Somewhat depressingly – in amongst all the other travails of the education sector – teachers in what used to be called the ‘Primers’ are now reporting having to cope with many new entrants devoid of ground-zero life skills. Like toileting, dressing, elementary speech and social awareness, and the like. Even apparently total ignorance of such seeming essentials as toothbrush use. (I must admit in my day toothbrushing wasn’t something done at school, but at least we knew how to use one back home.)
How has it come to this?! Wasn’t society meant to be all about onward and upward?
For a while NZ seemed to be doing so well. We were the global poster child for Top PEG – Progressive Egalitarian Society. We had Plunket and free milk for all school kids. We topped most of the international charts in terms of general standard of living, education standards, health care, cheap lamb chops and butter, roof-over-the-head provision, and social cohesion.
Now we only excel in all sorts of horror OECD metrics such as youth suicide and unemployment, domestic violence, incarceration, socio-economic inequality, child poverty, homelessness, addictions, and so on and depressingly so forth. And now we also need to take out a mortgage if we want lamb chops or butter on the shopping list.
This is a pretty spectacular undoing that took some doing. It didn’t just accidentally happen overnight – much midnight oil must have been burned to effect such a monumental leap backwards. Cogs were very intentionally put in place, together with the dynamics to set them turning. But why the hell would anyone want to even contemplate such a catastrophic quality of life sea change?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, and sadly very predictably even, the answer lies with that ancient arch enemy – human greed. In our case – because we have to own it to learn from it – let’s just make it personal and tag it Kiwi Greed. More specifically, major greed by a collective of Very Greedy Kiwis. And we let them get away with it because a) it was a largely unknown new beast in the bush, and b), the little bit of greed in all of us thought that some of it would rub off on us too.
In short, we sold out. Bigtime. Spearheaded by Labour’s Roger Douglas (‘Rogernomics’), who in turn was lap-dogging at the heels of the Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher ‘reforms’, we bought into the mantras that eventually became known as neo-liberalism – the dogma that markets know best, and the best thing governments can do is get the hell out of it and let markets sort it all out.
We let ourselves have the wool pulled over our eyes that ‘business’ wasn’t about producing goods and services that actually benefitted the wider community – with fair returns for the providers of those goods and services – but about producing exponentially increasing ‘profits’ that rewarded extractive financial vested and private interests dominated by a self-chosen relative few, from whose over-flowing pockets coins would spill for the benefit of all those scrabbling below.
Economic ‘Reform’ is an eternal process, necessary to keep apace ever-changing circumstances, and there’s no doubting that the 1970s and ’80s were no different in this respect. But unfortunately the extent to which we allowed ourselves to be captured by this bright new theoretical bauble meant the baby got thrown out with the bathwater. The result was a monumental rupture of the social and economic fabric that led to a massive transfer of wealth from the lower socio-economic tiers to the top, with all the toxic baggage that goes hand in hand with major meltdown of crucial social cohesion and exponentially widening inequality.
The top-tier lever-pullers usually swear black and blue that their ‘success’ is solely due to their own dogged determination and outstanding entrepreneurship, disregarding the fact that business operations depend on extensive and intricate publicly funded societal infrastructure, including educated workforces. Perhaps the most graphic example of this, the dozen or so critical technological innovations that stepping-stoned the whole electronic digital communication revolution – including the internet itself – resulted from publicly (i.e. Government) funded research and development entities, albeit mostly defence related.
Normal recognition of society’s wider contribution to these major technological and industrial operations is via commensurate taxation to help fund the whole wider package. But sadly – as in most OECD-type countries – the so-called neo-liberal economic ‘reforms’ have allowed the politico-economic processes to be captured by a relative few with deep purses and powerful proxies. The result is now in our faces, with those commercial and business interests relying heaviest on wider societal structure now contributing – in relative terms – the least towards it.
To be sure, there are many complexities involved in the whole taxation regime, but a term commonly heard that pretty much sums up the whole scenario is “corporate welfare”. And as Warren Buffett – one of the richest handful of humans on the planet – famously observed, even he was bewildered by a tax regime that allowed him to pay a lower personal tax rate than that of one of his office receptionists.
As business empires grow to the point where increasing market share fosters monopoly power, inevitably we see the Greed factor exponentially spiral as well, opening doors for the predatory and parasitic instincts to walk right in. Before you know it, you have delivery drivers for Jeff Bezos’s Amazon monolith, for example, having to pee into a bottle en route as toilet stops on company time are considered ‘bunking’, and duly noted and penalised. Or where some of their employees have to overnight in personal vehicles in the company car park as wages are insufficient for even the most modest local rents, while Jeff rents Venice for his wedding or plays Who’s Got the Biggest Rocket.
