The Post: NZ is having a bad moment – but it won’t last

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If I described to you a country that had recently halved its rates of child poverty, curbed its addiction to coal and engineered its biggest house-building boom in half a century, you might think that was a country where you’d like to live. Congratulations, then, because you’re already there: that country is New Zealand.

If this picture seems implausible, it’s because such points of light can barely penetrate the gloom that pervades the nation in its winter of discontent.

The proportion of New Zealanders who say things are on the right track, lodged for decades at around the two-thirds mark, is now closer to one-third.

Christopher Luxon’s claim that the country had “lost its mojo”, though politically incautious, may not cost the National leader many votes. It resonates.

In New Zealand, it seems, nothing works: our infrastructure is outdated, our preparedness for climate change inadequate, our slide down the education rankings apparently terminal. We can’t seem to close the salary gap with Australia; our productivity problems defy resolution.

None of this is without foundation. But the successes listed above are real. And they are – crucially for this country’s future – cross-party achievements.

The number of children living in families that can’t afford basic items, like paying doctor’s bills or buying two decent pairs of shoes, has fallen from 25% in 2011 to 10% last year. Housing consents have quadrupled in little over a decade. Less coal is now burned than at any point since 1990, and in the last 30 years, the share of renewable energy has risen from around 60% to over 80%.

These successes span National and Labour administrations. And they would probably continue, in some form or another, whoever wins October’s election.

On all the above issues, much remains to be done.

But our governments are clearly still capable of confronting grave social problems. We shouldn’t, in short, talk ourselves into thinking matters are worse than they are.

Such attitudes lead to despair, and despair often leads to inaction: the perpetuation of the thing lamented.

But how have these achievements been rendered so invisible? Labour’s setbacks elsewhere haven’t helped; a narrative of failure, once set, is hard to break.

More recently, Covid and the cost-of-living crisis have cast a huge cloud over everyday life. But all these things will pass.

While it has become fashionable to parrot the term “polycrisis”, humanity has in truth faced – and overcome – constant trial.

People born in 1900 endured, in swift succession, two world wars, an influenza pandemic and the Great Depression. Then they built back better.

We tend to forget such struggles because, as recent psychological research shows, the idea of a golden age is immensely seductive.

We are too attentive to bad things now, painting the present in a negative light, but – paradoxically – we also allow those thoughts to rapidly fade from our memory, leaving us with an overly positive image of the past.

Which is not to say that all is well in New Zealand now – with the country or with its government.

In a recent Listener essay, the writer Danyl McLauchlan posited three key problems: an inwards-looking bureaucracy better at brand refreshes than building things; an excess of oligopolistic, rent-seeking companies; and a culture of rampant sectoral lobbying and policy “capture”.

Much of this can be summarised with one phrase: the hollowing-out of the state. Its ability to plan for the long term, for instance, is minimal.

This stems from our national addiction to quick fixes – “number-eight fencing wire” is a short-term remedy not a far-sighted plan – but also the post-1984 small-government revolution.

When it comes to infrastructure, a 2021 Sense Partners report rightly labelled the 1980s and 1990s “the decades of underinvestment”.

This Government is ramping up infrastructure spending; again, good things are afoot. But the next problem is that we don’t have enough skilled construction staff.

Our long-term workforce planning, deficient in so many ways, needs urgent attention.

State capacity problems are widespread. Agencies rely too much on consultants because they have themselves lost the skills and confidence needed to deliver big projects. Labour may have hired 14,000 more public-sector staff, but many are young and inexperienced, novices joining agencies run by managers still repeating small-government mantras.

The restoration of state capacity could start small. The Australian government is creating a centre for evaluating how well its policies work, something that should both radically improve public services and cut the consultancy fees paid to what wags label “the coalition of the billing”.

More broadly, economist Mariana Mazzucato’s “state missions” – the vision-led initiatives that put a man on the moon and kick-started the clean-energy revolution – could help restore government’s sense of purpose.

Will any of these ideas be implemented? Possibly not. But if some big problems – poverty, coal use, constraints on house-building – are being tackled, there’s no reason others can’t be too.