By Chris Trotter*
Who will make the New Zealand of the next 50 years? We had better hope that, whoever they are, they make a better job of it than those responsible the last 50 years.
The condition of the country in 2022 offers a stark contrast to the New Zealand of 1972. The country of 50 years ago offered young New Zealanders world-class education and healthcare, full employment, an affordable home of their own, and a future secure enough to contemplate starting a family without trepidation.
The country has been riding on the back of that much stronger New Zealand right up until the present day. As my friend Chris Harris pointed out to me just a few weeks ago, the modern and highly efficient infrastructure of 1965 served a New Zealand population of 2.5 million. In the space of less than 60 years, our population doubled. Harris’s jarring question: Is the infrastructure required to service a population of 5 million in place? Do we have twice the number of hospitals? Twice the number of schools? Have we made sure that the New Zealand of 2022 still possesses the same high-quality scientific, engineering, medical, teaching, commercial and skilled-trades expertise as the New Zealand of 1972?
The answer to that question is the stuff of contemporary headlines. The construction of the physical and human infrastructure necessary for the maintenance of a strong, first-world economy and society has not kept pace with New Zealand’s burgeoning population. On the contrary, it has languished far behind. Not only have we mended and made-do, but we have also relied upon a qualified workforce that is growing older, but not larger, to keep the social and economic engine ticking over. These experts are rapidly running out of puff. But, when they look over their shoulders, what do they see? Too few replacements, and too far away.
The explanation for New Zealand’s crumbling infrastructure is, almost entirely, bound up with politics. The right-wing populism of Rob Muldoon was effective but expensive. His cancellation of Norman Kirk’s contributory superannuation scheme, which could easily have funded our required infrastructure investments, left him politically marooned and fiscally vulnerable. His increasingly idiosyncratic style of economic management also set up the conditions for the economic and social revolution unleashed by the Fourth Labour Government in 1984.
The neoliberal ideology which drove that revolution (and swiftly captured the National Party) was a reaction to, and an implacable foe of, the active state that produced the prosperous New Zealand of the 1960s and 70s. The “hands-on” style of nation-building which had been a feature of both Labour and National governments since 1935, was unceremoniously dumped. If infrastructure was in genuine need of refurbishment and/or replacement, then the Market would step in to reap the profits.
Except that capitalism has always relied upon the state to construct and preserve the physical and social infrastructure necessary for the realisation of private profit. If the behaviour of sovereign states since the global financial crisis of 2008-09, and during the current Covid-19 Pandemic, has not made that clear then it is difficult to imagine what could! Free movement of capital. Free movement of goods. Free movement of labour. Such is the neoliberal catechism – and New Zealand has been an apt pupil.
It was the free movement of labour that hurt New Zealand the most. By forcing tertiary students to take out loans to pay for their tuition, neoliberal education policy more-or-less forced the country’s best and brightest to join the “Anywhere” class of globalised professionals and managers. By destroying organised labour, neoliberal workplace relations drove New Zealand’s best workers across the Tasman to Australia where wages were 30 percent higher.
It was a deadly cocktail. In order to secure and retain some form of democratic mandate, successive neoliberal governments were obliged to offer tax cuts to their most reliable voters. This hollowing-out of the state’s fiscal position meant key infrastructure was either overburdened with demands it could no longer safely fulfil, or simply shut down. To this ailing physical infrastructure was added a human infrastructure no longer equal to the nation’s needs. The only way to keep the state even semi-functional, was by opening New Zealand’s borders to tens-of-thousands of immigrant workers.
When traffic is reduced to a crawl, and broken water pipes send geysers soaring into the air, the neglect of the past 50 years can no longer be ignored. When crippling shortages of medical specialists and nurses render our hospitals unsafe, and there are no longer sufficient qualified teachers to adequately staff our schools, polytechnics and universities, then the crippling infrastructure deficit simply has to be addressed. The critical question confronting New Zealand, however, is: can these deficiencies be made good?
