The Post: Government undermining house-building efforts of Labour regime

Read the original article in the Post

It was, in the words of one visitor, “kind of secret squirrel”. Although the Christchurch office building belonged to the Homes and Communities Agency, Kāinga Ora, no external signage acknowledged this fact.

Inside, staff had to switch off phones and emails. “I felt like I was entering MI5 or something,” this visitor tells me. Instead they found a room stuffed with every kind of housing professional – from architects to resource-consent experts to engineers – all plotting the delivery of state housing projects. On the walls, a stream of Post-It notes, each one representing a different stage of house-building, moved from left to right, the whole process designed to create a seamless, delay-free flow of tasks.

This work, carried out under the sci-fi-esque title of Project Velocity, became the more soberly named Housing Delivery System (HDS). But the goal remained: slashing the time and cost taken to build homes for the country’s most vulnerable residents.

It seems to have worked, too. The pilots reportedly cut construction costs by 40-60%, thanks to getting everyone in the same room at the outset, minutely planning workflows and avoiding ordering the wrong materials.

The usual building-site inefficiencies – notably, waiting for the right tradies to turn up at the right time – diminished sharply. Kāinga Ora claims labour productivity “doubled”, and former board member Philippa Howden-Chapman says the time between design and consenting fell from 17 months to just six weeks.

All this matters intensely in a week when the government launched a “turnaround” plan for state housing that looked more like “Project Managed Decline”. After completing Labour’s project pipeline, the government will cap the number of Kāinga Ora homes at around 78,000.

As the population – and thus housing need – increases, the proportion of that need that Kāinga Ora meets will slowly fall. Meanwhile NGOs – the other main provider – have funding to build just 500 homes annually for the next three years. Contrast this with Labour’s six-year tenure, when nearly 18,000 houses were added at an ever-accelerating pace.

National’s attempt to undermine this success takes two forms. The first is to complain about Kāinga Ora’s debts. But as Howden-Chapman noted last year, “Has anyone ever bought a house or built a house without doing any borrowing?”

The increased debt largely represents increased ambitions. It guarantees that future generations will pay their share of the investment in ensuring vulnerable people are housed. (Which, incidentally, saves a fortune in health and other avoided costs.)

Some of the debt, of course, might have been incurred because Kāinga Ora was inefficient. Finance Minister Nicola Willis claimed as much last year, saying its build costs were 12% higher than in the private sector.

But even National’s anointed Kāinga Ora chair, Simon Moutter, noted that private developers can “pick and choose” their sites, while his agency must work with awkwardly situated land. It also builds many disability-friendly homes and has sought the highest environmental ratings.

On an apples-for-apples basis, Kāinga Ora’s costs may be roughly the same as those of private developers. Of course, given its economies of scale and opportunities for learning-by-doing, Willis is right to say the state agency’s costs should be far lower. But HDS was starting to address that, and Moutter has a target to cut costs another 20%.

We must also remember that Kāinga Ora had to start almost afresh. Under the previous National government, more state houses were sold than built; a deficit of about 14,000 homes – relative to population growth – accrued, deepening the catastrophic sales under Jim Bolger in the 1990s. John Key’s government also did “almost no” renewals of ageing stock, according to Kāinga Ora.

Labour, in short, inherited a massive maintenance backlog and a state agency that had lost all knowledge of how to build at scale. This is one reason why left-wing governments often look “inefficient”: they have to restore so much depleted capacity before anything else happens.

In growing Kāinga Ora’s capacity ten-fold, and at high speed, Labour may have made mistakes, setting its remit too broad and creating a behemoth often unloved by local communities and even the more socially minded developers. But the party was responding to an appalling deficit in social housing, which is still just 4% of our housing stock when the developed-country average is 7%.

We need over 40,000 more social homes simply to reverse the cuts of the last 30 years and to house the 112,000 people living on the streets, in temporary shelter and in overcrowded dwellings. Curbing Kāinga Ora does nothing to solve those problems.

Still, even National’s steady-state solution involves building 1500 homes a year (counterbalanced by sales and demolitions). Selected staff including Caroline McDowall, the head of housing delivery, have been retained.

The best-case scenario, in short, is that Kāinga Ora maintains – or even sharpens – its capacity for delivering high-quality housing efficiently. Then it won’t be so painful for the next Labour government to scale it up again.

The Spinoff: My ancestors were colonisers

Read the original article on the Spinoff

Charles Wilson Hursthouse I

It is a beautiful object, and yet it holds something ugly. The tattered leather notebook, roughly the size of my hand, flips open to reveal a lining of silver stars on a deep blue background. Further inside is a jumble of surveyor’s notes, made in pencil: a sketch of a road cutting; a measurement set down as “South 332˚ 0 – North 201˚ 30 – arc of height”; the cost – twenty-four pounds, ten shillings and sixpence – of hiring a wagon for two months. And then, over the page, a translation, from te reo Māori to English. 

The translated material comes from two speeches by the prophets Tohu and Te Whiti, the leaders of the Parihaka community that peacefully resisted the theft of indigenous land in the late 19th century. The translator is someone else entirely. He will later be criticised in court for the errors in his renderings; more seriously still, he assists in the confiscation of Taranaki land, and serves as the interpreter for the invading forces when Parihaka is sacked in 1881.

This translator, and sometime surveyor, is my great-great-great-uncle Charles Wilson Hursthouse. His notebook is held in the New Plymouth library, Puke Ariki, and I am seated in its reading room, turning the faded pages and pondering three intertwined questions. What led Charles Wilson, and indeed his wider family, to perform actions that we now so severely condemn? How do I absorb this inheritance of memory? And what relevance does it have, right now, amidst the rekindled debates about how settler and indigenous peoples can abide with each other?

Mob I

My ancestors, Englishmen and women who settled in Taranaki from 1843 onwards, were unusual migrants. A mixture of highly literate professionals and small-scale landowners, they were “gentry … although in reduced circumstances”, according to one of their biographers, the historian Frances Porter. They had come to New Zealand less for personal advancement – though there was that, too – and more because they sought better health, a closer connection to nature and the chance to build a fairer society. New Zealand, Porter wrote, offered “the opportunity … for stretching mind and limbs”. During their emigration, my ancestors’ three distinct families – Hursthouses, Richmonds and Atkinsons – became tightly wound, by marriage, co-location and emotional sympathy, into one larger clan. Their fond nickname for each other was “the Mob”.

Rapidly pressed into service in the colony’s nascent political scene, the Mob soon numbered in their ranks a prime minister (Sir Harry Atkinson), a minister of native affairs and later supreme court judge (C. W. Richmond), a minister of lands (William Richmond Hursthouse), another minister of native affairs (J. C. Richmond), and sundry newspaper editors and regional politicians. The women of the family, though ineligible for high office, immersed themselves in the intellectual, spiritual and political debates of the day. The Mob were, in the view of the Nelson Colonist, “the most prominent of the governing families of New Zealand”.

Sometimes, within their settler world, my ancestors were a force for social progress. As a Taranaki farmer, Sir Harry had long stressed the virtues of individual self-reliance, hard work and thrift, but later came to realise that these virtues did not, by themselves, offer sufficient protection against economic shocks. Witnessing the poverty unleashed by the Long Depression of the 1880s, he became one of the first advocates of state support for those in dire need. His proposal to levy an early form of income tax – and use the revenue to assist widows, orphans, the elderly and the sick – was decades ahead of its time. 

