For some reason we are not good at learning from the mistakes of others. Auckland should have been taking notes from United States cities years ago on how not to neglect public transport and become trapped in gridlocked carmargeddon.
We should have been watching countries like Switzerland and Germany managing recycling and cleaning up their lakes and rivers but, no, we needed to create our own pollution problems – none of these crazy foreign good ideas stuff for us. We are quite capable of mucking things up by ourselves, thank you very much.
Housing is another look and learn.
House prices in Australia's major cities rose to astronomical figures with even the cheap ones selling for a million-plus. This was driven by the nonsensical notion that what goes up will keep going up.
Now the downward slide is demolishing people's equity and creating a mortgage crisis. This, of course, will not happen in New Zealand because we have been learning from their example – not.
I have, in the past, noted the odd coincidence that all our MPs, from all sides of Parliament, have been reluctant to tackle capital gains as one way to bring some reality back to NZ house prices. My fix for that is that all MPs owning more than one house should not be allowed to vote on housing legislation as they have a very direct conflict of interest.
By last reckoning that would mean three MPs would get to decide policy as most of our elected representatives own numerous properties.
Geographically we have two main islands, but socio-economically we are divided into two states — one the desperate state of the have-nots; the other, the have-plentys with small colonies of Smugsvilles where the inhabitants wallow in privilege and do not care. We need to do better.
The current state of the union requires us to be united in finding solutions. This means listening to the voices of the disadvantaged and understanding the reality of high rents, low wages and escalating living costs for some families.
At this time of year, the cost of a school uniform can break the family budget. Why do we have uniforms?
The kids have clothes yet we impose another set of rules on an issue that has no effect on the quality of education. Einstein's hair would have had him sent home from school if this was the way such things were decided.
My State of the Union address cannot end without mentioning the state of the status quo and the need for New Zealand to be moving into the status futurae.
Terry Sarten (aka Tel) is a writer, musician and social worker — feedback always welcome: tgs@inspire.net.nz