It is not just a question of finding the huge amounts of capital need to repair, replace and augment the nation’s physical infrastructure – it’s the strings that are attached. At the heart of the Three Waters controversy, for example, isn’t the fraught issue of “co-governance”, it’s the non-negotiable requirement of international lenders that the administrative entities needed to oversee the spending of the billions of dollars needed to bring our drinking-, storm-, and waste-water up to scratch are hermetically sealed-off from democratic interference.
Of even more concern is the decay of New Zealand’s human capital. Young New Zealanders of 2022 are simply not as literate, nor as numerate, as they were 50 years ago. Google, Wikipedia and YouTube notwithstanding, their general knowledge is abysmal. This is far from being a trivial objection. A good general knowledge is essential if young people are not to fall prey to misinformation, disinformation and wild conspiracy theories that infest social media. It is what they don’t know they don’t know that leads so many people down the rabbit-holes.
Most terrifying of all, when considering the scale of the repairs and renovations required of New Zealand over the next 50 years, is the question: who is going to do it? If the best and the brightest graduates New Zealand’s taxpayers can produce are snapped-up by overseas recruiters, who are we left with? The graduates the recruiters didn’t want? Who wants to live in a country built by the second-best engineers?
And then there are those who not only failed to make it to university, but didn’t even make it to school? The unprecedented number of truant kids who struggle to read simple instructions and perform basic calculations. How do you build a country with the people our over-stretched and understaffed education system failed to engage – failed to teach?
From somewhere, New Zealand needs to find the hope and the energy that built the physical and human infrastructure we’ve been living off these past, tragically wasted, 50 years. The only place to start looking for either of these qualities is at the bottom. God knows, we’ve done little enough to foster much in the way of hope or energy in our social depths, but we’re not going to find it anywhere else. Because the people who robbed this country of both, were the people at the top – and most of them don’t even live here anymore.
*Chris Trotter has been writing and commenting professionally about New Zealand politics for more than 30 years. He writes a weekly column for interest.co.nz. His work may also be found at http://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com.
111 Comments
' The explanation for New Zealand’s crumbling infrastructure is, almost entirely, bound up with politics'
Bollocks.
All political hues relied on energy and resource draw-down; this writer is energy/resource/entropy blind.
I suggest he does some homework: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/
And comes back when he knows enough to write something coherent re addressing entropy.
Which is not to say, however, that councils didn't collect money for waters infrastructure and spend it elsewhere - at least in Auckland prior to the super city and Watercare. There's an awful lot of deferred maintenance and leaving for others to worry about that has gone on.
Every time there's a council election all the rhetoric is on keeping rates down, not paying bills.
Claiming your truth to be "the" truth is probably the bigger issue. Repeating your truth over and over has the inverse effect of what you're aiming for, assuming that's to convince people the only concern they should have is resource depletion and energy scarcity.
You agree the sinking was 'the truth' on the Titanic? Not much point in addressing much else, unless of course one had a powerful need to avoid.
This is a good guide to where we are headed, infrastructure-wise:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0814275/
Smart leadership, lucky climate. We have neither - and a collection of commentators who seem unable to progress their thinking. That isn't just Trotter etc; that's a lot of folk including the Green echelon (they will doggedly pursue things like MMT, etc).
MMT is not an ideology that you "pursue" it is simply a description of how our monetary system operates. How politicians would utilise that knowledge is up to them. At the moment they don't have a clue how things work when they say that taxation and borrowing finance spending.
Chuckle.
Pragmatically, you can only play the best hand in your pack. Doesn't matter if it's sub-optimal. I've been playing in that space for decades (knowing it was coming).
I just get p----d off when folk determinedly (or so it seems to me, perhaps they are wired differently - choose to ignore, and thus to peddle - essentially horsepoo.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2015/04/programmed-to-ignore/
Sad reflection on a supposedly sapient species....
"At the heart of the Three Waters controversy, for example, isn’t the fraught issue of “co-governance”,....Yes, it is.
There is also the issue of the craven news media, Govt PR/spin doctors & an almost complete absence of hard political satire to contrast the Govts words with its actions. 50 years ago we had people like Brian Edwards Ian Fraser John Clarke, Billy T McPail & Gadsby etc.