Outside parliament, the family made useful contributions. In a court case concerning the Irish freedom fighters known as “Fenians”, an oppressed minority in colonial New Zealand, C. W. Richmond delivered a judgement of relative leniency and tolerance. His daughter Mary helped found New Zealand’s kindergarten movement, and the Mob’s women were influential advocates for temperance and female education. Unlike many of their contemporaries, the family’s politicians believed in public service for its own sake, rather than as a means to get rich. The Mob’s members read widely on philosophy and religion. They were scientific investigators. They held an intense curiosity about the world. And they singularly failed to apply these values to their dealings with Māori.

C.W.H. II

During his 70 years of life, Charles Wilson Hursthouse found himself at the scene of an improbably large number of historical events. Entering adulthood in 1850s Taranaki, he turned his hand to various frontier occupations, first of all surveying, a profession whose “naming, taming, marking out and mapping of the land” were, in the words of the historian Giselle Byrnes, “assertions of colonial power”. 

One of his first tasks was to help survey the Waitara “Purchase”, a large expanse of prime Taranaki land acquired in dubious circumstances. Charles Wilson’s older cousin C. W. Richmond had helped authorise the land’s sale by a minor chief, Te Teira, even though the latter had no right to dispose of it. Kuia from the local iwi, Te Ati Awa, responded with non-violent resistance, repeatedly pulling up the surveyors’ measuring pegs. 

The Crown’s attempt to quell this resistance formed the opening salvo of the New Zealand Wars. At Waireka, on March 18, 1860, the Taranaki Rifle Volunteers and Militia became the first colonial unit to take the field against Māori. Sergeant W. H. Free “had the honour”, as one settler historian put it, of firing the first shot; Charles Wilson fired the second.

Although this phase of the war ended in ceasefire less than a year later, Charles Wilson continued his dual life as surveyor and militia-man. He did so throughout the 1860s and 70s, the main phase of the New Zealand Wars, as the colonial government – acting on trumped-up pretences – invaded and then confiscated large swathes of the central North Island. When the Waikato iwi retreated to their stronghold in the King Country, a new centre of Māori resistance emerged at Parihaka, the village where the followers of Tohu and Te Whiti had gathered, halfway between Mt Taranaki and the sea.

By 1880, Charles Wilson had risen to the rank of lieutenant, and served briefly on the Taranaki Provincial Council. He had also become the council’s resident engineer, and it was in this capacity that he was charged with pushing a road through the fields used by Parihaka’s inhabitants. Once again, his survey pegs were pulled up.

Charles Wilson nonetheless became a frequent visitor to Parihaka. Drawing on language skills acquired during two decades of contact with Māori, he sent numerous translations of Tohu and Te Whiti’s speeches to politicians and the press. (Hence the notebooks held at Puke Ariki.) Meanwhile settler anger over Parihaka, a symbol of indigenous resistance, grew with each passing month. 

When, in 1881, the colonial government sent troops to attack the village, Charles Wilson acted as their interpreter. In an event later known as Te Rā o te Pāhua, the Day of Plunder, around 1,600 troops marched on Parihaka, only to be greeted by children singing and adults seated silently. As the Crown has subsequently acknowledged in its formal apology, the troops began “forcibly evicting many people who had sought refuge there, dismantling and desecrating their homes and sacred buildings … and systematically destroying their cultivations and livestock”. The apology also notes “the rapes committed by Crown troops in the aftermath of the invasion”, acts that caused “immeasurable and enduring harm … to the women of Parihaka, their families, and their descendants until the present day”. 

In the aftermath of the invasion, the land around Parihaka was either confiscated or removed from its owners’ control, while Tohu and Te Whiti were held without trial for 18 months. Charles Wilson’s translations, which had formed part of the government’s pretext for invading, were later deemed suspect. Casting the prophets’ speeches as more bellicose than they really were, his interpretations had been, historian Hazel Riseborough judged, “full of … inconsistencies”.

The Mob II

In their pursuit of settlement, and their indifference to its effects on Māori, my ancestors were well within the mainstream of colonial opinion. Some dissenters sought to preserve indigenous rights: the missionary Octavius Hadfield, for one, correctly described the Waitara Purchase as “a flagrant act of injustice”. But few settlers felt the same way; certainly not my ancestors. They never questioned their belief that, as Porter put it, “in the North Island of New Zealand were thousands upon thousands of acres of unoccupied, untilled land simply awaiting the axe, the plough, and European occupancy”. 

Māori, as has been well-documented, saw their land quite differently. Viewing it as a collective possession, they claimed “exclusive rights in their gardens, hunting grounds and fisheries”, as the anthropologist Atholl Anderson put it in the 2014 book Tangata Whenua. They had also formed themselves into political entities such as iwi and hapū, settling disputes and making binding resolutions through hui that the academic Māmari Stephens has described as an “exercise of civic decision-making power”. Detailed tikanga determined status, allocated responsibilities and ensured justice. Māori had, in short, their own structures of government, adapted to the way they wanted to live.

My ancestors, though, had little interest in understanding such facts. Among the exceptions were Sir Harry’s brother Arthur, whose creation of one of the first English-Māori dictionaries suggested some desire for cross-cultural understanding. But even he was eager to wage war against local iwi, and by and large his cousins held even worse attitudes. C. W. Richmond, in the words of historian Keith Sinclair, knew “almost nothing about Māori culture or land tenure” – and what he did know, he didn’t like. The “beastly communism” of collective landholding, C. W. once argued, must be “destroyed”. Māori should become “civilised”, adopting British habits and practices. Elsewhere in the family, Richmond Hursthouse described the people of Parihaka as “scum”, while Sir Harry thought they were a “semi-barbarous” people led by “fanatics”.

The Mob may have had a vested interest in failing to respect Māori rights: their access to land, and the renewal of their prosperity, depended upon it. But they also appear, in a manner so profound that it goes beyond mere pecuniary interest, to have been unable to reach across the barriers of culture, to recognise that different traditions – alternative ways of holding land, relating to nature, and conceiving of rights, justice and fairness – could be in any way equal to their own. And so they, in various ways, contributed to the taking of Māori land, the removal of Māori autonomy over their own affairs, and the wider attempts, under the guise of “assimilation”, to suppress all that was distinctive about Māori culture. It was on J. C. Richmond’s watch, for instance, that the government finally abandoned the idea – mooted even in early colonial legislation – of self-governing Māori districts.

New Zealand history can, as a result, be something of a minefield for people like me. The columnist Matthew Hooton once joked that whenever a political tome is published, half of Wellington rushes to Unity Books – not to read the work, but to check the index for any mention of their name. A similar effect operates with my family and works of history. “What have they done now?” I ask myself as each book appears, scanning the pages for names beginning with H, R and A. Of course they have done nothing now, my 19th century ancestors, but we are constantly discovering more about their misdeeds, and those actions resonate right into the present day.

Take the now-infamous argument that the Treaty of Waitangi was “a simple nullity”, a phrase generally associated with an 1877 declaration by the chief justice, James Prendergast.  As mere “savages”, Māori could not – Prendergast thought – have had the mental capacity to assent to such an agreement. Thus the Treaty was null and void, a convenient verdict that heavily influenced New Zealand law for the next hundred years. Bad enough, you might think. But looking up the judgment one day, I was intrigued to discover that Prendergast had had a co-author – and then horrified to find that his partner in judicial racism was none other than C. W. Richmond. 

Another time, a cousin forwarded me a story about a carved wharenui (meeting house) that had long been on display at Te Papa and, before that, the Dominion Museum. The wharenui, Te Hau ki Turanga, had been carved by the Rongowhakaata iwi but was confiscated in 1867 by the Crown. In a 2022 interview, Te Papa’s kaihautū (co-leader), Arapata Hakiwai, said it had been “ripped from the heart and roots, the umbilical cord really, wrenched from the heart of Ōrākaiapu pā”. The man responsible? C.W.’s brother J.C., “informally acting as director of the Colonial Museum”.

