KEY POINTS:
Do you ever get the impression that the wheels have fallen off NZ Inc? Reading the Herald for the past week or so has certainly led me to that conclusion.
The economy is shuddering, with the dollar too high and interest rates heading off the clock, while taxes and myriad other Government charges rob us blind.
The Corrections Department is in chaos and there seems to be no end to its inability to get its act together.
Officers of the police force are either facing serious criminal charges or handing one another speeding tickets like confetti.
The courts are irretrievably overloaded and several serious cases have lately been thrown out because they've gone beyond reasonable time.
The education system is still struggling to justify the flawed NCEA, and those who should know tell us the latest changes don't go nearly far enough.
The health system remains unable to cater for those who need its help, let alone want it, as in having to send cancer sufferers to Australia for treatment.
It seems rather unfair that after most of us have done what has been asked of us to achieve "economic transformation" by working harder and longer and taking ill-paying jobs to get off the dole, we are kicked in the guts right, left and centre.
Tens of thousands who have scrimped and saved to raise the deposit to buy a probably overpriced home now face the stress of having to cough up painfully increased sums in mortgage repayments, and it looks like too many of them will ultimately forfeit their properties.
On top of that they are penalised by increased electricity prices gouged by Government-owned enterprises; by rates constantly rising way above the rate of inflation; and by ever-increasing charges for water and wastewater disposal. (I was astounded to note on my last Metrowater bill that the wastewater change was just on double the charge for the water itself.)
And while so many suffer the consequences of economic mismanagement, the Governor of the Reserve Bank tries to take on the world's currency traders with infinitesimal interferences, best described by Tim Dower on NewstalkZB as "taking a leak in the Pacific Ocean".
What Alan Bollard should be doing is dropping interest rates so the international money manipulators lose interest in us and go and rip off some other country. If a bit more inflation is the result that's surely a better price to pay.
Although I see that lots of other developed countries manage to keep their interest rates way below ours - and their inflation rates, too.
As for the Corrections Department, I can see no easy solutions to its manifold problems except to privatise our prisons, which we were doing when the socialists stormed the Treasury benches.
The privately run prison here in Auckland was a model operation and, if I recall correctly, as free of trouble as any such institution can be.
I have been visiting an old mate of mine over the past year or so while he spends some time as a guest of Her Majesty, and the thing that has struck me is the miserably dispiriting atmosphere in the jail.
Not surprising, you might say, considering the nature of the inhabitants. Yet the more often I went the more I became persuaded that the nasty atmosphere was engendered more by the staff than the inmates.
Not even visitors are exempt from the nitpicking and condescension of prison staff and are treated by most in a manner that verges on humiliating.
If these are the type of men and women who have climbed or are busy climbing the career ladder, then I fear our prison service is doomed to perpetual disaster.
I have no argument with the police prosecuting those of their number who commit crimes - and there will always a sprinkling of those - but when I hear that cops were caught 685 times by speed cameras last year and only 435 tickets were waived because they were on their way to emergencies, I get another inkling of why police morale is so low.
There was a time when these minor infringers would have received a gentle warning about obeying the speed limit and that would have been the end of it. I wonder what hope there is for improved police morale when the revenue-gatherers among them begin feeding off their own.
Failures in the justice, education and health systems are there for all to see, in spite of all the money that has been poured into them since Labour came to power in 1999.
Which suggests to me that the Prime Minister and her Cabinets have had more than enough time to prove beyond reasonable doubt that they're not up to the job. Because things haven't got better, they've got worse.