Exactly. Co-governance demonstrates the paucity of thinking in this country where to fix the problems of the past we are creating new inequities. You will not take away my vote to bolster someone else's. If we can't find a better way around this, someone else will be penning a similar article in 50 years. On a stone tablet.
Unfortunately when we signed UN Declarations that support the Rights of Indigenous People, it's something we have to live with.
20 APRIL 2010
Prime Minister John Key announced today the New Zealand Government has given its support to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
The statement in support of the declaration:
- acknowledges that Maori hold a special status as tangata whenua, the indigenous people of New Zealand and have an interest in all policy and legislative matters;
https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/national-govt-support-un-rights-dec…
also from the statement link you provided:
"Will Māori get a veto right on government decisions?
The Treaty of Waitangi continues to be the basis for the Crown-Māori relationship. In some instances this does involve mutual agreement on proposals, notably Treaty claim settlements, but right of veto is not conferred."
And we can also elect to withdraw from UNDRIP as easily as Key & Jones covertly signed us into it - unannounced prior, with no electoral mandate for it.
calls on all parties to renounce UNDRIP - ACT New Zealand - For Freedom
I am not ok with co-governance at all I find it extremely racist, and I am not comfortable living in a racist society. To me racism is when you treat some different because of their race, but people are trying to change this simple definition and start arguing a completely different point. Just like they are doing with the word gender.
That being said you are also right that it will mean very little for the average Maori, what will help them is a return to a system of truly free education, teaching them about how manage their finance and spot all the people trying to sell them useless stuff, without this any extra money will just go immediately back to the rich. Also we need laws that are balanced not mainly designed to protect corporations.
All that co-governance will do is make a few Maori rich, make a more divided nation, and distract us for a few more decades while the rich get even richer.
The article articulates 50 years of underinvestment/incompetence in our infrastructure management, yet all you can come with is co-governance?
Since we have been pretty much run by pakeha throughout this period, perhaps you should focus on your own performance. Ardern, Orr, Robertson, Hawkesby - all pakeha. J^s)s wept, imagine if one of them was Maori - we'd never hear the end of it. Maybe co-governance will help pakeha to stop sucking???
Maori have had political representation & voting rights for over 150 years, longer than women. They have also had dedicated electoral seats over that time as well as the flexibility to vote on the General roll for over 50yrs. In recent decades Maori have been overrepresented as a group in the makeup of Parliament.
Many Maori political leaders have been around for a long time eg Winston, Bridges, Seymour
Yes, but not in positions of influence which are closely guarded. How many senior Treasury/RBNZ/Ministerial portfolio's have Maori had (and I'm not talking about 3rd tier roles like Head of HR)? There are plenty of well educated Maori - doctor's, lawyers, bankers who are pretty much locked out of positions of influence. Sure, we are thrown a cracker every now and then when someone wants to virtue signal but it always comes back to the network for the meaty roles.
As for voting, we were awarded 4 seats to vote for which on a pro-rate basis should have been 16. But I guess that's your benchmark of democracy.
Co-governance is not the boogie-man, take a look at your own performance first.
A position of influence in which culture, again?
Maori, pre European, were closer to sustainable levels of depletion than Europeans were then, and orders of magnitude closer than European-derived culture is now. But they were still unstainable, and right on the energy margins - which is why they fought, and why they ate the losers (energy-gain).
The joke is that you're wanting to climb onto A Deck, Titanic.
I suggest there are better ways to spend the remaining time. Nurturing friendships and community; fostering resilient food-production; coming up with a local triage plan.
That is the best question I've ever been asked.
I kid you not.
Left to subsist, the longest-running sustainable effort was the Australian Aboriginals (40--50k years). We have other things going for us; science knowledge, many already-extracted materials, much triage-able infrastructure, more plant varieties. Against us are an overshot global population (we will need to repel boarders at the borders, before we're done), sterile plants, climate, biodiversity loss, topsoil loss, aquifer depletion, city formats (no city over 1 million existed before Fossil energy).
