This deal with Sky City Casino has the same air of political willingness to kow-tow to corporate interests.
Why is it so important for Auckland to have a convention centre? Will the next international meeting of casino companies hold their meetings there?
Mind you, it may be that in exchange for rows of new pokies, Sky City will take a leaf of paper out of the Christchurch book and build a convention centre out of cardboard?
They could construct it on the cheap out of used shoe boxes, be seen to have fulfilled their part of the deal while raking in the dosh from the suckers glued to the proverbial one-armed bandits. Of course, a cardboard building would have to withstand the Auckland climate. The rain would have it a soggy mess within a few months.
The whole deal with Sky City is completely inappropriate. The men in suits are talking to their mates in suits (sounds like the Mafia when you put it like that) at a time when jobs and people's lives are being demolished by government policy. Like the Christchurch earthquake, John Key's Cabinet seem determined to destroy any sense of social progress by taking the country back to another era.
Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglit, writing in the US magazine Vanity Fair, makes a strong argument for governments to expand rather than contract public spending in times of recession. He is referencing the US economy but much of what he says fits our own situation. He examines the Depression years and notes it was the onset of war that boosted government spending, which in turn, pulled the economy out of a financial rut with the need for heavy industry and investment in public infrastructure. In the US, this was the era when the interstate highways were built, industry and innovation gathered momentum and new jobs emerged.
With the end of the war, the GI Bill provided education funding for returning servicemen and women.
Stiglitz is not suggesting it requires a war to generate this effect but proposes that governments must spend in order to lift a nation's fortunes rather than go for the short term wins of cost cutting.
So far, this government's cost cutting obsession has achieved rising unemployed, public service staff struggling to cover the work of those made redundant and a growing concern that safety and due care is being sacrificed for political gain.
Some readers might recall when cardboard policemen were stationed around NZ to reduce crime. If we think it is alright to knock up cardboard cathedrals, will we find ourselves with cardboard convention centres, sports stadiums and hospitals?
John Key has been accused of turning NZ into a banana republic - but perhaps there is a danger we will become the cardboard country?
Terry Sarten is a social worker, musician and writer. Email him at: tgs@inspire.net.nz
