but a plan - the neoliberal logic of paying for punishment