Population comes first - crash reduction thereof (nothing to lose, Mother Nature would do it to us in uglier fashion). I advocate 2 million by 2070 for NZ (reckon that would weather the bottleneck). Not enough surplus energy to do a lot, so let roads revert, maybe keep rail (very efficient friction and gradient-wise), go local (village-size clusters at useful nodes; local leadership; a loose internet-type coordination (which Maori sort of had).
My fear is that much cultural gain, and much social advancement (currently being fiercely, woke-ly pushed) will be lost. I think we'd be poorer if we lost this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_X1MTjrRe2E or this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uO7EByvrIgA
I think we'll be doing a lot more food-production, a lot less rentier-ing and usury.
Thank you for the question.
I'm flattered, I think....I hope you are wrong though PDK, I really do. You make some good points though. Without fertiliser (Russia) we have minimal primary export industry, our current account explodes and we all become poorer. If/when China invades Taiwan then we will be living in a very different world. We will be forced to suspend trade with China and all that comes with that.
He has Rarotongan heritage, but where does Orr whakapapa to here? I don't think he does, it's certainly not documented anywhere and it would be if he identified as Maori. I'm not discrediting his heritage, but he needs to have a hapu here.
He gave this speech only a few weeks ago https://www.bis.org/review/r220614b.htm No tribe or hapu in his pepeha.
I couldn't care less what anyone "identifies with", the ToW guaranteed everyone "the rights & privileges of British subjects".
My going back beyond 160yrs / 5 generations of NZdrs to identify with both sides of my ancestry in the Scottish Highlands & Ireland is meaningless & self limiting personal history.
This bang on. Nz strategy is to bring in both low and high skilled migrants, to make up for our inability to educate and train. Weve got 11% of working age on benefits too, so there is something else going on. There is also lack of self reliance, motivation and hope, and this is what I see as the cause, not the effect.
In the 60s, not everything was perfect, but everyone had the opportunities from a decent education system and plenty of well paying jobs, so they were living in the present and weren't mining the past for grievances real and imagined.
In the 60's, there was enough surplus energy going into the system.
The onset of student debt, alone, should have rung warning bells (right across academia, one whoud have thought). It didn't; they just went on spending their silo-dependent tokens, as did we. That debt was just a facet of the bigger malaise; more and more aging physical infrastructure, less and less energy being apportioned to the exponentially-increasing maintenance (let alone the heroic assumptions being made, of future energy being available to underwrite pensions etc.).
It now takes more than a dollar of debt, to 'produce' a dollar of GDP - and GDP already (purposely) avoids the inconvenient! There isn't enough surplus energy to maintain our energy-hungry social construct (which, in hindsight, was a massive mistake) and we are staring down the barrel of triage, writ large.
About which, Trotter appears to be clue-less.
Here's a fun little year 10 maths exercise.
Given that a square meter of solar panels in the "sunny" Netherlands produces 125kWh of energy per year.
And New Zealand imports 46M barrels of oil per year.
And a barrel of oil holds 1700kWh of energy.
How many square kilometers of photovoltaics at Netherlands level efficiency would be required to replace the all the energy from all our oil imports?
Oh, dear, I've had another nagging thought. Someone has actually done the sums, haven't they? I mean a real actual engineer using real numbers in scientific units (ie NOT an economist who doesn't know how anything real works, using non SI units like dodgy, stretchy dollars).The coal needed to make the solar panels and install them is less than just making the electricity here from coal directly, on an ongoing basis? OK, I know I haven't quite worded that right, but you get the idea. There is an overall energy gain, er, isn't there, I mean a real one, not an imaginary one? Energy out is greater than energy in from the system as a whole?
The most seductive ideas are the ones you so want to be believe are true that you don't question the assumptions. To be clear, I'm for mining the coal and putting in the solar panels, but it has to be worthwhile.
PV plant life is negligible in the scheme of things. We should be starting to build more hydro now & transmission lines North from Manapouri.
I've travelled extensively in Japan several times: I remember a train ride up into the mountains along a river gorge & every 10kms for a 100kms there was another another hydro plant reusing the same water.
