The fishing, forestry, electricity and gas resources of Aotearoa are being uprooted, extracted, packed and shipped overseas in vast unsustainable quantities. Thus the capitalists' fundamental accumulation strategy is fundamentally flawed. The stringent austerity for the working class at home and a desperate prostitution of everything they have for access to export markets is not working for them. The costs of this failure are not borne by the capitalists themselves. Rather, deliberate austerity policies ensure the costs of the capitalists' failure are borne by the working class.
Regressive taxation puts the greatest tax burden on low incomes.
Social spending restrictions reduce the social wage available for workers. Repressive labour legislation such as the Employment Contracts Act weaken workers ability to organise for higher wages. The ongoing economic crisis has made the political situation very unstable. More importantly for the capitalists, there is no clear consensus among them about how to go on. The failure of the devaluation to boost exports and the impasse in further reduction of state spending revealed the impotency of the Bolger-Peters cabal and opened it to ridicule.