On a trip to Australia, I read news about home. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon had suffered an embarrassment. He was heading for Melbourne but his Defence Force 757 had broken down and he’d missed meetings on the sidelines of the Australia-Asean summit. Finance Minister Nicola Willis described the breakdown as “not ideal” and said, “I don’t think we look like a backwater country.”
It wasn’t so much the ancient plane that made us look like a backwater. It was everything else. I received a brutal forecast for New Zealand from an Australian businessman: the new government’s tax cuts mean cutting social services. We’re scrapping agreements that kept wages higher so our essential workers will leave for Australia, seeking better pay. We’re about to strip the public service. We won’t fix the water infrastructure. We won’t fund conservation so we’ll damage the environment, which is one of our greatest economic assets.
We won’t protect marine resources so they’ll be depleted. We won’t build new schools or fund education properly. We won’t pay for hungry kids’ school lunches.
We’ll cut regulation because health and safety and environmental protection are deemed too expensive. We’ll renege on climate mitigation because we don’t want to pay now for a better future. The result: an impoverished, poorly serviced, unsafe little backwater.
I said, “What you’re telling me is we’ve decided, collectively, to enter a death spiral of false economies.”
It really was embarrassing, and it got more so when it turned out we’d deemed TV news too expensive, too. We couldn’t afford to have journalists holding politicians to account. So what if public broadcasting is necessary for maintaining a functioning democracy? We don’t want to invest public money so we might just let social media platforms destroy local journalism. It’s bizarre. A free press is a human right. Are we the first democracy to lose it simply out of fecklessness and stinginess?
The brutal Australian rundown continued: we’ve been well respected. Soon, though, with all this cutting and lack of self-investment, we won’t look like a thriving, independent nation. We’ll look like a cypher that has stopped looking after itself. No more self-care, no more wellness. Just a scruffy, dull-eyed little wreck that has horribly let itself go.
It didn’t help to be in Australia while hearing this dim view of us. Riding on cheap public transport, strolling through crowded, pedestrianised city streets, consuming local media.
In an interview that went viral in the US, right-wing former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull outlined current international risks. It’s not a good time to let ourselves go. Turnbull identified Donald Trump as a threat to global security. He said, “Trump is in awe of Putin. When you see Trump with Putin, as I have on a few occasions, he’s like the 12-year-old boy who goes to high school and meets the captain of the football team. ‘My hero.’ It is really creepy … This is a guy leading a party that is no longer committed to democracy … His approach is a threat to the security of the world.”
Turnbull’s assessment chimed with that of Robert Sapolsky, a professor of neuroendocrinology and baboon expert, who described Trump in an interview with Rory Stewart: “A poster child for the pathologies of when dominance goes wrong, he’s a disaster. There’s much about baboon behaviour that seems way too nuanced and sophisticated compared to him … Fascism is really going to suck here in the US.”
The warnings are urgent; the mention of fascism isn’t frivolous. Winter is coming. Backwaters are vulnerable. We need to look out for ourselves, invest in ourselves, not render ourselves ignorant, impoverished and bare.