We do this in the South Island, (https://www.meridianenergy.co.nz/power-stations/hydro/about-the-waitaki…) and again to a degree on the Waikato river but what is missing is smaller scale hydo as well. What is missing from the Waikato and to a lesser degree the South Island is run-of-the-river installations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run-of-the-river_hydroelectricity) much easier to construct, less impacting environmentally.
Article aligns well with The 4th Turning - Strauss/Howe theory.
1972 - now follows the life cycle of the boomer generation as the dominant force within society.
If they theory holds true, then later this decade, when the millennial generation become the dominant force in society, many of these issues will be resolved over the following decades - just as the greatest generation did in the 1946-1970's period.
We might all be surprised what happens, when those with everything to lose if the status quo were to change, lose demographic power. The cracks in the baby boomer centric fortress are starting to show and the younger generations, in my view of dealing with both generations, are ready for change.
And I wouldn't confuse optimism with a theory (and its not my theory....). But having read the book about The 4th Turning, the more it appears correct...even in the personality traits you see within generations.
Boomers like to believe that the world won't survive without them - only they can do good things..that they are the moral teachers of everyone else...oddly they do this while holding the power and everything falls apart around them. If they are like their grandparents, they will use the millennial generation as their way of fixing their own failings (just as the Greatest generation were in the 1940's onwards).
... taking the kids to school , observing & eavesdropping in ... the millennials seem to me to be an energetic , greatly creative , freethinking group ... they give me positive feelings that the future is in good hands ... but , there will be change , they wont agree to or settle for alot of the BB's tired old ways ...
Taking my kids to school I see an education system that is broken, taking days off because the don't have enough teachers, biology classes are focused 50% on the social implications vaccines as opposed to teaching them biology. Math classes where they have to write their explanations essay style. A marking system that getting anything over achieved means nothing. Getting attitude reports instead of giving a parents an indication of how well the student is actually doing. Even when you do get marks there is a convoluted system where the mark they get depends of how they have should have been doing a subject.
The problem is focusing our limited resources teaching them to be politically correct, free thinking creative group instead of a actual subject. As a society we actually need a lot more boring people that do the actual work than free thinking artists and entertainers.
Another point from the Strauss-Howe theory that occurs during the crisis period as boomers step aside (now) is broken/dysfunctional institutions (think political, corporate, education etc..across the board). Which seems to be to me what we are witnessing.
From what you are saying above, the education system sounds like its right on point with needing a good clear out and redesign....
Interesting isn't it how when conditions aren't suited for settling down and procreating, a species stops/reducing doing so.
Perhaps we should create the conditions that make it suitable for procreation and young people do just that?
e.g. economic stability, affordable housing, work places and institutions with good leadership giving stable and satisfying employment, resulting in a less anxious and depressed group of 20-40 year olds....but instead we have done the opposite and wonder why young people aren't getting married and having children.
Fix the soil and the flower will bloom.
Thanks a lot! ;) But seriously, give us some power and trust, and we will surprise you. We have been mulling over the state of our nation since we signed up for student loans and entered the workforce during the GFC. We are hungry for change and motivated to make it happen. We just need to be allowed to do it.
Most wealth has been transferred from wages and savings to land. The best option might affect you positively: incentivise productive work and disincentivise land speculation by raising LVT on the unimproved value of land (recapturing some of those wealth transfers) and reducing income tax to reward work.
But boomers tell me they all did amazing jobs and built the entire country from nothing!
I know quite a few boomers and most are all just out for themselves. They whine about how infrastructure is crumbling, the kids aren't educated and the crime rates, while at the same time demand tax cuts and put their hands out for government support for everything they can think of. Not many have any clue about investing in the countries future, they all just run on the spot with their hands out, dreaming of becoming property millionaires.
Most on this site are pretty good, but it's not a reflection of the entire generation unfortunately.
At what size of population can the New Zealand economy provide all of its people with a first world standard of living? Who benefits when we add another household to the 50%- 60% that pay nothing in tax when you take into account the transfer payments they receive?
