Joanne McNeill: Another brick in our wall

Seen any brickworks lately? The last one I remember, at Kamo, closed down years ago. I doubt any remain in New Zealand, which means any bricks used here today, must be imported.

Freighting heavy blocks of cooked earth from overseas, when we have plentiful unemployed labour and excellent resources of brick-making clay at home, seems crazy.

Why do it? Assumedly because overseas manufacturers produce cheaper bricks, which makes economic sense on paper, although in every other way - carbon miles, under-utilisation of local resources, loss of skills, plant, local jobs and, possibly most importantly, of strategic self-sufficiency in a tiny far-flung island nation subject to the fickle winds of economic sea-change, for instance - it's nonsense.

The same has happened to woollen mills, tanneries, glassworks, railway workshops, car assembly plants, clothing, china and footwear producers, and hosts of other once-thriving manufacturers. Hardly a week goes by without announcements of mass regional job losses.

Local industries have closed or trans-located to low-wage economies where desperate people work for pittances. This has the incidental effect of importing a lower standard of living (and products) rather than the preferable option, which would mean paying NZ-equivalent living wages (and attending to sustainable quality) wherever our goods are manufactured, thereby exporting a higher standard of living and ecological balance globally, so all might enjoy the kind of productive work, leisure, peace and security governments are supposed to promote.

It's hard to find any everyday utilitarian goods made nationally any more (maybe toilet paper?), apart from fresh food, although even in supermarkets over-priced tasteless, eerily perfect, Californian oranges upstage juicy local Kerikeri produce.

I do not pretend to understand economics, but the model we follow - competitive, growth-based, exclusively profit-driven, free-market capitalism - does not appear to serve the greater good.

Rather it seems to reward a ruthless few usurers while maintaining an ever-growing pool of unskilled slaves with no choice beyond accepting stigmatised welfare or performing low-wage service roles the wealthy baulk at. Socially, this is a recipe for trouble.

But, as (the-then plain) John Key, 25-year-old hot-shot foreign exchange trader, said in historic Close-Up footage of his prime: "No time, necessarily, for manners."

It's not all the current PM's fault. The rot set in when Roger Douglas began dissolving the collective institutional glue in favour of cut-throat, free-market ideology in the 1980s. The imported social fabric has leaked ever since, along with the buildings.

The recent hint of serious co-operation between opposition parties Labour, Greens and NZ First in setting up an inquiry into the crisis in the manufacturing sector was promising.

Their recommendations - reforming monetary policy to stabilise the exchange rate, refocusing investment from housing speculation to production, lowered electricity costs, tax relief for research and development, and a government procurement policy of buying NZ made - are all anathema to ideological free-marketeers; especially stabilising the exchange rate which I imagine would take lots of fun and profit out of forex trading.

Key dismissed suggestions of the manufacturing crisis as a "joke". It's no joke reducing a formerly productive country to total dependence on imports. His glib amusement is at our expense.