Dialogue: Social responsibility is a concept we're leaving behind

An article in a British rag this week lamented the death of the notion that decent public services are a prerequisite of a civilised society.

A lot of articles lament the passing of that notion. The difference with this one was that the author (who, reading between the lines, was one of those lovably pot-addled, social democrat types who follow the social sciences as though there is a point) seemed genuinely to believe that there was hope.

He also believed that it was possible for a country that had experienced years of New Right government and a prevailing spirit of competitive individualism to hang on to its social conscience.

More to the point, he was able to conceive of a society where the great unwashed would affirm the above-mentioned social conscience by volunteering to pay higher taxes.

Occasionally I wonder what it would be like to be able to suspend disbelief to that degree. What is it like to genuinely believe that there is life after capitalism or that the Third Way is feasible - that capitalism and social responsibility are not mutually exclusive?

What is it like to genuinely believe that the great unwashed in a post-Thatcherite nation like New Zealand means it when it says it is suddenly more interested in social responsibility than in capitalism?

There is no evidence to support this fantasy. National is back up in the polls - New Zealand's flirt with social responsibility is already over. Not many people want social responsibility enough to pay for it. Such is the legacy of the monetarist era. The priorities are firmly in place. There's no going back.

There's particularly no going back for a country in which the generation raised in the New Right era is coming of age. This is my own generation and the one after it. These generations have little notion of collective action and collective responsibility, or public service, or even of public domain.

I suspect that a lot of them would be surprised to hear that universities, art galleries, cooperatives, friendly societies and unions were once considered, to varying degrees, public utilities. (This is, incidentally, the list of "important" public utilities in the British article.)

Collective action, interest and responsibility are simply not part of up-and-coming New Zealand's consciousness. That is hardly surprising; these concepts have never been part of its experience.

Let's not forget that some 10 years have passed since the New Right's monumental changes; since unions were disbanded in New Zealand, tertiary education deregulated and so on.

Let's not forget, either, that 10 years is a long time and there is now a generation of young adults too young to remember those changes.

As far as this lot is concerned, union membership was always voluntary, tertiary education was always user-pays and no one ever objected to either.

This upbringing shows in the way that youngsters have turned their backs on the notion of student union membership - in the fact that they would rather abandon a collective enterprise than modernise it.

It shows in the way they prefer to leave the country rather than suffer through a socialist administration. It shows when they tell you they don't mind the user-pays ethos, even when it comes to education.

I interviewed youngsters at Massey University recently who said that paying for their courses kept them motivated to finish them, and it was wrong to expect other people to pay for your education.

We're America now. It's finished. These kids will be in charge soon. The old New Zealand is gone.