"Fifty wasted years" - life of CT , spent agitating for socialism.
The government has its own sovereign currency and is never dependent upon money from superannuation schemes before it can spend and it would never use such money anyway, that is not how the governments finances operate. Savings in superannuation funds are for the private sector to make use of.
The government is never financially constrained in what it can do but only by the resources that is has at its disposal and which can be mobilised for the public good.
Chris clearly needs to sprinkle something on his weetbix as he is having a bad day
Sure some of the issues in NZ are internal and some a lack of understanding that the world has changed
Way easier (pre-pandemic anyway) to get on a plane and fly away which wasnt going to happen in the 60's
And we still have much better facilities and services now than when I was a kid despite the issues and despite the slow drift to state control of our everyday lives
So chin up Chris - maybe you need a visit to the Federation of Russia just to see how far behind us the ideal socialist world has become because you wont get it from watching RT (or reading the Dom Post)
Interesting point Grattaway. It occurred to me too that CT was having a bad day. Perhaps too many expensive imported wines with his Karori academic mates the night before?
The Kirk government's mandatory super scheme was based on the good idea that getting old was fairly predictable and making personal provision for retirement was a worthy thought. I seem to remember the architect of the scheme was the young Roger Douglas.
A significant reason for people to take their votes away from Labour was the obvious problem of trusting the sole superannuation administrator...ie the "gummit". I would guess not a few voters remembered Labour's pre WW2 "Social Security" scheme where they took (invested?) one and sixpence off your wage with promise the funds would be there when you needed health, unemployment or retirement funds. Of course we know that both Labour & National governments "spent the lot" in each of their electoral cycles.
Would CT be the only person in NZ to actually believe that the billions$ collected from Roger's scheme would have been carefully invested to give the retiree his, (hers) own money back, plus the employer's contribution, plus the substantial interest earned on said careful investments...that none of the subsequent governments would not have raided the fund for all manner of needed projects?
I think pigs might fly,....or at least the canny voters who put their tick in favour of National at that next election so believed.
This trojan horse government will not do the hard work to right this ship. They need to roll back some of the freemarket reforms and nationalise key industries such as building supplies, scrap the gentailers and generally bring costs down in this overhyped and expensive country. Who now believes the hype when you're struggling to make the mortgage payments and you fear the weekly food shop bill. Instead Willie Jackson et al have lead us down the rabbit hole.
Wow, someone is blackpilled today!
The political system is purposefully bound to a lack of purpose beyond managing the society for the extraction of rents under the present neoliberal system. Couple things though.
1. We don't need three waters. We could found an infrastructure investment bank who exists exclusively to lend to government institutions on infrastructure projects, which would issue bonds for these municipalities to fund these projects, which could then be used as low risk investments for kiwisavers etc.
2. The lack of political vision is because the radical energy on the wings of politics isn't there. No radical right or radical left means no energy enters the system anymore. We only get energy from liberal extremists in the greens on one side or act on the other for more of the same.
3. The structure of the international system, the use of outsourcing to destroy unions, the debt slavery system of drinking the maximal mortgage yield out of middle class workers, the endless wage suppression by importing endless foreign workers. You can't stop the immigration because the immigrants themselves see their vested interests in keeping it open to their kin. You can't rebuild the unions without controlling the flow of labour, which means cutting off immigration. You fundamentally can't overcome these things unless you enforce these control over the labour supply. You can't control the banks, who blew up this housing bubble, unless you can control the political power which doesn't dismantle them.
Fundamentally the change that Chris is constantly upset about is prevented by the way the system is structured. It will only end once the establishment media, institutions of policymaking and academia have been discredited enough that they can be stomped over by a Caesar figure who can direct things for his own power and save the masses from this.
We ultimately only have two sources of NZ dollars, those which are created by the government when it spends as its own liability and those created by the banks as the liability of the borrower. The government never needs other peoples money to spend as it creates its own and why would it exchange one liability just to replace it by another..
Labour's greatest hero , Sir Roger Douglas was right ... but , his policies have been watered down , 3 watered down by Cullen , English & Robbo ... and we're all the worse off for that creeping creaking extension of the welfare state ....
