What is the plan for Auckland's Harbour Bridge?
As the election campaign gets well under way, I have mental images of political bigwigs sitting in darkened rooms discussing policy into the wee small hours: wrestling with complex problems and challenging each other with deeply thought-out and nuanced solutions.
If you’re slightly strange like me, you open their policy documents, dismayed to find the kind of care, attention and depth of thought a 4-year-old might give to their latest painting of the family dog – that is, lovely, until they got distracted and knocked a glass of water all over it, leaving it a blurry mix of colours and, well, wet.
You see, the great hope of an election is that you have the chance to have deep introspection as a country. Except you don’t. The big issues of the day, the challenges for the country in the next 30 years, do not get a mention. Long-term planning is replaced by the short-term goal – simply winning. Forget facts and data. Forget that your short-term plan might be wrong in the long-term. It seems winning is the goal at the expense of all else – even New Zealand.
So, I thought it would be fun to have a wee yarn about the unmentioned challenges. Those big things that impact so much but just don’t get a discussion in the age of the soundbite. It’s not meant to be party-political, except to the extent that a failure to have a meaningful discussion, and acknowledge that these are complex questions, opens the door to populist leaders of the Trump and Johnson ilk. Ignoring them only diminishes them as problems and allows a “simple solutions” brand of politician to take political ground and media airtime when their lack of detail and strategy should be exposed by simply asking the tough questions.
Let’s start with the balance of payments. How do we as a country start selling more to the rest of the world than we buy from it? What will the world need from us over the next 30 years and what policies can we implement to encourage business to deliver those? And how can we best support and make it easier for those businesses to take their products to the world?
This area is so critical because, more than anything else, it will drive our wealth as a country and determine what we can afford to pay our teachers, nurses, police etc. It also means decisions we make and the success we have as a country will influence the performance of the NZD far more than it does now. In turn, this will help our businesses successfully plan without worrying about our currency bouncing around and turning their plans to mush. So for our political parties: can you really have a manifesto document without a clear plan to improve our position? Particularly in the light of the long-term, systemic change required of our economy by the Paris Agreement?
It is all well and good for one side to say ‘tax individuals less’ and the other to say ‘spend more’. Neither is a strategic position on growth and how the economy will be comprised 30 years from now.
This brings us on to infrastructure. The latest IMF report has had a lot of coverage recently, but in it the IMF note we have a “large infrastructure deficit”. I’m not sure where they looked for that level of carefully considered, nuanced insight, but they wouldn’t have had to go far. While there is the usual lolly scramble for new roads in contested seats, there is, apparently, no single plan for the country’s infrastructure requirements in the next 30 years. Roads are always front of mind, but why are we letting a politician, driven more by votes than national need, decide which roads we should build next? What is the national (small n) forecast for homes and their locations over the next 30 years? What does that mean for the cost benefit on new roads? Where is the list of major projects ranked by return on investment to the country? What is our view of risk in our transport network and w
hat are the contingencies if a major part of the network goes down? The Auckland Harbour Bridge, for example?
While new highways, rail lines and potholes are important, it also actually goes far deeper (pun intended). As we build new homes and climate change influences water discharge rates into the existing network, we need to think wastewater - we need to think sewage. While it’s an experience to have sewage in the road after heavy rainfall, it isn’t a good experience. It’s a mucky conversation, but wouldn’t it be lovely to have it now rather than when the streets’ discharge repeats on you?
We’ve mentioned business – what about our ports? It’s truly lovely to be miles away from anywhere, but we do need some form of connection which works for the world. Our ports today aren’t big enough to handle modern supertankers. It’s like the world has moved to the cloud and we’re still clinging on to old technology in the hope it might come back into fashion. What is our plan to deal with that issue? Because it’s worth multiple percentage points on all our import and export costs and is going to be an increasingly significant driver to our balance of payments and cost of living.