But to return to our own patch, the truly disappointing aspect of our plummeting relative standard of living is that, while by no means perfect, we had it so good and blew it. Many purported economists assert that our problem lies not in the number of paid hours we clock up (apparently we’re quite high on that metric) but in what’s labelled as our ‘productivity’. This is measured in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the total value of goods, services and revenue produced, and when divided by the various inputs used to produce it. The labour component usually figures as the main denominator, but elements such as capital and resources are also in play, and either way we’re OECD cellar dwellers.
But the main problem in this analysis of where we’re going wrong is the metric itself – GDP is an absolutely crap metric for measuring true ‘economic’ worth and performance, and it’s equally crap that most economists cling to it as if their life depended on it! It’s quite refreshing to see – with regard to current ‘economic’ goings-on – the increasing currency given to the awesome Oscar Wilde’s highly quotable quote that the definition of a cynic is he who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.
But with all respect to the truly scintillating Oscar, that’s not the definition of a cynic but an ignoramus.
As colleague Steve Baron points out, the devil is in the detail when it comes to rating economic ‘progress’. A lot depends on what metric is chosen to do the measuring. Our present prime minister, the Great Deodoriser & Groomer Christopher Luxon, spends a great deal of his time telling everyone how all their dreams are coming true as they chow down on foodbank handouts, and, if questioned, can produce some sort of treasury graph showing how one isolated aspect of the economy is technically improving while ignoring the fact that all else is going to hell in a handcart.
Similarly with housing. Things are looking up, the Treasury Bench incumbents say, because house prices relative to average income – particularly in Auckland – have fallen. Which is true on one level, but mainly only because we incentivised housing to become casino chips, and thus ended up with one of the most over-valued housing markets on the planet. Sure, that ratio has fallen a bit lately, but is still more than double what was once considered normal and reasonable.
Others tout population expansion as the way forward, with supposed accompanying efficiencies of scale and so forth. At the moment this is mainly through immigration, as home-grown child-raising has become increasingly unaffordable through the neo-liberal predations on wider society. But this of course flagrantly ignores the fact that NZ was at its zenith on most social and economic scales when its population was less than half what it is now, not to mention how global population pressures are already driving many of the ingredients of wider environmental meltdown.
Super-tech toy-boys play with their rockets while helping doom-spiral the very planet that resources their machinations – while simultaneously preparing the bunkers and planning the extra-terrestrial sanctuaries to escape the lethal fallout of their own collective madnesses.
If ever a planetary re-set was needed it is now. Old-time megalomaniacs have often tried their best to screw the planet to their own advantages, but the technology of the time only let them go so far. Now, bad actors have a cornucopia of devil’s tools to help wreak their havoc – way beyond what even a Genghis Khan and his bow-and-arrowed hordes could have conjured up in their wildest imaginings.
In the broader picture, little old NZ is small change. But now and again the mouse has roared, and fellow inhabitants on the planet have taken note. The 2026 election is the time for a NZ re-set too.
When the UN was being established, NZ’s then PM Peter Fraser was widely praised for helping the nation punch well above its weight in establishing a workable framework for international cooperation and fraternity. Just recently, our Foreign Minister Winston Peters conversely scraped the barrel on NZ’s behalf by abstaining from a vote on a measure to improve such cooperation with regard to potential pandemics. Of the 193 full sovereign UN nations, our only co-abstainer was Paraguay – hardly a paragon of progressive politics. Talk about bottom-of-the barrel buddies.
Sadly we’ve now been re-colonised by offshore capital and corporations, and our premium export is presently the legions of our best and brightest high-tailing it for better pickings abroad despite all manner of other major threats ravaging the wider world. This speaks volumes as to why we need a re-set from parties that for too long now have indirectly been in the back pocket of shareholders other than the NZ public.
I loathe to repeat the old cliché definition of insanity (i.e. doing the same thing, etc..), but if there was ever a time to do something different, now is that time.
By and large, NZ is still a pretty nice place to hang out, given some alternative locations. In the words of the immortal John Clark/Fred Dagg, “we don’t know how lucky we are”, but that’s only because we started from a very high bar.
For the last half century or so, that bar has dropped dramatically, and we’ve been doom-looping on all the major, true quality-of-life benefits that used to flow from the generally healthy, cohesive society we once had. This election, something different needs putting in place to help mend our unnecessarily over-fraught and fractured society. The same ol’ same ol’ just doesn’t cut it anymore.
Frank Greenall has been a copywriter, scriptwriter, artist, political cartoonist, adult literacy tutor and administrator, and Whanganui Chronicle columnist for many years, amongst numerous other sundry occupations. His cartoons and articles have appeared in most major NZ newspapers at various times. He has a BA in politics and a Masters in adult literacy/numeracy. https://stevebaron.co.nz/author/frankgreenall/