.... the cure for NZ ? ... bring back & embrace neoliberalism ....
Environment supports and shapes behaviour, and our infrastructure creates environment.
Unfortunately, the infrastructure we have does not support the behaviour that is now deemed desirable by those whose planning has led to decades of under-investment and inappropriate solutions.
I think some scepticism is warranted of the political class who led us to this place, but do not seem to be capable of providing the environment to help us alter the way we behave.
A few illustrative examples –
- Suburban monoculture cities that we are still building, whose expensive low density and compartmentalised structure means they don’t (and maybe can’t) support public transport that meets the needs of the residents and reduces the need to drive everywhere to participate in life.
- Educational infrastructure that doesn’t foster curiosity, practical skills, and does not prepare the people we need to make the country function, while loading young people with debt some of them may never be able to repay.
- A debased transport infrastructure that makes us ever-less productive and drives everybody mad in the process. The need to move people and goods around the landscape isn’t going to go away, but all the different heavy carriage alternatives – road, rail, and sea - are badly degraded with no sign of meaningful redevelopment in any of them. So, we end up with the simple solution: large numbers of heavy trucks pounding the hell out of ill-designed, under-maintained roads and productivity-sapping reductions in speed limits because major roads are now not deemed safe at the previous limits, despite many of them being reworked.
A good post, I would add that the lack of educational infrastructure has ensured the other outcomes as we lose our ability to agree on analysis meaning decisions are a popularity contest. We are therefore reduced to experiential learning and so it is only when things are in crisis we can react.
Robert Muldoon Right Wing ??? - I was only a boy - but didn't Muldoon control the economy with regulations, tariffs, import licences, protectionism for inefficient government owned businesses, disincentivised people having second jobs thru high taxes, created large government owned enterprises and industry (Think big). I would say he was the last real socialist we had.
He tried to keep a way of life going. As anyone would who had enjoyed any era. None of his moves were right or left - merely an attempt to continue.
Which is our problem now, and it may well be terminal for humankind. It's not the fault of left or right - both worshipped a falsehood, both are going to endure the consequences.
I would push it back further than 50 years, poor economic planning all around in NZ history:
Māori settlement - not too bad, a bit of long term deforestation and loss of a key food source (the moa).
European settlement - reliant on Māori for food and resources to survive. Oh no! Our colonial mindset makes this impossible! Invent reasons to confiscate Māori land.
This continues.
1950s - Oh no! We don't have the labour to do the work we need. Get Māori to do low skilled work from rural areas into the cities.
1960s-1970s - Oh no! There's no more Māori to bring into the cities. We hadn't thought that through either. Let's ask our Pasifika friends to come here instead.
2000s - Oh no! We still haven't thought through this whole labour problem. Asia it is.
Where to next?
It is the same the world over. The UK elites exploited the working class, particularly northerners by enclosing the common land and then forcing them to work in mines and mills. Then they imported Indians and West Indians, then Eastern Europeans. Post Brexit with the loss of cheap labour they are struggling for hospital staff and agricultural labour.
Perhaps that is why NZ state education is now so terrible, they plan use the uneducated poor to do the manual labour.
National should be hammering Labour on education (but I think they should forget charter schools). What we need is for every school to teach the same curriculum to the same standard. Quality education for all - and no more postcode lotteries.
When our local school introduced child led learning and learning through play, I had a few questions for a deputy head. He told me that learning facts was pointless, what was important was wellbeing, teamwork and transferable skills, if they needed facts they could use google.
I asked how they would know what to google, if they didn't know anything, and what their wellbeing would be like, as adults, if they had no academic qualifications. He didn't talk to me much after that.
Yes it has been an interesting journey, lots of teachers in my family (4) so I had a ring-side seat to this transition. For me removing the cane was a must do, as a recipient in my time it was helpful to have the punishment conclude quickly but the likelihood of true justice was minimal.
As society has moved on to a post-patriarchy world so education needed to move. I think our schools reflect our society.
