Political Maturity
Just in the past months leading up to the election, we witnessed some political parties and their aides blowing a lot of hot air, but without really much substance to it.
Now that the Writ for Election has been issued and election campaigns are in full gear, we should all prepare to experience this at a whole different level.
Unfortunately for Fiji, because we do not necessarily have that level of political maturity, no one stands to question whatever hogwash is mouthed by some political parties desperately trying to get into power. We need to have academics who are not in any way politically aligned – which we lack thereof – actively scrutinise the unbelievable promises these politicians make.
At the moment we seem to have political parties just throwing whatever they can at each other. We do not have third party assessments on their claims. This election seems to be a battle of “who can make the boldest claims” Some say they might make university education completely free, without necessarily indicating how they would pay for it or where they would cut the budget spend from.
Factually speaking, we now have more people attending universities than ever before. Some universities are failing to cope.
Are we going to see more university campuses being built? If yes, where are we going to get the money from to cater for this? Or are we going to place restrictions on who can obtain university qualifications based on race and ethnicity like we previously did? Because we would definitely need some form of control mechanism, otherwise we would see people already holding multiple degrees going back to university to obtain even more. Moreover, some previously mentioned that they would raise the minimum wage to $5 an hour, then just some time ago another said $10 an hour.
Have any of these politicians sought advice from their economist friends, because figures like these obviously do not make economic sense.
I remember a political candidate gave a lecture some time ago at one of the universities, in which she talked about minimum wage. She did recognise the fact that a raise would affect small businesses, however made a very ridiculous statement saying Government would subsidise small businesses. How does she expect Government to subsidise small businesses? Does she expect Government to pay their employees, or does she expect Government to stock their inventory free of charge? Where would they get money for this from?
You see, many political parties nowadays just think up to their noses – probably following the footsteps of their predecessors. They need to think further down the lane. A rise in the minimum wage would mean there would be a rise across the board.
People getting $6-$7 an hour currently, would then want to get $12 an hour, because all of a sudden, people working below them would have gotten a pay rise of more than a 100 per cent.
It makes perfect sense that they would demand a higher wage as well. This would mean that the person stocking the shelves or cleaning the floors at your local supermarket would all of a sudden need to get paid almost double of what they had previously been getting. Whom do they think the shop owner would pass the cost of that to? It would obviously be passed on to the consumers, he would not pay the difference out of his own pocket.
Just to give some perspective on this; there is a lady that comes around to my house every so often with her sasa broom. When she would have to pay more than what she previously did for her groceries the next time she goes shopping at her local supermarket, where would she get the extra money from?
She does not have anyone to give her a pay rise; it would mean that she would then have to sell her sasa broom for twice the price that she currently sells it at. Subsequently, that would mean that the next time she comes around to my house, I would have to unfortunately refuse her sasa broom and buy a plastic broom with handle from my supermarket because, of course, it would make perfect economic sense to do so as the plastic one would have a longer lifespan, thus reducing the cost per use drastically.
At the end of the day, the aim of every government should be to put more money into the pockets of the average consumer. Moves such as these that would have a huge inflationary impact would never help achieve this aim, in fact the average consumer would ultimately have to fork out more money from his own pockets. Therefore, if we do have some apolitical economists and other analysts probably quietly hiding somewhere, we need you to please come out and scrutinise such blatant claims made by political parties. We also need a culture change in the way our news media organisations work. We need you to analyse any news story you get. We need you to get people thinking, because right now what we see is when a news story comes up, the media reports it, then we have an “around the grog bowl” discussion on that and everyone forgets about it after two days.
The media has a very important role and it is not just to report on stories.
They have to get people thinking, they have to do their own analysis on everything, and right now is the perfect time to start as we would get some more very unbelievable and unpractical promises from desperate politicians trying to get into power.
We have to be prepared for when we get to hear someone trying to raise the minimum wage to $50 an hour or someone trying to make grocery shopping completely free.