Seeing Clearly I

We stand at one of the inflection points that have marked the relationship between Māori and Pākehā for over two centuries. In recent decades we have witnessed a growing Māori presence in public life: more reo Māori in the media, greater biculturalism in government agencies, wider uptake of indigenous images and concepts. Māori have also begun to demand a restoration – at least in part – of the autonomy they enjoyed before European arrival. Some elements of this autonomy, including Treaty settlements and te reo immersion schools, are now uncontroversial. 

But, as has been exhaustively canvassed, the last Labour government began extending this trend to include seats for Māori on local councils, a Māori health authority, and greater Māori influence over water use. Much of this is now labelled “co-governance”. The term sometimes denotes situations where Māori and Pākehā jointly manage a major, non-separable institution like a national park. But it has come to also describe the practice of Māori running separate services for Māori and, indeed, the calls for a parallel Māori sphere of government.

Such moves have been met with a backlash that now dominates New Zealand politics. Debates about co-governance consume the airwaves. Alongside attempts to wind back Māori wards and remove references to the Treaty of Waitangi from legislation, the major flashpoint has of course been Act’s Treaty principles bill, which seeks to limit any affirmative action that might help redress inequalities for Māori. 

Clearly, some Pākehā – or New Zealanders of European descent, to use the official terminology – are uncomfortable with where things are headed. In some cases this seems to be motivated by outright racism. The Christian evangelist Julian Batchelor, for instance, claims that teaching children to speak te reo is a form of abuse, and has likened the phrase “kia ora” to “heil Hitler”. It is hard to see this as anything else but hatred of another culture.

In other cases, I suspect, something subtler is at work. Some Pākehā feel “got at”; they think they are being made to apologise for acts they didn’t commit, to condemn their own culture as defective, to feel bad now because white people have done bad things in the past. But history need not be so threatening. I don’t think that, by and large, Pākehā are being asked to feel terribly guilty, nor would it achieve anything very much if we did. Guilt, for me, doesn’t pass down the generations, doesn’t travel in the blood. But we do have a public duty to perform an act at once complex and simple: to see things clearly, and then do something about them.

C.W.H. III

By 1884 Charles Wilson, having returned once more to surveying, was helping push the Main Trunk railway line through the King Country. There, he and two colleagues were captured by members of the Ngāti Kinokahu hapū seeking retribution for the attack on Parihaka. Three pigs were given the names of the three surveyors, and were killed and eaten. Apparently on the verge of being killed himself, Charles Wilson was rescued by a party that included yet another Māori prophet, Te Kooti. 

Resuming his surveying in the King Country, which kept him away from his New Plymouth family for long spells, Charles Wilson formed a relationship with a Ngāti Kinokahu woman, Mere Te Rongopāmamao Aubrey. Their daughter, Rangimarie, later became Dame Rangimarie Hetet, a craftswoman revered for having helped preserve the art of harakeke weaving. By this stage, Charles Wilson seems, from the documents he left, to have come to better appreciate the Māori world, and regret some of his past deeds. He later moved south, to Lower Hutt, and it was there, as he lay dying in 1911, that he finally told his Pākehā family about Rangimarie’s existence. 

Charles Wilson was buried at Taita Cemetery, nestled under Lower Hutt’s eastern hills; several decades later, and just a few kilometres further south, a wharenui was built by Te Ati Awa, whose members include Rangimarie’s many descendants. The meeting house, Arohanui ki te Tangata or Love to All the People, was named in honour of Tohu and Te Whiti.

Seeing Clearly II

To see clearly is, for me, to face hard truths front-on. It also requires us to hold good and bad in tension. Although the older histories were far too kind to my ancestors, it would achieve little to swing the pendulum its full arc, to collapse their characters into one-dimensional villains. We have to be able to see in double vision. We can accept that my ancestors’ actions were in line with the dominant moral judgments of their society, while acknowledging that they would fail – catastrophically, in some cases – the moral tests we apply today. We can see them from the point of view of their time and the point of view of ours. We can see that they behaved well towards their own community and terribly towards others.

Some people object to this line of thought, fearing that the better deeds will be used to excuse the worse ones. But the good doesn’t cancel out the bad, no more than the bad erases all memory of the good. Instead, in the tension between the two, important questions open up. If my ancestors had been all bad, little could be learnt from studying them. It is only when we see their good side, the positive values they sometimes embodied within their own world, that their failures come into sharpest relief. It is ironic, given that iwi were often labelled “tribes”, that my ancestors behaved in what might be termed a “tribal” – that is, insular – manner. As the religious scholar Sharon Brous has written, “One of the great casualties of tribalism is curiosity.” My ancestors were not, at heart, curious about indigenous culture; had they been, they might have relaxed their views about their own superiority, and treated Māori as equals.

Nor is this a purely historical point. Today’s opponents of greater Māori autonomy will think of themselves as good people – and within their own sphere perhaps they are. They may be kind parents, upstanding members of their residents’ associations, the first people to volunteer to bake cakes or run sausage sizzles. Within the Pākehā world, they may stand for honesty and fair play. But, I wonder, are they applying those values and that respect to all New Zealanders or, as with my own ancestors, only to those they regard as equal members of their own community?

To ask these questions, to look at things unflinchingly, is not easy. While the exact feelings that my family and I experience, as we grapple with this history, is a matter for ourselves, it would be fair to say we find the process sometimes uncomfortable. But the history of Parihaka – and countless related events – is such that if we, as its inheritors, aren’t occasionally uncomfortable, we are probably doing something wrong. 

Clarity of sight also helps reaffirm our place here. There is a theory, in some academic circles, that the wrongs done during colonisation will always render Pākehā identity unstable. It makes us interlopers, uneasy people standing on stolen land. And some Pākehā try their best to skirt around this ugly history, to close their eyes and stop their ears, striving to avoid anything that might distress them. The writer Bill Pearson once described Pākehā as “fretful sleepers”, haunted by something at the edge of consciousness. Pearson wasn’t thinking about colonisation per se, but the point still applies. Our ancestors are part of us, and we need to be in a right relationship with them. If we don’t deal honestly with history, we will always suffer a disturbed sleep. But if we do acknowledge past wrongs, we will, as I see it, have earned the right to a stable identity.

Not that this is the sole point of the exercise, or even the main one; that would be somewhat self-regarding. Clarity of sight must be put in the service of a broader justice, one that recognises the connections between past and present. Take, for instance, Richard Shaw’s 2021 work The Forgotten Coast, which describes an ancestor who, like Charles Wilson, assisted in the attack on Parihaka’s inhabitants, and then became prosperous farming their land. Or take, with a wider lens, the Atlas of Deprivation, a publication that invites us to look at the map of the million-plus acres of Waikato farmland confiscated by the colonial state, look at the modern map of that region’s most fertile and wealth-generating land, and think long and hard about why the two charts so closely overlap.

What these accounts share is a conviction that we can’t put matters right unless we understand how they went wrong. When Pākehā try to deflect debates about history, they typically argue that the bad things either didn’t happen or aren’t relevant today. I am here, bringing with me my own family’s record in this matter, to tell you that they did, and they are.

Culture and Autonomy I

When people live in a world ordered by their own values, they may not recognise the benefits this brings, so invisible and natural do they seem. Yet these advantages exist, as I know well. When today’s members of the “Mob” are born, married and interred, we perform rituals practised for generations. We can freely speak our native language at all times, and be understood. Even the public realm – schooling, healthcare, the whole set of state services – is organised around familiar Western notions of individual responsibility and bureaucratic neutrality.

