Dialogue: Not only buildings rotten at the core

By GARTH GEORGE

The chickens sent flying by Rogernomics and its derivatives are coming home to roost with a vengeance. And two of them should make it plain once and for all that the great economic experiment - for that's what it has been - has failed miserably and it's no wonder our economy is in a mess and getting worse.

Who would have dreamed that houses would begin leaking and rotting within months of being built? Or that Air New Zealand would find itself short of $500 million in capital and the object of contempt on the part of many of its customers?

The cause in each case, and they are but two of dozens of examples, is the same - the 19th-century laissez faire capitalism reintroduced by Roger Douglas and given a big lift along by Ruth Richardson. It continues to suck us dry financially and socially as we spiral ever faster into Third World status.

No matter which way you look at it, or what excuses are made, the decline in building standards can be put down only to the cost-cutting and staff reduction that have become synonymous with business.

They call it downsizing - and this at a time when all you hear from Government and business is the need for economic growth. How on earth can you downsize and grow at the same time?

One of the key elements missing from the building industry - and from most of our other industries - is new tradesmen coming on. Why? Because somewhere along the line, stingy businessmen prevailed on the Government to cancel our wonderful apprenticeship scheme because it was costing them money.

Another was succinctly explained by builder John Barrett in our Weekend Review cover story last weekend. He said the building industry's problems had become a vicious circle - the demand for the cheapest price from owners, architects and developers being met by less-skilled tradespeople using cheaper materials.

And his partner added: "In the old days everyone took pride in what they did, now no one gives a damn. It's just get it finished and get the dollars."

Which, if you'll pardon the pun, hits the nail on the head. This nation is now ruled by greed, and the seeds of that greed were sown in the economic upheaval of the mid-1980s and fertilised by the synthetic boom that followed.

So we continued to sell off our national assets and businesses as fast as we could to overseas corporations run by men and women with balance sheets for brains, calculators for hearts and dollar signs in their eyes, interested only in bottom lines.

They called it wealth creation, then proceeded to bleed us dry, siphoning off billions of dollars of our national wealth into the bulging pockets of their overseas shareholders while our disposable incomes dropped dramatically.

They talked about job creation, then laid off staff by the hundreds of thousands or transferred their manufacturing overseas, depriving more and more New Zealanders of jobs.

They said that if business flourished, there would be more available for the social purposes, yet their machinations have created a new impoverished underclass bigger than it ever was, benefits have been cut and our social services remain starved of money, creating suffering and despair throughout society.

And the Business Roundtable has the cheek to bring to here a conservative "welfare analyst" who tries to tell us that unwed women and their impregnators should be punished. If he thinks he can hold back the sexual urge in this age of moral vacuum by threatening punishment ... he's got as much chance as King Canute.

The other example is Air New Zealand which, it now seems, has been on the down and down since it was floated as a public company and given into the hands of the economic rapists.

Thus it transpires that the airline most of us once thought was indeed the best in the world may be far from that, if you can believe the letters of some customers published in this newspaper in the past week.

And that's no wonder, for it, too, has been the victim of cost-cutting, complete with sustained attacks on staff numbers and conditions of work. Its decline can be matched by a number of other businesses, notably Fletchers and Tranz Rail, which have suffered the same fate.

Well, as I've said before, any business that treats its staff as a liability and not as its most valuable asset is doomed to fail.

It is ironic, of course, that the only people who have not suffered from the decline in our economic performance are those who have perpetrated it. With their exorbitant directors' fees and inflated executive salaries, they're sitting pretty, thank us very much.

Is this what was meant by Ruthenasia?

* garth_george@herald.co.nz