The cost of living crisis is over – this is just our reality now

The Spinoff

5 days ago

New Zealanders are participating in mass delusion by insisting we are still in a 'crisis', argues a nihilistic Mad Chapman.
Imagine you don't smoke. You tell everyone you don't smoke, and it's true. Then one night you drink a few too many beers at a party and find yourself smoking a durry on the deck with your new best friend who you just met. You wake up the next morning, throat feeling disgusting, and think 'that was weird and out of character'. When someone tells you they didn't know you smoked, you say no, I don't smoke, that was just a silly thing I did in a moment of weakness.
The next weekend it happens again. You still don't smoke, except when you're really drunk.
Then you start a big work project and find yourself staying late at the office a lot. Sometimes you have a beer to take the edge off while you work. What goes hand in hand with a beer? A smoke. Just one pack you think. I don't smoke but this project is hectic and one pack could help with the stress.
As soon as that big project ends, another one begins. A year later, your colleague sees you smoking outside the office at 11am and asks when you started smoking. No, you insist, I don't smoke! There's just a lot going on right now. They look at you for a second too long before nodding and walking away.
This is how we all sound in the year 2025, insisting the cost of living is still a temporary crisis.
We've become so used to the phrase it's hard to remember when it actually began. Such a concept is relatively modern. A search of newspapers (some as recent as 1989) returns no results for 'cost of living crisis' but does reveal that in 1918, Australian butter prices shot up and prompted public protests to the Price of Commodities Commission, 'a sort of Cost of Living Appeal Board'. The writer suggested this sort of thing was needed here in New Zealand too.
What is a crisis? A crisis is 'a time of intense difficulty or danger'. A crisis can be personal, societal or economic, and demands immediate action and attention. The Covid-19 pandemic was a crisis. Effects of that are still being felt across the world but most people would agree the 'crisis' element has passed, largely due to that aforementioned urgent action and attention.
The delayed impact was the cost of living, which became an official crisis in New Zealand around the beginning of 2022. Three and a half years later and you can still expect to see 'cost of living crisis' in a headline at least twice a week. That's a long time to be in need of 'urgent action and attention'.
Which actually begs the question of whether or not our cost of living crisis can even be called a crisis if there has been a distinct lack of urgent action and attention? Like a cursed Schrodinger's cat, can a crisis exist if it is, by all practical measures, ignored?
The finance minister certainly intends to address it, as the finance minister before her intended to. Nicola Willis told RNZ last week she agreed with Kiwibank economist Jarrod Kerr's assessment that we still live in a 'severe cost of living crisis'. She acknowledged the near-exponential increase in prices over the past five years (across groceries, power, transport etc) but suggested the true solution is a growth in wages to afford those skyrocketing costs.
The government has a to-do list that is going to 'rebuild the economy' in the third quarter of its term, including specific cost-of-living actions around supermarket competition – which have not yet been checked off. When asked for a timeline for legislation that could potentially stem the rate of inflationary prices, Willis instead returned to a promise on rising wages. In other words, things aren't going to ever get cheaper but maybe you'll get a promotion.
Wages did in fact increase recently – including a smidge increase in the minimum wage in April – but that hasn't scared the high prices away. In fact – and I'm no economist so don't quote me on this – a rise in wages typically encourages higher spending (higher demand) which tends to lead to increased prices unless there are, hmmmm I dunno, rules restricting that. Until then, it seems New Zealanders will continue to flock to Australia where wages really are higher and groceries are expensive but somehow still cheaper than here.
Everything is getting more expensive (fun) but the arbiter of the cost of living is butter. A product of the biggest industry in New Zealand and a staple item considered an essential ingredient on any shopping list, butter is virtually unavoidable and the cost of it feels somehow directly tied to our collective mental health.
In 2022, one of the most-read articles on The Spinoff all year included the words ' $4 blocks of butter '. The article itself was a fascinating business feature on the expansion of The Warehouse into the supermarket space but I don't think that's why everyone clicked on it. I think everyone clicked on it because they Googled 'cheapest butter nz'. Back then a $4 block of butter was certainly the cheapest but only by a dollar or so. Now, an ad for a $4 block of butter means you're about to have your credit card information stolen.
Any time someone dares suggest that New Zealand is a blissful paradise, a raspy voice will remind them that butter is $10. That it costs $50 to buy butter, eggs, milk and a couple of chicken breasts. And these prices are only heading in one direction, with no end in sight. (Willis has since said she's asked Fonterra some questions about the cost of butter and milk. Can't wait to hear the answers!)
In the meantime, there's a comfort in calling something a crisis, because a crisis is temporary. A crisis has an end point (even if that end point is really blurry on the horizon and may in fact be a mirage). If the crisis went away but butter was still $10, what are we supposed to do then? Perhaps our mass delusion in believing that someone, anyone, will eventually do something about the cost of living is the real crisis.
And if we really are in a crisis, we are well past the point of urgent action and attention. This is just our lives now. A cost of living reality. We're all huddled on the shaky deck of the New Zealand economy, passing around a single durry.