| Life
If the Aussies hadn’t laid false claim to the title, this could be called the lucky country.
Arecent news headline said Americans living in New Zealand considered this country to be like the US half a century ago. I somehow doubt that. Fifty years ago, America was bogged down in the Vietnam War and plagued by race riots; its middle-class kids were in revolt; and it was just about to elect as president mendacious Richard Nixon, who would face the threat of impeachment several years later.
New Zealand, in contrast, seems an island of sanity and stability in an increasingly out-of-control world. Its relative calm and affluence are drawing many itinerant Kiwis home, and a small tidal wave of new migrants are queuing at the door. But the problem is that the country appears to have absent-mindedly forgotten to build the necessary infrastructure to cope with a growing population.
Compared with other countries, New Zealand enjoys a remarkable degree of political consensus. For the past two decades, economic policy has been steady on its centrist course as Finance Minister Michael Cullen morphed almost seamlessly into Bill English who, in turn, has now evolved into Steven Joyce.
National and Labour are basically the image of each other, although they do sometimes debate such issues as how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
The Greens are holding, and even slowly building, a share of the younger vote by concentrating on environmental issues such as climate change and the state of the country’s water. These platforms strike a chord even with folk who would never vote Green.
The lack of extremes has created a vacuum into which Winston Peters and New Zealand First have moved. The party is calling for immigration to be drastically cut, and Peters bellowed recently to a Rotary Club audience that “after 32 years of the neo-liberal experiment, the character and quality of our country has changed dramatically and much of it for the worse”. NZ First, it seems, wants to take us back to the Muldoon era of a heavily regulated command economy that had us staring down the barrel of bankruptcy by the 1980s.
Fortunately, the financial sector is still strongly regulated. What's more, the economy and wages are growing, unemployment is dropping and interest rates and inflation are low.
Meanwhile, out in the parallel universe of social media – especially the terminally depressed and paranoid galaxy of Twitter – extremes abound as partisans try to make a case for one political faction or another three months out from the elections.
Yet Twitter and Peters’s views aside, it is hard to deny that New Zealand has better social equity than our neighbour Australia or our old friend the US. The UK is a more stark example of the failure of neo-liberalism: it has a yawning gap between rich and poor, is engulfed in chaos over Brexit and suffers gross acts of terrorism.
Prime Minister Theresa May’s apparently uncaring response to the plight of victims of the Grenfell Tower fire betrays an almost Marie Antoinette-like attitude to her people. In New Zealand she would be political dog tucker by now.
Whatever you may think of politicians in this country, whether Labour, National,
Green or even NZ First’s Peters, you have the impression that they do care and that they are trying their best – even if they occasionally disappoint.
I think I’ll spend the next 90 days quietly humming the Fred Dagg classic We Don’t Know How Lucky We Are.
In New Zealand, Theresa May would be political dog tucker by now.