Why does this matter? Because it ensures that in almost any situation, even in public, I can be myself. Too often, though, this is not true for Māori, as their leaders have long argued. Taranaki educator Keri Opai’s book Tikanga describes its subject as “a Māori way of doing things, the customary system of practices and values that are expressed in every social context”. Hui, for instance, start with more formal introductions than do Pākehā meetings, because Māori understand the world through whakapapa, the long bloodlines connecting individuals and families. 

Opai also cites the example of tangihanga, where the ceremonials last several days, koha are expected, and attendees often commune with a deceased person lying in an open casket. These practices are required to give effect to values such as whakapapa and manaakitanga. Māori schools, likewise, typically teach a more holistic view of the world; Māori health services often involve the whole family in consultations.

Every human being, Opai says, should be able to “bring their whole selves” to a given situation. This implies that agencies delivering services to Māori must be able to follow tikanga. And that, in its turn, may require those bodies to be run by Māori. Put it another way: how well will organisations dominated by one culture ever work for another? The French would not enjoy public services organised along Iranian lines, nor would Nigerians flourish under American law. Each of those peoples has, of course, maintained its sovereignty. But then so too have Māori.

He Whakaputanga, commonly translated as the Declaration of Independence, was signed by northern iwi in 1835, and asserts exactly what its name suggests. In Te Tiriti, the reo Māori iteration of the Treaty of Waitangi, Māori guaranteed themselves “tino rangatiratanga”, the nearest English equivalent of which is “sovereignty”. Indeed it is hard to imagine why iwi would ever have ceded that power, given the tiny number of Pākehā in the colony at the time – roughly 2,000, against perhaps 80,000 Māori – and the minimal power they exerted. As the late scholar Moana Jackson argued, it requires “a profound suspension of disbelief” to think Māori would ever have relinquished “the authority to make independent decisions”.

Under international law, it is the Māori language version that holds sway. And even the English text’s assertion that the Crown had gained “sovereignty” probably doesn’t mean what we have come to think it means. In his 2023 book The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi, historian Ned Fletcher argues that, according to contemporary letters and instructions, the British drafters of the document saw “sovereignty” not as absolute, an all-or-nothing outcome, but as something eminently divisible, something that could be shared. And all that the Crown sought was sovereignty over its own settlers, disputes between them and Māori, and foreign relations. Māori were to govern their own affairs. 

In other words, Fletcher’s thesis, grounded in painstaking archival research, is that in 1840 the Crown was comfortable with the idea of co-governance. It was only afterwards, when profit motives intervened, that the dominant settler view changed. So if the colony’s Victorian founders could envisage co-governance, why can we not?

Seeing Clearly III

What that co-governance would look like is a question well beyond my compass. All I am trying to do, as a descendant of settlers, is use my own history as a means to reflect on the present moment, encourage other settler descendants to do likewise, and help lay the foundation for the redress of historical injustice. That injustice includes the loss of Māori autonomy over their own affairs; the solution, as Māori leaders have long argued, must involve some restoration of that autonomy.

I know many Pākehā worry that co-governance will lead to segregation, and I understand that fear. I don’t pretend to know exactly how this will pan out. All I can say is that segregation seems to me unlikely. There will always be countless social spaces in which different peoples mix. Māori and Pākehā will always come together in offices and on sports fields, at holiday camps and in church choirs, in all the venues and meeting grounds of daily life. Their cultural practices will continue to be influenced by each other, their lives united by friendship and marriage. 

My ideal is that both Māori and Pākehā – and, indeed, every one of this nation’s many communities – can engage warmly with the other, and do so from a firm base of security in their own culture. For Pākehā, the task as I see it is to understand the wrongs that were done, then help put them right. And this is a challenge we can all meet. If I, who would – given my family’s history – have more reason than most to feel got at or guilty, can sidestep those feelings; if I can look this history full in the face, address the facts, and encourage our country to follow the long arc back towards justice; then, I would hope, others can do the same.

The Post: Austerity kills, but it’s not the actual threat facing us

Read the original article in the Post

Austerity kills. That’s the clear verdict from the latest research into British public spending cuts, which shows that the Conservatives’ savage post-GFC retrenchment led to at least 190,000 excess deaths.

Cuts to childcare centres and services sent more kids to hospital. That’s if they could even get there: in areas where health budgets were chopped, fewer ambulances turned up on time. Welfare cutbacks, deepening poor people’s misery, sparked drug overdoses and other deaths of despair.

The bleakest irony is that these clawbacks didn’t even aid the economy: living standards under the Conservatives stagnated for a staggering 14 years. Fewer jobs, shorter lives: austerity really is a lose-lose.

No wonder, then, that our own Labour Party wants to pin the “austerity” badge to Nicola Willis’ lapel, having started working the term into its political attacks. But will it stick?

Although austerity has no clear definition, one can take as a guide the British cuts, in which virtually all state agencies had their budgets slashed by around one-fifth. So far, the Finance Minister’s 6.5% cuts are not in the same league.

Willis has, admittedly, foreshadowed a further “programme of targeted savings”, a spending cap for most departments, and potentially more job losses. Meeting her target to curb government borrowing could also require sharp reductions.

But ministerial comments about not being “a slave” to the target rather suggest it will be relaxed. And while the redundancies in particular can cause great pain, none of this amounts to slash and burn.

State spending, after all, rose rapidly under Jacinda Ardern, from $76 billion in 2017 to $128b in 2023, most of it going on Covid, health and higher benefits. Adjusted for the rapid inflation of the post-pandemic era, this represented a $28b increase in annual spending.

Willis’s much-hyped 2024 Budget cuts removed just $2.5b, or one-tenth of that sum.

The public-sector redundancies are more sweeping, however. Staffing levels rose by around 16,000 under Labour; roughly 3000 have already lost their jobs, and that figure could ultimately reach 7000.

There is no doubt that Willis and colleagues want to shrink the state. The key measure here is government size relative to GDP, which tracks whether spending rises in line with increased costs and a growing volume of economic activity needing regulation. This captures, in short, the breadth of the public services the state offers us.

On that measure, core government spending will fall from this year’s 33.6% of GDP to 31.5% in 2029. That implies National will spend around $8b a year less than Labour would have done.

This, in turn, will require agencies to either become vastly more efficient or – more likely – deliver a lower level of service. But it’s worth recalling that in the dying days of the last National administration, state spending was just 27.3% of GDP. This Government may be tacking hard right on cultural issues, but in economic terms it plans to spend $16bn a year more than Bill English would have done.

Left-wingers may have been spooked by the Prime Minister’s stated desire to learn the “lessons” of Ruth Richardson and Bill Birch’s 1990s cutbacks. State spending then was cut from around 40% of GDP to 30%, while benefit levels were slashed by one-quarter.

One shudders to think how many deaths this austerity-on-steroids caused. But nothing like that is currently envisaged: the “lessons” soundbite is less a prediction than it is a rhetorical device, an invocation of figures still mystifyingly revered on the right. National’s plans are, at most, austerity-lite.

Hence the muted nature of the public’s response, outside Wellington anyway. Most Kiwis haven’t experienced sweeping cuts to services.

Not yet, that is. Willis’s gamble is that she can curb the government’s “back office” while protecting the frontline. And there are, of course, horror stories of bureaucratic waste. One former Ardern lieutenant told me about an internal comms staffer at a state agency who, during a job interview, admitted their key aim was – wait for it – to send one really good staff email each week.

By the same token, the public service possesses analysts who are – I’m told by their foreign counterparts – world experts in their field. The ideologically driven haste of the government’s cuts means many of the latter are being lost.

National this week touted its scientific credentials, but has slashed hundreds of public-sector science roles. And its cull of bureaucrats may – for instance – simply force frontline police officers to fill out the paperwork formerly handled by head office.

All this, in turn, could spell real trouble for the quality of public services in a year or two’s time, on top of the debacle that is the health sector.

