"In the clearly mistaken belief that Wellington knows best, local hospitals and polytechs have had their leadership removed."
OPINION:
As we say goodbye to 2023 and welcome in 2024, it’s a good time to catch up on the very best of the Herald columnists we enjoyed reading over the last 12 months. From politics to sport, from business to entertainment and lifestyle, these are the voices and views our audience loved the most. Today it’s five of the top columns of the year from Steven Joyce.
So far, so good for the new Government. In the past week, it has come up with a tidy set of portfolio allocations and a clear plan for its first 100 days. The plan is an entirely recognisable amalgam of the election policies of the three coalition parties, as are the coalition agreements.
This is just the start. There remains much thinking and work to be done across a whole range of thorny issues. And one of the burning platforms is what to do about local government and the regions.
It’s no secret local government is struggling, and in some cases completely broken. Our capital city is the poster child. Forget for a moment the travails of the current mayor, and look back over the past 20 or 30 years. Wellington’s story is one of spending money on grand above-ground monuments to itself, while not bothering to do the things it is most clearly mandated to do, like managing the delivery of fresh water, removing wastewater, and helping people get around the city in practical ways, including, God forbid, using a car.
Regional areas have a different problem, but it is just as acute. The previous Government largely dismantled local governance and control over big areas of activity in regional centres. In the clearly mistaken belief that Wellington knows best, local hospitals and polytechs have had their leadership removed, and local government was slated to lose control of its planning functions and Three Waters provision until that was all halted by the election result.
Centralisation is clearly not working, and if it continues, it will get worse. I have lost count of how many regional leaders I have talked to over the past few years who report that their polytech and hospital have completely disengaged from their community as a result of the reforms. The visibility each local region has of these crucial local services and their ability to shape them is now non-existent. Read more >
With the votes finally counted, the shape of the new Government is becoming clearer. While there are still a few hoops to jump through before we know exactly who does what and what’s on the agenda, everyone’s thoughts will be rapidly turning to the programme for the all-important first six months in Government.
Therein lies the first challenge for the new administration - to create first a sense of and then actual momentum, after being becalmed for three weeks post-election while the bureaucrats counted and re-counted the votes. With the best will in the world, by the time ministers get their feet under the desks and staff hired, the Government won’t be fully into gear for a few more weeks, while the people who voted for them have already banked their decision and moved on. There will soon be impatience for change.
Job number one is the regulatory rollback. These are the economy-stifling laws passed by the previous Government which take the wrong direction, and which National and its associates have collectively pledged to remove from the statute books. Things like rolling back the RMA reforms, the Three Waters legislation, fair pay agreements, and the oil and gas ban. Some sort of omnibus regulatory rollback law, to be passed before Christmas with the support of all coalition partners, would make sense, followed by a second one in the first half of next year for the more difficult jobs. Priority should be given to changing laws which stifle investment and growth.
Task number two is getting started on fiscal repair. This too will be a long job, but the new Finance Minister will need to demonstrate early intent. Nicola Willis has indicated she will move quickly, with a mini-budget before Christmas. Whether a full mini-budget is possible in the time now available will be resolved in the coming days, but there is a definite need for a round of sacred cow culling in order to stop spending money on doomed projects. Read more >
Two pieces of news out of Northland this week help illustrate what’s causing our wider economic malaise.
Yesterday the Prime Minister swallowed the dead rat of his party’s longstanding derision towards the Puhoi-to-Warkworth motorway, to preside over the opening of the road. The motorway, which cost around $880 million to build, is a huge step towards providing a safe, efficient route between our largest city and one of our poorest regions just to the north of it. It is vitally important for lifting economic activity in Northland. It will help get goods to market more quickly, make it more practical for Aucklanders to live in and visit Northland, and ensure much-needed supplies flow north more quickly and reliably.
Associate Transport Minister Kiri Allan appears to get it. She was waxing lyrical in the media about the route being vital for our economy and crucial for Northland to gain better access to Auckland and the wider upper North Island, all of which is true.