Now to the wealth gap. In 2017, right-wing voters said it was their number-one worry. Back in the last decade, the UN said the wealth gap cost us more growth than any other country in the OECD. It hasn’t got better. If you look at data from the US, UK, Australia and Canada, the policies of trickle-down economics promoted by Reagan and Thatcher have, since the 1980s, increased the gap between the haves and the have-nots. Yet we still see those policies on the ballot paper, with no plan to deal with the other side of the ledger. In New Zealand, the left have increased funding to directly address child poverty, and in the last six years, the issue has become more pronounced. Yes, they will blame pandemics and global recessions, but the facts and data do not help their case. We need a grown-up discussion about this because it impacts crime, education and health, and the main victims of this are children for whom the idea of equality of opportunity is a fairytale.
Let’s pivot to something more personal. Mental health. Youth mental health. The world has a pandemic of mental health issues. New Zealand has a pandemic of mental health issues. I seem to recall another pandemic getting rather a lot of coverage recently. Now we’ve become experts at air fryers and banana bread, can we put a similar level of effort towards mental health? How can we as adults do better at creating an environment where our children feel supported in taking on the challenges of the world today? How do we ensure that people facing a crisis know where to turn? And when they do seek help, ensure someone is there to catch them before they fall?
Everyone probably agrees that social media has a lot to answer for. Here is one thing, for a start – how can an industry that has such a profound influence over our society be totally outside of societal regulation? In just the last eight years, it has been the vehicle for Russian interference in the US election, Russian interference in the Brexit referendum, the radicalisation and dispersion of extreme views and conspiracy theories, and the channel for the streaming of a mass murder in Christchurch. I could go on and on and on. The EU just made Apple ditch their Lightning connector to make it easier for consumers. It’s astonishing that packing two cables is a problem, but regime change is perfectly acceptable. Is this really an area where we can take the “she’ll be right” approach? Is it acceptable for politicians to be silent on it?
There are arguments for many things in this list (and you’ll have your own list, I’m sure) being the most important, but climate change would be near the top for most people. A National government signed us up (rightly) to the Paris Agreement, committing us to reducing our emissions by 45 per cent by 2030. How do we do that when 50 per cent of our emissions come from agriculture? How do we support agriculture and maintain its positive impact on our balance of payments during the change that is going to have to come? How do we ensure we don’t miss our obligations given the importance of 100% Pure to the NZ brand story? What is the impact of plant-based or lab-grown meat and milk on our primary industries? Can we assume the world will still want what our farmers make 30 years from now, and make no plans just in case they don’t? These are deep questions, and go far beyond simply supporting our farmers.
Finally, politicians themselves. I admire them and think they’re madder than a box of hats in equal measure. To want to put your head above the parapet in today’s world demonstrates a particular amount of crazy and ego that terrifies me. I also think there aren’t enough good ones. We also don’t have enough opportunities to see the leaders sat down and pressed on these complex issues, and if we do, they often fall short. I’m sure they’d rather not answer questions more frequently, but how do we create more situations where politicians are tested on their ideas and their record? The UK has Question Time, the US networks have their own political discussion shows. These are important proving grounds for politicians and vehicles beyond social media where people can have their say. NZ needs more of this.
New Zealand is in a relatively good place. We got through and recovered (economically) from the pandemic better than almost anyone else in the world, and we’ve grown faster than most since – that’s those folks at the IMF again. The one reality in this election, though, is that almost nothing any party does during the next three years will have an impact in those three years. Economies and political systems are like oil tankers. You point them in a direction and it takes years to see them turn (it’s why Labour can’t really take all the credit for good growth post-pandemic and why National can’t really slam them for all the issues now). The problem is that by the time the oil tanker does start turning, the direction in which they’re turning often isn’t ideal anymore. That’s why it’s so crucial we demand our politicians talk about the big issues and go beyond tax less, spend more. If only we looked at the long term now, we’d avoid the big mistakes farther down the line and actually take NZ forward as a country.
Matthew Bennett is the CEO and founder of Nibblish. He was a finalist for the EY Entrepreneur of the Year award last year.
Dalton Taylor's city centre attack lasted more than seven minutes.