Inequality costs everyone

Ahead of the New Zealand General Election on 20 September, War Cry is publishing material from a Christchurch-based group of Christians suggesting a ‘Gospel Manifesto’. Experts will focus Christian voters on the teaching of Jesus and the local and global situation in which we live.

Priority 3: Inequality costs everyone

The gospels make it abundantly clear that Jesus had harsh words for those who acquired great wealth, especially at the expense of the less well off. Responsible stewardship of one’s gifted wealth was paramount for Jesus, who made it clear that accumulated wealth was a real stumbling block for those seeking to join him in bringing in the Kingdom of God. In short, they were better off without it!

This same locked-in, structural inequality strikes at the very core of the social wellbeing of societies today. It rips out their economic heart by continuing a massive concentration of resources in the hands of fewer people, presenting a major threat to inclusive, just political and economic systems. A recent Oxfam report, Working for the Few: Political Capture and Economic Inequality notes that a mere 85 people control the same amount of wealth as half the world’s population. That is 85 people, compared with 3.5 billion. Worse still, it appears to be beyond the capacity of the world’s richest nations to stem the tide of rising inequality.

Max Rushbrooke points to signs of structural inequality in Inequality: A New Zealand Crisis:

• New Zealand now has the widest income gaps since detailed records began in the early 1980s.
• From the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s, the gap between rich and the rest has widened faster in New Zealand than in any other developed country.
• The average household in the top 10 per cent of New Zealand has nine times the income of one in the bottom 10 per cent. 
• The top one per cent of adults own 16 per cent of the country’s total wealth, while the bottom half put together have just over five per cent.

But the most damning aspects of our national social, economic and political crisis is that New Zealand children are more likely to be poor, feel unsafe and unwell, than children in most other developed countries. Added to this, says Rushbrooke, is the ‘shocking statistic … [the] disproportionate number of Maori and Pacific people living below the poverty line’.

Sadly, New Zealand will remain gridlocked into this growing and extraordinary economic disparity simply because it is not in the interests of the elite powerful few to address the unjust economic gross inequality that locks in their privileged advantages. But despite the entrenched nature of this gross inequality, we don’t have to accept that this is simply the way the system should work. A Christian response requires action on a number of levels, beginning with ourselves and our own lifestyles, priorities and commitments, then lobbying church leaders to follow the lead of Pope Francis by spelling out and actively seeking to address gross inequality in its many forms.

Gross inequality was rampant in Jesus’ time, but Jesus did not shirk from challenging those who created it and its cancerous impact on society. Two thousand years later and in a diff erent context, corrosive inequality is increasing social tensions and the risk of social breakdown. May we, who profess to be part of a Christian church, walk in the footsteps of Jesus in an uncompromising response to the socially crippling challenge of inequality, which costs everyone, especially those on the lowest incomes.

By Rodney Routledge.

Rodney Routledge is a Presbyterian minister, a Community Development worker and a former Lecturer in Social Work at Canterbury University.