They seem to get worse. Every year the Minister of Finance presents a budget projecting a 12-month forecast of where our money will be spent to tackle them and deliver a surplus (or not as the case may be).
Every day our politicians fight to survive in a battle ground of destructive energy sapping conflict, and media attention fixated on their human frailties. They can't just "get on with the job". Some make it to the next election. Some don't. The billboards come out again.
We witness "bad politics" because we do not have a plan. There is nothing else to inspire our attention. For my part, I am over it. There has to be a better way. I think there is.
Our local authorities must have a 10-year plan. A plan that sets their vision, how it will be achieved, and funded. They are accountable to it. We should demand no less of Central Government.
I say we need a Long Term Plan for New Zealand. I moot a Long Term Social and Fiscal Responsibility Act. Under it, every budget would have to demonstrate where, across a clear range of sensible social, environmental and economic parameters, government policy will place us, not just in 12 months time, but in 30.
A generation. Call it the "Kiwiplan".
The problems we face cannot be solved in three-year cycles. Bold visionary policy may not be immediately popular, but is surely essential. Example. We need to go to war on climate change, with all departments of state engaged, both to minimise the impact and to adapt to its consequences. This is going to be major. The insurance industry, at least, understands that.
Why spend (as planned) $9 billion on roads in the next four years when in 30 years, no one may even own their own car. Are we not better to invest courageously in technology, education, science and research for alternative fuels, battery storage, and antidotes to methane from ruminants, than to try and "cash" our way out of tomorrow's traffic jam?
Another example.
The Dunedin project tells us to invest in the first two years of every child at risk. "Wraparound" multi-agency support will save billions in social costs (prisons, Police) in a generation. Long-term rather than short-sighted "get tough on crime - three strikes you're out" solutions will save in the end, but may not get you elected in September.
Yet another. Looking ahead now to 2047; how many people can the New Zealand environment (our rivers, lakes and beaches) sustain? Where should these people live? How many schools, hospitals, houses and parks do we need to accommodate and support them? Does anyone even know the answers to these questions?
We tinker with the parameters, but who is crunching the hard numbers, and across government departments - immigration, education, environment, and housing?
A Long Term Social and Fiscal Responsibility Act would require that governments of the day do know the answers to these questions. Sure, this long-term approach would require governments to make predictions about how effective their policies will be, what short or even medium-term costs may be incurred in delivering them, and what savings might be made in the long term through the policy benefits achieved (which can be transferred to other areas of government over time).
But isn't that what Treasury does, or at least, should do? Isn't that how policies today are gauged and evaluated but only (I suspect) over a much shorter term timeframe?
A Long Term Social and Fiscal Responsibility Act would also not only demand that governments make bold, visionary even courageous policy decisions in the overall future interest, but empower them to. The opposition could scream "deficit" across the floor, but without legitimate claim. They would also have to deliver a sustainable long-term surplus when they get in. Parliament, as elected by all New Zealanders, would instruct them to do just that.
We were told that the "structural" economic reforms in the 1980s would deliver dividends to all within 18 months. Thirty years later the gains are yet to "trickle down". There is so much that needs doing on every street, in every town and city and every day of the week - to better care for each other and our environment, while unemployment, poverty, crime, homelessness and pollution endures.
A longer term view would drive social policy that systematically, even systemically confronts these challenges. Not based on a "hunch" or ideological myopia, but on demonstrable and deliberate design.
We would have a plan. The Kiwiplan.
Martin Williams is a barrister specialising in local government and resource management law, based in Napier.
Views expressed here are the writer's opinion and not the newspaper's. Email: editor@hbtoday.co.nz
