The Hollowing Out of New Zealand

Corrupt Democracy and the Devil's Bargain Remain Intact

It was always nothing more than an empty gesture. The taskforce set up to tell New Zealand how to close the living standards gap with Australia by 2025 has published its findings. It was a stillbirth. We cannot recall any Government instigated investigation being so comprehensively dismissed so quickly. If the Report were a stone it would have been found at the bottom of Grand Canyon within seconds.

The Prime Minister and his deputy rushed to assure the electorate that closing the gap with Australia was always and only an aspirational goal, which is to say it is a goal no-one should takes seriously. John Armstrong catalogues the political impossibility of following the report's recommendations. Essentially, no-one has the political will or courage to follow the advice which essentially turn around two key planks: reduce taxation, and reduce the role of elephantine government.

Most singularly, neither John Key nor Bill English disagreed with the recommendations per se. They just said that they would not be following them. Now they need to fess up and be candid with the electorate. The reality is that no successful and popular politician can follow the recommended steps--the voters could not stand the pain; they will rise up to cast out any such errant government. The devil's bargain that lies at the root of all corrupt western democracies--of which New Zealand is surely one--where politicians bribe electors with promises of goodies paid for by other people's money, and voters willingly accede to being bribed--remains firmly intact. But such corruption has its price. The problem with bargains made with the Devil is that certain damnation draws nigh.

The damnation drawing night is the hollowing out of our economy at an increasingly rapid rate. In effect our leaders have told us that lower and lower relative living standards are inevitable. New Zealand is ineluctably moving down the ranking ladder towards the status of a banana republic. And the speed of decline is increasing by the year. It is sad, but inevitable. The vicious cycle is reaching critical speed: people and capital flight will likely become unstoppable from this point onwards, until the government prohibits both, at which point, the banana republic truly will have arrived.

Maybe when the end is reached, hacks like John Armstrong will change their view and nostalgically look back to the wonderful years of courage and progress that attended the reforms of Roger Douglas, but it will all be too late. Too bad. On the other hand, maybe Mr Armstrong thinks there is something noble about New Zealand sinking to the bottom of the OECD, becoming a "pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas".

Contrary to the seductive tones of the Devil's bargain, no-one owes us anything. But prostituting ourselves to the highest political bidder--as if we were all owed something by someone else--is now so much part of national life that it cannot be reversed. The genie is well and truly out of the bottle.

Since we have judged ourselves unworthy of God's light and law, as being beneath our dignity or, as the French would say, our amour-propre, He long ago turned to others. The light of the Gospel is now shining elsewhere. Our darkness is deepening.