A country is not a company and a Prime Minister is not a CEO - Chlöe Swarbrick

OPINION

A country is not a company. A Prime Minister is not a CEO.

We’d all be forgiven for thinking so, given the decades of propaganda generated to prop up this mythology. The champions of the supposed “free market” - which turns out to be anything but when hard times come and the corporates expect state-sponsored bailouts - have spent years meticulously weeding out consideration of the greater, collective good from economic and political commentary.

This has helped to create a sense of inevitability about a deeply unfair, climate-changed world. Yet we are living in the consequences of decisions made by human beings. It’s not natural for our waters to run polluted while those experiencing homelessness pull together makeshift beds out the front of luxury stores. It’s the result of political decisions that have prioritised short-term, hyper-individualised gain at the expense of pretty much everything that holds society and the climate necessary for our survival together.

As Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko entrenched it into the pop-culture psyche, “greed is good”. As UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s trickle-down economic reforms shredded the social contract, she said “there is no such thing as society”. As Christopher Luxon argued in his state of the nation for harsher penalties on the poor and a bloody-minded commitment to tax cuts, “our Government is making the tough choices required to rebuild New Zealand’s economy”.

Tough choices for who exactly?

Prior to the 1980s, these ideas of privatising profit and socialising cost were fringe and radical. It would have been a whacky idea then to contemplate rampant profiteering on the things we all needed for a functional society: housing, education, healthcare, energy and public transport.

But as with all successful campaigns, many of us now find it hard to imagine anything but this way of the world.

Enter, stage far-right, the Government’s latest 36-point “plan”. It reads like a bizarre bingo card for environmental destruction and trickle-down economics, with hollow slogans plastered over hints at a climate-shredding agenda.

They’re talking an “independent” review on methane - kind of the point of the Independent Climate Change Commission, and therefore a strong signal that they don’t want that science, but the convenient version which continues to kick the can down the road for our most polluting industry, many players in which actually want to be part of the solution.

They’re “taking decisions” to reopen oil and gas drilling, suspending protection of indigenous biodiversity and saying without saying it that they’re deprioritising the health of our freshwater to maximise privatised profit.

There are two deeply ironic themes I find in all of this, which would be funny if it weren’t for the fact that it’s our futures at stake.

The first is that these bullet points wouldn’t even hold up in the corporate world: vague, immeasurable and untethered from reality and evidence as they are. The second is that the long-term costs of all of these decisions ultimately far, far outweigh the short-term benefit.

Greens co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick during Question Time in Parliament. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Management is one thing, but leadership is another.

It’s not particularly difficult to fire up the shredder and kowtow to mega corporate lobbyists.

It is difficult to stand up to those profiting handsomely from the status quo, wedded to the game with the rules designed in their favour. These gatekeepers will do anything to ensure you don’t realise these things can change if enough regular people decide to feel just as entitled to the political system working for them as they do for those presently sitting at the top.

“The economy” is not a game of Monopoly. It’s all of us, the planet we live on and the rules we put in place to govern those relationships. These rules have changed time and again as society has evolved.

In 2024, 40 years on from the 1984 Rogernomics reforms, it’s time for an economy that serves both people and the planet - not the other way around.