The current political debates about “austerity” – and, relatedly, public-sector job cuts – are, in the final analysis, just shadow-boxing. What actually shows up on the frontline, and consequently in people’s day-to-day lives, is what matters politically.

The Post: The honeymoon’s over, but a hangover’s just kicking in

Read the original article in the Post

The received wisdom is that this government never got a honeymoon – and, like much received wisdom, it’s almost certainly wrong.

Sure, the coalition parties didn’t see the usual polling bump immediately post taking office. But, according to at least one pollster I interviewed early last year, focus group participants were giving the government the benefit of the doubt.

Some things made them uneasy. Voters had sympathy for public servants losing their jobs, and sensed something slightly savage in the cuts to spending. They were also turned off by the more aggressive anti-Māori policies.

But, like all fair-minded Kiwi folk, they felt a new government deserved a chance to prove itself. That leeway – a honeymoon of sorts – was duly extended. Hence the coalition’s polling held up for much of last year.

The problem facing the government is that it has now thoroughly burnt through that goodwill. Casey Costello’s pro-tobacco shenanigans, the anti-environmental Fast-Track Bill, the relentlessly negative unwinding of Labour’s agenda: that’s quite some way to torch your honeymoon.

The divisive Treaty ‘Principles’ Bill, meanwhile, may have slightly boosted ACT’s ratings, but at the expense of driving moderate voters towards Labour and radical ones towards Te Pāti Māori. Between the 2023 election and the last five polls pre-Christmas, National’s vote slumped from 38.1% to 32.9%.

On the other side of the ledger, Chris Hipkins’ party rose from 26.9% to 29.4%, and support for the Māori radicals jumped from 3.1% to 6.5%. All of which leaves the governing parties just two percentage points ahead of the opposition.

While ACT and NZ First seem unconcerned, National’s leading lights can sense danger, and in a series of interviews late last year signalled a shift towards a more “positive”, forward-focused agenda. The problem is that it’s not clear what that would actually look like, nor if it could undo the reputational damage already done.

While National was well within its rights to reprioritise low-value spending and tackle things like the bloating of government comms teams, the mindless haste of the state staffing cuts – which could total 7000 on current estimates – seems to have registered with the public.

In infrastructure, the same story pertains. National could have sought efficiencies at the homes and communities agency, Kāinga Ora, and gradually increased the building capacity of NGO providers. Instead it has brought construction to a near-standstill, feeding its ideological animosity to state provision at the expense of actual on-the-ground progress.

The public sector and infrastructure cuts, both of which slow spending and investment, have only weakened an economy already struggling under Labour. On a per-person basis, we are experiencing a worse recession than that which followed the GFC.

This is why National so fervently insists it got inflation “under control” by cutting spending. It’s the party’s sole economic claim to fame.

But even that is bogus. Inflation has fallen only because the Reserve Bank had hiked interest rates sky-high.

Labour’s pandemic-era spending was, in any case, never a major contributor to inflation. A 2023 report showed increased corporate profits were responsible for more than half the post-pandemic spike. This chimes with global research blaming factors largely outside governments’ control, in particular corporate profit margins, but also disruptions to supply chains and oil price increases.

Post-GFC, conservative governments worldwide – notably in Britain – successfully sold the lie that the financial crisis had been caused by excessive state spending (as opposed to the actual culprit, weak regulation). But if Labour can push back against the latest lie – and all the signs are that the public isn’t swallowing it – then Hipkins and co have a greater opportunity to be heard than parties usually do after being turfed from office.

Labour’s problem, of course, is that last time round it left too large a gap between ambitious promise and underwhelming delivery. Over the next 18 months, the party will have to tread a fine line, simultaneously offering voters something positive while acknowledging – more strongly than it has so far – the mistakes made in office.

Pledges of sweeping change are unlikely to sit well with a public now sceptical that big dreams will come true. Even the 2023 promise of free dental care for under-30s, a relatively unambitious policy, was – I’m told – met with disbelief that it would ever be delivered. Some kind of mid-range change – not minute incrementalism, but tangible improvements people can see in their daily lives and their communities – may offer Labour its best hope of victory.

If, as predicted, the economy does recover by mid-2026, with growth rising and unemployment falling, National will still be favourite to win another term. The cuts may then be long-forgotten, the coalition’s tone shifted from vengeance to positivity, the approach less ideological, more practical.

And economic fundamentals matter: they are, ultimately, what cost Democrats the presidency in the US last year. But, thanks to the coalition’s failings, the political door is more open to Labour than it would normally be.

The Post: Taking control of technology’s future direction

Read the original article in the Post

As we reach the end of yet another year that has not, perhaps, been the best the world has ever seen, it would be easy to feel defeated about the future. War, drought, famine, climate change: no end of things trouble us.

Technology has become another potential source of pessimism. Many people are understandably worried about the way that AI, in particular, seems to be evolving beyond our control, its economic threats at least as large as its promises.

But we should not be defeatist. That, at least, is the message of the best book I read this year, Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle over Technology and Prosperity, by the Nobel economic laureates Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson.

Their basic contention is that technological development, AI included, can yield extraordinary economic benefits to humankind – but only if we point it in a specific direction. And we hold that power in our hands.

What Acemoglu and Johnson have in their sights is a naïve – and dangerous – version of the “productivity bandwagon” theory which, as espoused by the tech lords of Silicon Valley, holds that technological development is uniformly positive because its economic benefits automatically filter out across society. Citizens and their governments should, in this view, just get out of the way of technological change, and watch productivity rise and living standards soar.

The beauty of Power and Progress is that it delves deep into 1000 years of history in order to point out that this theory is not, in fact, universally true. I already knew that during the Industrial Revolution, many workers were temporarily worse off after being displaced by innovations like spinning machines. But even I was surprised to learn that the living standards of textile workers went backwards for an entire century.

Even more startlingly, it turns out that the mediaeval period had a fecundity of technological innovation far beyond what I had believed – including greatly enhanced ploughs, the first fireplaces and chimneys, and the development of mechanical clocks and eyeglasses – but the living standards of peasants stalled for 200 years.

Why is this? Acemoglu and Johnson’s great insight is that the “productivity bandwagon” operates only if two conditions are met.

First, a given innovation has to raise something known as worker marginal productivity – the additional contribution that each extra worker makes, for instance by increasing throughput in a factory. Innovation, in other words, has to make each extra worker more productive.

This has happened often throughout history. New forms of software, for instance, have helped car mechanics work more rapidly and productively.

Technological development can also create whole new tasks. Henry Ford’s assembly-line method for making cars may have rendered some workers obsolete, but it created a vast swathe of design, technical, machine-operation and clerical tasks. It also spurred the development of other industries – in oil, steel and chemicals, for instance – and new forms of employment, from inter-city freight through to the humble drive-in cinema.

In contrast, pure automation, the replacement of people with industrial robots, leads to fewer jobs and can effectively make workers less productive. Acemoglu and Johnson are also scathing about what they label “so-so automation”. Self-checkout systems in supermarkets don’t meaningfully increase productivity or bring whole new industries into being: they just shift the work of scanning items from employees to customers.

The second thing needed to make the productivity bandwagon a reality is an institution – a law, an organisation, a body of some kind – that ensures the gains from productivity are broadly shared with workers, in the form of higher wages. Powerful trade unions and minimum-wage laws are two such institutions.

Lacking collective power, mediaeval peasants and early Industrial Revolution workers unsurprisingly saw their living standards degrade. In the latter case, it was only once trade unions hove into view, and labour laws were reformed, that industrial innovation began lifting ordinary people’s wages.

The underlying point here is that we, as citizens, retain that most precious of commodities: choice. We do not have to submissively accept the technological changes espoused by our would-be overlords in Silicon Valley.