On the other side of the ledger, the Auditor-General released a report into the state of the Provincial Growth Fund, a $3 billion fund given by Labour to New Zealand First as part of the price of admission into government in 2017.
Around $700m of the Provincial Growth Fund has been spent on dozens of large and small things in Northland, more than any other region. The Auditor-General has been quite scathing in his polite way about how that money and all the other PGF funding has been distributed.
The two sums are quite similar in size. One has resulted in a project which will have a direct tangible benefit as a multiplier of economic growth in the Northland region lasting decades into the future; the other has largely disappeared already. Read more >
We are now well into the befuddled stage of the election campaign. For weeks, we have all been bombarded with competing views of the world and competing lists of lollies we will receive if we vote for this or that party. We have a bumper number of political parties on offer for the electorate to choose from. This time around there are 19, although only 17 are contesting the list. Back in 2011, the number was 13.
It might help at this time to try to simplify things a little. At its most basic level, this election is about continuing with some version of the status quo, or reverting to a version of the policy settings that existed before the last six years.
If you like the current direction of travel, then your choices are broadly three: Labour, the Greens or Te Pāti Māori. This combination believes the state is the solution to most problems, is broadly in favour of increased taxation and greater public debt, supports more co-governance, and has a questionable commitment to improving public services.
If you want change, or to borrow National’s slogan, “to get back on track”, your choices are two: National or Act. Both broadly emphasise growing the economy by providing more opportunity for businesses, shrinking the size of the state, providing tax relief in response to the cost-of-living crisis, rolling back co-governance and centralisation, delivering infrastructure, and focusing public services primarily on what they deliver to people.
Your final option is to contract out your decision to Winston Peters.
NZ First has risen in the polls in recent weeks, as it tends to do when one of the major parties weakens. There are many centrist Labour voters currently not happy with their party who will vote NZ First in preference to swapping over to National or Act. There are also voters who want change, but perhaps not the exact combination of National and Act that might otherwise turn up.
These people are taking Winston at his word, that he won’t return a Labour-led Government. However our old friend Mr Peters is a past master at saying one thing before an election and another thing afterwards, so at best they are voting for a crapshoot. Are we really believing Peters wouldn’t hold a Dutch auction after the election if he holds the balance of power?
When all the noise clears, the choice this election is clear. Vote for more of the same, or change. Or contract your vote out. Read more >
David Lange used to call the university vice-chancellors bikies in suits. He was Minister of Education as well as Prime Minister in the latter half of the 1980s, so he saw them up close. I did too, and there were plenty of times during my nearly seven years as Tertiary Education Minister that I had cause to recall that description.
The vice-chancellors were pretty demanding types in both his period and mine. I was often criticised by them both publicly and privately for my ostensibly parsimonious funding decisions. Most of them have moved on since, and one of their number, Stuart McCutcheon, has recently and sadly passed away, but a number have told me that in hindsight, I was a far better Tertiary Minister.
That’s because our universities have inexplicably been on hunger rations for the entire term of this Labour Government. And quite brutal rations. In contrast to the Key Government increasing university funding significantly in excess of inflation, the current Government has done the reverse. They have ignored the impacts of both Covid-19 and inflation on these institutions in their funding decisions, and that can only weaken the quality of our universities over time.
The Government’s shrinking of our universities is storing up trouble for the future. While not everyone can or should go to uni, young engineers, scientists, computing scholars and entrepreneurs are crucial to our future prosperity.
There are also immediate skills problems for the country which are going begging for lack of funding and a lack of government ambition. The big problem in the health sector is a lack of health professionals and especially doctors, yet we refuse to invest any money to train more. We have just two medical schools while a proposal for a third is left to wither on the vine. Australia has 21 medical schools for a population just five times our size.
We also complain about the cost of dental care, but the base problem there can be traced to a shortage of dentists training and graduating. In New Zealand, we have just one dental school; in Australia they have nine. Read more >
Steven Joyce is a former National Party Minister of Finance and Minister of Transport. He is director at Joyce Advisory, and the author of the recently-published book on his time in office, On The Record.
Around 18,500 public servants received a pay rise in the quarter.