Our politicians send their kids to private and grammar schools so have little interest in what happens in a low decile state school. One radical policy would be to nationalise all private schools. If the rich and powerful had to send their kids to the local school, they may take more interest in raising the educational standards for all.
My kids do a lot of self directed learning, particularly if they have a poor teacher. They use Kahn academy and other on-line tools. But they do need to have some kind of curriculum to follow and a way to measure progress. You cant just say to a kid, "here's an i-pad, go find out what you need to know". It doesn't work that way.
It is amazing how many of the proponents of modern learning environments have degrees and post-graduate qualifications - yet they tell the kids that formal education is not important, well it seemed to work fine for them. Perhaps a good school education is only meant for the middle classes who can afford to pay for it?
"And then there are those who not only failed to make it to university, but didn’t even make it to school? The unprecedented number of truant kids who struggle to read simple instructions and perform basic calculations. How do you build a country with the people our over-stretched and understaffed education system failed to engage – failed to teach?"
Oh dear...that has been a big part of the problem...encouraging all and sundry that a university education ( with the associated debt) will be the key to an advanced economy...it has been shown to be the bollocks it always was...meanwhile we cant re build or maintain the existing infrastructure.
As a boomer I dont buy this decreasing education standards. When I started High School at a well known all boys school.
12 classes in 3rd form
6 classes in 5th form
20 boys in 7th form (10 worked at the freezing works all year and played rugby)
Not much truancy to report as everyone just left !!!
We stopped investing in education just when we needed to invest more (more people realised its important).
Demographics - reducing working age population world wide. The modern world has never faced this before and its going to get worse very soon.NZ rural working age population reducing by 15 to 30% in next 15 years.
Phillipines now short of nurses because NZ, Australia, USA stealing them all - they may start banning them from leaving!!
Have a friend in Jakarta running a business - cant get staff, young people wont go outside the city to work etc etc - sounds very familiar!!! and this in a country of @260 million and considered less developed than us.
Europe will have 30 million less working age people than now in 2050 but more people living there - do the maths!!
Co governance is the least of our issues - I have some friends who should know better and they have been sucked down this rabbit hole - I have far greater concerns than this as the mobs in charge for the past eons have refused to think beyond a 3 years cycle. Going forward our labour pool will rely more and more on Maori and Pacifica (there % of the youth labour market is and will grow fast)- if you don't provide the right environment good luck. Old white men will get more grumpy, silly and childish. I saw a Groundswell comment wondering where all the people under 45 to 50 years were?
With Kiwisaver and Infrastructure funds there is no shortage of capital - there arent enough people to do the work here or anywhere (Demograhics again).
Energy wont get cheaper unless we find some miracle source.
Will be an interesting ride
Great comment
You'd appreciate the inference to biomass (real-time solar, vs trees which are some years, or FF which are millions) in this:
Great article, while not agreeing with everything said
it does highlight a massive gap in our current infrastructure that no government has effectively tackled to date
Part of that could be the average term that these governments are in power and that they typically have short term focused agendas that focus on pleasing their constituencies and not focussed on the 'future of NZ'
It's sad to see.. but short term governments bring short term thinking....
Roger Douglas & David Lange in action carving up NZ.
The only difference between then compared to now is that 'they're' not saying the word 'reform!'
Someone Else’s Country looks critically at the radical economic changes implemented by the 1984 Labour Government — where privatisation of state assets was part of a wider agenda that sought to remake New Zealand as a model free-market state. The trickle-down ‘Rogernomics’ rhetoric warned of no gain without pain, and here the theory is counterpointed by the social effects (redundant workers, Post Office closures).
It didnt work then, and it isnt going to work now.
PS. Even then they didnt limit how many times they used the word, "Crisis!"
https://www.nzonscreen.com/title/someone-elses-country-1996
Chris
Thank you! thank you! for calling out the evil that is neoliberal economics. The demon that feeds on the common wealth created by past generations; and steals from future generations to satisfy sensations and consumption.
This model needs absolute destruction and a return to community focus and investment for others not a focus on me me me.
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