There are many ways we can ensure that digital technologies, including AI, bring widespread economic benefits, making workers more productive in their current jobs or creating new tasks for them to do. Government can, and should, provide subsidies for socially beneficial technologies, regulate surveillance technologies, protect people’s privacy and data ownership, and invest massively in lifelong vocational education.

These are not pie-in-the-sky ravings; Acemoglu, in particular, is probably the world’s most influential and broadly respected economist.

He also argues, correctly, that in political mobilisations like America’s late-19th-century Progressive movement, we see examples of ordinary people succeeding – against great odds – to overcome the domineering power of big capital and vested interests.

“The future path of technology”, Acemoglu and Johnson conclude, “remains to be written.”

The Post: The Greens find a new target that isn’t one of their own

Read the original article in the Post

Watching the Green Party’s series of self-inflicted scandals unfold this year, I’ve often been reminded of a shoot-out scene from Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, in which one gangster remarks, “I don’t f...ing believe this! Can everyone stop getting shot?”

But even if it sometimes looked like their MPs were, in fact, determined to get shot as often as possible, the party has closed out the year in respectable fashion. Most notably, it released last Sunday an alternative emissions reduction plan that would triple the pace of our climate change response.

The document, though light on details, is stuffed full of big, interconnected ideas. A clean power payment to cover the upfront costs of rooftop solar panels is matched with a Future Workforce Agency to train a new generation of installers, all funded by a turbocharged emissions trading scheme.

Where National’s relatively feeble plan would take 17 megatons of carbon out of the atmosphere early next decade, the Green version, its modelling suggests, would remove 48 megatons.

Politically, the plan serves multiple purposes. The party has been accused of being “missing” in environmental debates this year, and even though party insiders disagree, they concede it’s useful to have a heavyweight intervention to counter that claim.

The plan signals an intent to get on the front foot, to consign the annus horribilis to history, to be known once more for policies not personalities. It also foreshadows a key strategic focus: the idea that the environment is, as the document states, “a fundamentally economic problem”.

The Greens have always struggled with the tension between honouring radical roots and appearing fit to govern, and the current strategic focus can be read both ways. On the one hand, it signals a desire to put the environment – for too long regarded merely as an extractable resource – at the heart of economics.

On the other hand, it accepts the reality that while climate change is not, alas, a public priority, the economy absolutely is. This positions the Greens well for the run-up to next year’s Budget.

Getting heard, though, will still be hard. There has been heated debate about whether this year’s scandals – most obviously the Darleen Tana catastrophe – have harmed the party’s polling.

One could argue that they haven’t: the Greens’ 2023 election-night tally of 11.6% has, by my calculations, dipped only imperceptibly, sitting around 11% in the last five polls. But the party has, historically, profited from moments of Labour weakness, and given the larger party’s struggles, the Greens should probably be several points higher.

Whereas the party’s base support once appeared perilously close to MMP’s 5% threshold, it is now more like 8-9%, insiders suggest, with a similar number seriously contemplating going Green. It surely helps that the party has proved it can cope with the rigours of government – albeit, critics allege, at the expense of its radicalism.

This year’s polling sensation, though, is Te Pāti Māori, riding a wave of hīkoi energy to hit 6%, twice its 2023 election tally. Labour is also up slightly.

So although the public mood is shifting on issues dear to the Greens’ heart, including te Tiriti justice and tax, the danger – from the party’s viewpoint – is that it may not be the beneficiary.

But while grassroots members may see things differently, there is no immediate prospect of a radical change of direction. The emissions reduction plan may attack capitalism as “an insatiable, unsustainable economic system”, but the solutions it envisages, though supportive of an enlarged state, are hardly anti-capitalist.

Nor does the party plan to microscopically target sections of the electorate, in the way that – for instance – Donald Trump focused on disaffected young men who listen to podcasts.

Green MPs are, admittedly, intensifying their outreach to marginalised non-voters – a more useful task, from the left’s overall viewpoint, than poaching votes from Labour – but such schemes have been tried before with limited success.

At least three big challenges loom for 2025. One is how to accommodate the ongoing absence of co-leader Marama Davidson, still battling cancer, and address the resultant strain on Chlöe Swarbrick.

The second is the party’s sense of being placed constantly on the back foot by the coalition’s blitzkrieg approach to governing, which creates endless policy announcements that can’t be ignored but which nevertheless distract from the task of shaping a proactive Green agenda.

The final challenge is perhaps the biggest: getting cut-through. The Greens have eschewed the David Seymour approach of dominating the news by picking high-profile fights with whoever is deemed the enemy of the day, be it “woke” food providers, Māori activists or Tusiata Avia.

Fair enough, perhaps – but with a diminished media struggling to digest complex policy, this stance raises the risk of being ignored. To adapt an old adage: if the Green Party holds a press conference in a forest, and no-one is around to hear them, do they even make a sound?

The Post: Erica Stanford has made education a bright spot of first-year legacy

Read the original article in the Post

If you only read the headlines, and had seen last week that education minister Erica Stanford called her opposite number “a stupid bitch”, you’d be forgiven for thinking that schools policy was mired in the usual political pettiness. And you’d be wrong.

The woman thus abused, Labour education spokesperson Jan Tinetti, did make clear her displeasure. But she also told RNZ that just the night before, she and Stanford had had a constructive meeting about curriculum reform.

Behind the scenes, there are promising signs that New Zealand’s school results may soon flip from Bs to As – and that the change, being relatively bipartisan, will endure. As the National-led Government celebrates its one-year anniversary, education stands out as a potential bright spot amid a stalling economy and David Seymour’s attempt to rip up the Treaty of Waitangi.

Stanford’s core ambition is to restore balance to the way we teach our children. New Zealand has long had an exceptionally flexible curriculum: teachers have wide discretion over what they cover, and when. And this has unmistakeable advantages.

When I lived in London, the teachers I knew complained about an over-prescriptive British curriculum that robbed of them of the creativity and autonomy that animate the best instructors.

Many people now think, though, that the New Zealand curriculum is too flexible. It can require teachers to make decisions above their pay grade, and leave them unsure of what they should be doing. Weaker teachers can dodge the most difficult elements of their subject. Too many students leave school unable to properly write or do maths.

Hence Stanford’s push for a more clearly articulated curriculum. Teachers will get detailed instructions about which elements to cover and when, and – in theory – more classroom materials to support that work. Teacher training and professional development will be overhauled; assessment likewise.

Though distinctively Stanford-esque, these reforms continue on a path that Labour had tentatively trod. During her brief tenure as a minister, Tinetti had announced a list of “the essential and foundational maths and literacy assessment standards” that a student must achieve in order to pass NCEA. And while Stanford is rolling out “structured literacy” and “structured maths” curricula, Labour had already begun implementing “a comparable literacy curriculum”, according to Newsroom’s Laura Walters.

One might, of course, question just how quickly Labour was actually creating change, given its enthusiasm for expert advisory groups and reviews that went nowhere. Stanford has clearly stepped up the pace and thoroughness of reform. But then Covid-19 had put a wrecking ball through Labour’s school plans; some allowances must be made.

In any case, the attribution of success or failure – a favourite sport of politicians – is far less important here than the basic, underlying message of hope: the New Zealand state retains the ability to solve problems.

Sure, it took too long to recognise a decline in school performance that had occurred under both Labour and National. But as public concern has grown, so too have experts, public servants and politicians of all stripes responded. This is elementary stuff, but stands in stark contrast to, say, the American political system, now so dysfunctional that it is more likely to exacerbate problems than solve them.

Stanford’s reforms should, by contrast, bear fruit over coming years. This includes her mobile phone ban and her moves to cut construction costs by standardising classroom design.

