Garth George: No wonder Captain Clark can't wait for an election

When we set aside all the excuses she might offer - none of which would hold air, let alone water - and take a look at the real reason, Helen Clark's calling of a snap election should come as no surprise.

This consummate politician - which is not, incidentally, a compliment - has noticed that the ship of state is sailing full tilt towards a number of ship-killing reefs.

And she knows that if she waits another five months, the ship will be so close to the reefs that more of the crew might mutiny and the majority of the owner-shareholders might vote to dismiss her from command.

Thus she has decided to demand from us, the owners, a renewal of her contract for another three years. And, God help us, we'll give it to her because there is no other captain and crew available at short notice.

But that won't save the ship of state from the reefs, which are looming ever larger over its bow. Let's look at them.

The inexorably climbing dollar. This is going to put more and more pressure on interest rates - we'll all have to pay more for our mortgages and other borrowings - and have a seriously deleterious effect on our exports, which will play hell with our general prosperity, not to mention our balance of payments.

The welfare system. In spite of all the extra money that has been thrown at it, the system is still not providing adequately for those who really need it and is still subject to rorts costing the taxpayer billions of dollars a year.

Just one more indication of the truth of that was the Herald series Our children - a 5-year review, the guts of which was that our underprivileged children are probably worse off now than they were five years ago.

The health service. Once again, in spite of all the extra money laid out, the health system is in total disarray. And it's getting worse by the day while so-called managers play rearrange-the-deckchairs-on-the-Titanic, dedicated health professionals use up valuable time begging the public for donations, patients have to be nearly dead to get life-saving surgery, waiting lists grow even for urgent treatments and thousands are condemned to lives of pain and misery because they can't even get on a list.

Our education system. Recalcitrant teachers are simply a symptom of the depth of the sickness that afflicts education, which has become much worse under the inept control of one of the least competent officers of the ship of state.

At the root of the problem is the stupid National Certificate of Educational Achievement, which is held in contempt by most teachers and students alike, but continues to be championed by those so-called educationists, mainly in the state bureaucracy and the PPTA hierarchy, who are so politically correct that they have lost all touch with reality.

The other root cause is the loss of control of school financing and teachers' remuneration by principals and boards of trustees as a result of the scrapping of bulk funding. In that sense, the teachers - who couldn't wait to see the end of it - because it rewarded worth and made no allowances for incompetence - have shot themselves in both feet.

Law and order. So low is the morale in our police force that hundreds of officers are resigning. It's no wonder they're fed up in the face of insufficient personnel and gross underfunding. We have one police officer for every 700-odd people; in Australia it's one for every 400-odd people.

Our police are so thinly spread (except when engaged in revenue-gathering duties) that it's no wonder that crimes of violence are epidemic, burglaries and all sorts of petty crimes go uninvestigated and the streets in some parts of the country are so unsafe that women (and even some men) are afraid to go out at night.

The creaking court system, from its liberal, hand-wringing justices and judges, some of whom are patently incompetent, to its untrained, underpaid and overworked frontline staff, is an absolute disgrace and desperately in need of clean-up, particularly the star chamber Family Court from which horror stories of injustice leak almost daily.

Then there's the castrated Defence Force, a reef that is lying just under the surface, and the only thing we can be sure of is that sooner or later - and soon at the latest - there will be a very low tide.

The irony is that it would cost next to nothing to blow all these reefs out of the water. They don't need more money, all they need is a change in attitude. What they all have in common is that they are public services. But successive governments have made them public businesses.

Until the business ethos is put to rest and the service ethos revived, misdirected public services will continue to endanger the ship of state and all of us owner-shareholders whose lives depend on it.

Captain Clark needs to order the helm over a few degrees to port.

* garth_george@nzherald.co.nz

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