Blaming season

A storm is gathering over Labour as supply shortages, the cost-of-living crisis, gang violence and Māori co-governance issues frustrate voters.

- JANE CLIFTON

All around the world, pandemic and war are causing consumer crises, but they have starkly different tipping points.

Wheat, fuel, gas, fertiliser and cooking oil were in the first wave of shortages causing rapid-onset inflation. Now things are becoming more culturally specific. Russia's dominance of cod fisheries threatens Britain with a grave fish-and-chips shortage. In Australia, KFC is using cabbage instead of A$12 lettuces in its burgers.

But who would have predicted New Zealand would literally hit the wall?

"Wadda we want?" the next parliamentary protest encampment will chant up at the Beehive. "Gib! When do we wannit?" "Now!"

The $20 block of cheese and the 30-year high in fruit and vegetable price inflation were bad, but this challenge to the ancestral right of every New Zealander to size, glue, hammer, plaster and plane slabs of gypsum-packed cardboard to anything not moving has proven a breaking point for the collective psyche.

Oh, for the carefree days of protests, March's anti-mandate when a person could rig themselves up a particle-board dunny cubicle smack bang on Parliament's grounds, without either having to take out a new mortgage or ram-raid a Mitre 10.

Accordingly, one of the emergency tourniquets Jacinda Ardern applied to the body politic in her Cabinet reshuffle last week was to effectively appoint a "Minister of Gib". The prime ministerial transfer of responsibility for building and construction to the can-do Housing Minister Megan Woods, and away from the struggling Poto Williams, will not easily solve the problem, but it might be a start.

Our dominant supplier, Fletcher Building, simply can't meet demand. Canny developers, including one of the building company's own shareholders, are now importing wallboard and, ominously for Fletcher, finding it cheaper.