And whenever Labour gets back in, we can hope to be spared the usual destabilising 180-degree change of direction. The alternation of parties should instead help us tack towards the goal, like a boat sailing into the wind.

Labour was right to introduce a curriculum that corrected the long neglect of Māori history, but the curriculum’s principles ignored Pākehā history entirely (save “colonisation”); Stanford’s promised restoration of “balance” could be beneficial.

In place of a draft science curriculum that didn’t even mention physics, emblematic of a certain wooliness of thinking, we’ll have curricula that emphasise the acquisition of core facts and good grammar.

The reforms are, however, being implemented at a speed that threatens to overwhelm teachers, and could become too prescriptive and test-focused; a Labour administration might need to tack back a little.

Better support for teachers, through enhanced professional development and classroom resources, will also cost money, something National is loath to spend. Beyond Stanford’s own reforms, the mess soon to be left by Seymour’s charter schools and other evidence-free ideas – fining parents for their children’s truancy, anyone? – will have to be fixed.

And there is one inconvenient fact National prefers not to confront: the biggest handbrake on learning, research shows, is not bad teaching but poverty and its related socio-economic ills. It’s hard to succeed when your parents can’t afford a laptop, your house’s mouldy walls are incubating rheumatic fever, and stress and violence are all around.

Given National’s profound lack of ambition on tackling poverty, that may be one problem Stanford leaves for her successor.

The Post: Understanding the forces that bring authoritarian populists to power

Read the original article in the Post

The day after Donald Trump got re-elected, lecturers in at least one American university –the New York Times reports – told students, “we’re actually cancelling class today because of the election”.

The academics’ inability to cope is understandable in part: Trump, as has been exhaustively documented, is a serial liar, an abuser of women and an attempted over-turner of legitimate elections. But as Laura, the 20-year-old student who conveyed her lecturers’ remarks to the Times, said, “I was shocked because [they were] completely blocking off the idea that someone might support someone other than Harris”.

Surely, after nearly a decade of seeing “The Donald” in public life, we have passed the time for bewilderment, and reached the point of addressing the forces that bind people to such authoritarian populists. This is not some far-distant concern: Trump’s support here seems to have more than doubled from 9% in 2016 to 21% this year. That figure rises to 31% among Kiwi men.

Hypothetical polls (“how would you vote in another country’s election?”) may, admittedly, be unreliable, or just reflect Trump’s greater familiarity. But they are consistent with a vote share of around 15% for New Zealand First and ACT, parties that increasingly foment a similar divisiveness.

In the last decade, of course, countless columns have been written about authoritarian populism. But as can be deduced from the shocked American lecturers, and from the equally shocked Kiwis in left-wing circles, those of a more liberal bent have still grasped neither the drivers of Trumpism nor its solutions.

The first step, I think, is to isolate the valid from the invalid drivers. The latter sometimes consist of outright bigotry: racism, sexism, the wider pushback against a more diverse world. Those impulses can only be confronted head-on, as the hīkoi to Parliament is currently doing.

But there are also people who, in every nation, have valid reasons for anger. No-one, in my view, has ever bettered the analysis of Trump voters offered by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Kathy Cramer, who, after years spent interviewing rural Americans, reported that they felt they weren't getting their fair share of three elementary things: income, respect, and political power. Globalisation had wrecked their livelihoods; elites looked down on them; and political decisions were made in faraway urban centres.

The question of respect is complex, because not everything in those lives deserves validation; but the two other complaints are more straightforwardly true, in New Zealand as elsewhere. Since the 1980s, the number of families in poverty here has nearly doubled, and most of them feel they are locked out of the political system.

A 2022 survey, carried out by the OECD, found that although nearly 60% of financially secure New Zealanders say they trust Parliament, that figure falls to just 40% for people who struggle to pay their bills. Similarly, just 35% of the poorest Kiwis feel they “have a say” in political decisions.

Rural dwellers likewise report very low levels of trust. And since 2022 the figures may well have worsened.

What’s driving this disenchantment? Although the Official Information Act needs reform, nearly eight in 10 Kiwis think “information about administrative procedures” is easy to find. The problem is less about what government puts out, and more about what it doesn’t take in.

Fewer than half of New Zealanders – 48% – feel they have enough opportunities to voice their views, and only 37% believe that if they did speak up, state agencies would listen. As a recent OECD report put it: “People need to feel trusted by the government in order to trust it.”

What would it take to turn this situation around? An effective state, able to deliver core services well, is crucial: competence plays a central role in enhancing trust.

Addressing hardship is likewise vital. If lifted out of poverty, hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders would be more likely to vote. And to ensure their voices weren’t still drowned out, we could clamp down on the political donations and vested-interest lobbying that convert wealth into power.

But at the heart of any reform programme must be a determination to do politics differently. The most trust-enhancing reforms are, according to the OECD’s evidence, those that ensure citizens’ voices “will be heard”.

Top-down, one-way politics is a 20th-century hangover. We need more opportunities for ordinary people to come together, share their collective wisdom, and play a meaningful part in decision-making.

That requires, in particular, greater outreach to marginalised New Zealanders. State agencies should ditch their cosy habit of consulting “selected stakeholders”, and get out there – in malls, sports clubs and community centres – to engage people where they are.

We have the chance, if only our public service can grasp it, to restore a more cohesive society.

The perils of the alternative path – divisiveness, polarisation and a breakdown of trust – are plain to see.

The Spinoff: The right’s weird new obsession – Singapore

Read the original article in the Spinoff

In years gone by, New Zealand’s right-wingers had predictable heroes. They looked to tax-cutting, regulation-shredding leaders like Margaret Thatcher, and their exemplar states all had libertarian characteristics: America’s weak trade unions, the former Soviet Bloc’s flat taxes, Ireland’s corporate-friendly “Celtic Tiger” economy. Now, though, a new hero has roared into view: Singapore.

This interest dates back at least as far as a 2016 paper by Act founder Roger Douglas and Auckland University economics professor Robert MacCulloch, which lauds Singapore’s health and welfare services. But it’s everywhere now. “I’m a big fan of Singapore,” former National leader Don Brash said during a recent debate. Singaporean-style ideas turn up in New Zealand Initiative presentations. “Christopher Luxon hankers after Singapore’s success,” the Listener columnist Danyl McLauchlan wrote recently. Winston Peters’ mooted national infrastructure fund has parallels with Singapore’s Temasek.

It is, on the face of it, a strange enthusiasm. Far from being libertarian, Singapore is an immensely authoritarian state, one barely qualifying as a democracy. Since 1959 it has been ruled by one party, the PAP, which currently controls 89% of seats in its parliament. Political opponents are forced into exile or bankrupted by PAP “defamation” lawsuits. Similar tactics are used against journalists. Activists are jailed for holding up pictures of smiley faces.

Some right-wingers are, of course, happy to overlook such trivial matters as long as a government follows other parts of the conservative playbook. You could call it the John Key doctrine, given the latter’s support for Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro: the vilest behaviour, the most brutal assaults on human rights, can be justified as long as you cut taxes. (In fairness, parts of the left have long been willing to overlook parallel failings on their side.) And Singapore does indeed have low taxes and minimal restrictions on foreign investment. But its popularity on the right seems to stem from the other part of its somewhat schizophrenic approach to government: its unashamedly “big state” tactics for creating growth and promoting social outcomes.

Central, in both cases, is the push for greater savings and investment. Singaporean workers must put a startling 21% of their wages into compulsory savings accounts, and employers contribute a further 16%, sums that would otherwise be paid as wages. From these accounts, workers pay for their own pensions, healthcare and medical insurance.

