Max Rashbrooke A thinker on government

A thinker on government

You could try this some time. Head out to a busy pedestrian street and ask passers-by if they like government and want more of it. What would happen?

‘‘Few people would say we need more government,’’ Max Rashbrooke agrees.

Government is a hard sell. But ask people if they want more or better public services, and the answer would be very different. Polling tells Rashbrooke that two-thirds of us would be prepared to pay more tax to fund public services.

‘‘Which is really the same thing, and you would get a warmer response than if you said government,’’ he says. ‘‘That’s the challenge I’m up against.’’

Rashbrooke, 37, is a respected writer and researcher based in Wellington. One of his roles is as a research associate of the Institute for Governance and Policy Studies at what is still known as Victoria University. Five years ago, his book Inequality: A New Zealand Crisis both coincided with and helped to motivate a national debate about the widening gap between rich and poor.

Does it feel like more than five years since the new age of homelessness, the families sleeping in cars, the zero-hour contracts and the grim news about the working poor? He explains that his new book, Government for the Public Good, flowed inevitably out of the previous one.

He noticed in focus groups that when people aired concerns about the big issues – inequality, climate change, ageing populations – it only took one person to pipe up about ‘‘the reality of the market’’ and everyone else just crumbled.

‘‘People had no ability to argue for the idea that government action worked at a very fundamental level. That it was effective, that it would get things done, that it could be a counter to the logic of the market.’’

Even the global financial crisis, which was so instrumental in shaping Rashbrooke’s thinking when he was a financial journalist in London, did not seem to shake a core belief in people that the market was the natural way of doing things. Since the mid-1980s in New Zealand and elsewhere, high-flying philosophical ideas about markets and freedom have trumped harder conversations about government effectiveness.

Language has shifted in ways we barely recognise. We talk about government intervention rather than action, which ‘‘makes it sound like there is a natural market order that government then artificially adjusts’’. The phrase ‘‘the tax burden’’ works in a similar fashion, framing tax in a highly negative way.

‘‘Not everyone loves tax, but it achieves a lot of good things and to call it a burden is very pejorative.’’

As he says, it is definitely a challenge to turn this thinking around and get people to feel good about government and taxes and, by extension, the public servants and faceless agencies who spend the money. Good luck with that.

Moving to the specific, though, Rashbrooke thinks there are ‘‘some big weaknesses’’ in the Government we have. There are all sorts of democratic innovations overseas we could pick up on, like the rapid online democracy of Taiwan, direct public voting on budgets in Brazil, or the ability to draft laws online in Finland.

The world is becoming more complex, more fragmented. The current Government has no shortage of reviews under way but they are the same old ‘‘topdown, expert-dominated processes’’, he says.

‘‘We live in a world where people have much greater expectations about how much control they have over key decisions.’’

He talks the talk. Vision, aspiration, detail. And the Institute for Governance and Policy Studies is just a hop, skip and a jump from the Beehive. But he laughs at the suggestion that he could ever enter the political realm. ‘‘I come from a family where being involved in the public sphere is very normal and natural, but what I enjoy is the reading, writing and thinking. I’ve got absolutely no desire to do the politics myself.’’

That family is the Richmond Atkinson Hursthouses, ‘‘who were very dominant in 19th century politics’’. He can quote a Nelson newspaper that once sneered at them as ‘‘the government family’’ of New Zealand politics, law and journalism.

The young Rashbrooke followed suit, heading for journalism rather than politics or law. A quick search through the archives of Wellington’s newspapers turns up an early appearance as a young genius. The

Evening Post in 1997 has a report on Petone College seventh-former Max Rashbrooke winning gold in the Australian Schools English competition, with a mark of 76 out of 80, the highest of any New Zealand competitor.

The report says that, while he was thrilled, he thinks he could have got one or two more right if he hadn’t felt the time pressure. In passing, the newspaper mentioned that he had also won an Alliance Francaise competition and a Katherine Mansfield Literary Award.

A year later, Rashbrooke the university student was writing to the same paper in defence of Petone College, which was being talked down in the media and was closed at the end of 1998 by former education minister Wyatt Creech.

Growing up in middle-class Eastbourne, Rashbrooke had heard ‘‘dire warnings about how badly I would do there academically. I would get intimidated by all the Polynesian kids. None of which was true’’.

There was the usual prejudice and snobbery. When school zoning was abandoned, ambitious parents voted with their feet. Parents cannot really make informed decisions about schools, he says, so instead they look at what kinds of kids go where, how smart the uniform looks and whether the marketing appeals.

‘‘I was living through the failures of the competitive system. It massively increased social segregation, which is what I saw happening first hand.’’

He didn’t know it at the time, but it was a real life political lesson. At Victoria, he went on to do an honours degree in English and edited student magazine Salient, making him part of ‘‘that student media mafia’’ that includes other famous former editors such as Sir Geoffrey Palmer.

Of course, Palmer is the ultimate politician turned policy wonk. Better yet, he is a public intellectual. Does Rashbrooke see himself that way too?

‘‘The only reservation about the title is that sometimes people who do it complain about how hard it is being an intellectual in New Zealand. I think ‘hard’ is being an underpaid cleaner on a precarious contract.’’

The other intellectual mafia he might belong to is a vaguely connected group of young Left-leaning thinkers who are all published by Wellington’s Bridget Williams Books. Besides Rashbrooke, there is Morgan Godfery, Max Harris, Andrew Dean and David Hall.

This group is too dispersed to be a movement or a scene, he says, but he agrees there is something about the appearance of these thinkers at this particular moment.

‘‘It does feel like we’re in a time when things are up for debate,’’ he concludes. ‘‘You look at politics and there isn’t really a road map at the moment. We probably share a sense that there is a need for fresh thinking, more urgently than in the past.’’

Government for the Public Good: The Surprising Science of Large-Scale Collective Action, by Max Rashbrooke. Bridget Williams Books, $49.99.