This approach, Douglas and McCulloch argued in a 2016 paper, encourages consumer choice, limits health costs and provides high-quality care. Their paper exhorts New Zealand to slash state spending and force people to save, Singaporean-style, for not just their pension and healthcare but also for six months’ worth of “unemployment insurance”. Nor is it just Douglas and MacCulloch: a New Zealand Initiative researcher, Max Salmon, espoused similar ideas at a Retirement Commission event earlier this year.

Although I did, in the spirit of open debate, commission MacCulloch to rehearse these arguments for a journal I edited in 2019, I can see serious defects in this plan. For one thing, higher-paid people would get bigger pensions and be able to buy more healthcare.

And the state can’t stay out of things entirely. The Singaporean government still subsidises up to 80% of care in some cases, while MacCulloch acknowledges that the New Zealand state would need to keep providing unemployment benefits and healthcare for the very poorest. More generally, the global evidence is that competitive, user-pays systems for health and education are less successful than those that work collaboratively and are free at the point of use.

Then there’s Winston. He wants New Zealand to create a $100bn pool of infrastructure cash that would have parallels with Singapore’s Temasek, a sovereign wealth fund whose initial stake was created by commercialising state-owned enterprises. But if one wants a model for sovereign wealth funds, there are plenty in the democratic world, including that run by Norway (albeit using the proceeds from a past oil boom). And although, at a more general level, Singapore has remarkably good social outcomes, the countries that still outperform it are, predictably, the Scandinavians. And they do so while guaranteeing their citizens minor things like – you know – basic human rights.

More interesting than the flaws in this Singaporean love-in, though, is the reason the enthusiasm exists in the first place. There is a sense that, on one crucial point at least, New Zealand’s hands-off approach to the economy has failed. We are famously bad at saving, and that leaves us with relatively little to invest in things like infrastructure and start-up businesses. Even when we do have windfalls – like the Maui gas fields – we fritter them away. And so our economy languishes.

As Simplicity’s Sam Stubbs points out, Australia has five times our population but 38 times our retirement savings, thanks in part to a superannuation scheme that forces them to save 11% of wages. Stubbs, and others commentators, increasingly call for a two-birds-with-one-stone solution, in which we are somehow made to save more and thus generate domestic funds for investment.

In this context, Singapore, with its muscular approach to economic development, can look attractive. Compulsory savings accounts, meanwhile, evoke in part the traditional libertarian desire to individualise and marketise human life. But only in part. What’s truly fascinating is just how authoritarian these visions are. In a libertarian paradise, healthcare privatisation would leave people “free” to spend on medical treatment. The Singaporean version forces people to save large amounts of their salary to spend on certain things. It’s not that dissimilar to taxation, only with none of the efficiencies of Inland Revenue collection.

Partly this may reflect global trends: the American “new” right, for instance, which counts among its flag bearers people like JD Vance, is remarkably non-libertarian. It embraces tariffs on foreign goods, government-directed industrial policy, and even in some cases a particularly masculine version of trade unions.

Partly, also, Singapore’s popularity reflects a philosophical shift. At least in New Zealand, there is very little credibility left in the 1980s libertarian ideal that, if the state just got out of the way, everything would be fine. The average voter has clocked the poverty and dysfunction that that embedded. People haven’t forgotten the havoc that unregulated markets wreaked during the GFC, nor do they think that markets will solve climate change. They know that the countries with the smallest governments aren’t prosperous paradises but rather the failed states of Africa. The embrace of authoritarian Singapore, in short, symbolises the absolutely bankrupt state of modern libertarianism.

The Post: The disaster scenarios arising from building consent deregulation

Read the original article in the Post

Here’s a thought: if the government didn’t need to inspect your car before it was built, does it need to inspect your house?

Such are the questions raised by the Government’s announcement this week that it wants to allow certain tradespeople and builders to “self-certify” their work.

Construction minister Chris Penk wants, firstly, to see “qualified” plumbers, drainlayers and builders join electricians and gasfitters in being able to self-certify work – that is, avoid inspection – on “low-risk” builds.

Secondly, construction businesses with “a proven track record”, like those who build hundreds of near-identical homes each year, would get a “more streamlined” consent process.

For minor plumbing jobs, this might be fine. But for anything bigger, disaster scenarios immediately suggest themselves: cowboy builders do a bodge job, “self-certify” it, and are long gone – or conveniently bankrupt – when the homeowner finally discovers the fault.

In response, Penk says tradespeople would be eligible only after passing rigorous professional exams, and would have to put funds aside – through insurance or cash reserves – to fix defects and reimburse homeowners.

Then, theoretically, building practices would be reformed by the shift in responsibility. At present, the argument goes, councils are risk-averse and over-inspect, because they can be held liable for ushering through a defective build. If the responsibility lay with builders, they would carry the can for faults, while a layer of time-consuming inspection was removed.

Hence the car analogy, derived from AUT construction professor John Tookey, who argues that, even though cars are potentially deadly, the state doesn’t inspect each vehicle as it comes off the line. It relies, instead, on new models meeting rigorous quality standards pre-production, and firms being liable for any subsequent defects. This leads to safer cars, Tookey says. “So conceptually, could it work [in building]? Sure.”

Practical problems abound, though. First, there is ample evidence that even “qualified” professionals will do shoddy work.

Second, the industry would undoubtedly apply pressure for more projects to be deemed “low-risk”, until even relatively high-risk work was done without inspections.

Third, as The Post has reported, no insurer currently offers builders cover for non-completion or defective work, suggesting they don’t think it can be provided at a sensible price. And, if they did provide cover, insurers would – guess what? – want to do their own inspections and consents, thus partly nullifying the “streamlining” of the system.

Faced with this reality, Penk has gestured towards things like the Master Builders’ “guarantee”, but it doesn’t deserve the name. Heavily caveated, it only covers leaky-homes style defects for two years post-completion.

Master Builders, meanwhile, try very hard not to actually pay out. News reports are littered with headlines like “Family suffers 17-month Master Builder guarantee ordeal” and “Master Build guarantee ‘not worth the paper it's written on’ ”.

A better version is of course possible, but as Tookey notes, when New Zealand politicians are setting up new systems, “we tend to go for the economy version”. If Penk’s changes happen, they are likely to happen shoddily, marred by inadequate professional standards, powerful industry lobbying and weak insurance.

In the UK, the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire, which claimed 72 lives, was this year found to have been caused partly by deceitful firms installing products they knew were unsafe – but also by a privatised regulator captured by the industry. Any shift away from conventional state regulation is, in reality, a massive risk.

It could also generate a massive bill. Remember that the leaky homes crisis, incurred in the last bout of deregulation, has cost the country somewhere between $11 billion and $47b.

And even if, under Penk’s system, builders can get insurance, homeowners would have to spend huge amounts of time and money pursuing the payouts. Then there’s the costs of repairing defective work.

However expensive the delays caused by council inspections are, they are unlikely to be anywhere near as bad. Prevention is almost always much cheaper than cure.

Sure, council consenting needs to be streamlined, sped up and standardised across the country. But that doesn’t require deregulation.

Some might say that, under deregulation, the potential damage to reputation (and insurance profile) would encourage builders to do consistently better work. But that’s fantastical. It’s also the point where Tookey’s car analogy breaks down.

Such fears might motivate car manufacturers, but only because car faults are so deadly, so easily traceable, and so fatal to reputation. Building faults, by contrast, can take ages to emerge, are often hard to pinpoint, and generally aren’t fatal.

Plenty of firms will cut corners but bank on being able to frustrate clients, outlast them in the courts, deny responsibility, or – ultimately – declare bankruptcy. (The Government has nothing more than a vague “plan” to deal with the latter problem.)

Penk’s reforms are supposed to shift liability from councils to builders, but in practice would probably lump it onto a third party, the one least equipped to handle it: homeowners.