Brexit/Trump could happen here

Many people will be following the tortured process of Great Britain withdrawing from the EU with fascination and not a little sympathy. In spite of the passage of time and the dislocation of distance many New Zealanders still have the remnants of colonial affection for the nation which what was once known as the "Mother Country".

For some fourth-, fifth- and even sixthgeneration New Zealanders, many who have never been to Britain, there remains a nebulous, almost spiritual, link to the land our English, Irish and Scottish ancestors abandoned to establish a new life far away in the South Pacific. For many of them, the reason for leaving was to escape the poverty and hopelessness of life in a nation where the reasonable needs and aspirations of the common people were subservient to the profits of the privileged nobility and upper classes.

Now Britain faces an uncertain future as a slim majority of her people have decided to withdraw from the EU. Most of those who voted to withdraw from Europe were the same underprivileged and elderly who had nothing to lose and much to gain by wresting back their country from assumed unscrupulous investors and unmitigated immigration designed to maintain an underpaid working class.

We also watch with the same level of fascination, if not the same degree of sympathy, as newly elected United States President Donald Trump staggers from crisis to self-imposed crisis. His arrogance and ineptitude in international diplomacy make him easily the most embarrassing of all those who have been elected to head the most economically and militarily powerful nation in the world so far. He may also be one of the few presidents to be impeached if current high-level investigations find he has acted outside the law.

There are as many theories as there are theorists as to why the ordinary hard-working, wage-earning and taxpaying people of Britain and America made such drastic decisions. There is, however, one common denominator among most of them and that is the frustration of ordinary, non-political, people at having their well-being and welfare ignored for too long in favour of vested interests by those they elect to oversee and provide for them.

Contrary to many theories, Trump’s support base is much wider than rednecks and hillbillies. Millions of intelligent people in middle America finally ran out of patience with the established political system which put the interests of big business and international corporations ahead of the reasonable needs and requirements of ordinary people.

We may also have a number of similar situations developing in New Zealand.

The rapidly developing dairy industry has brought calls for reasonable constraints by those who fear the natural environment, which most of us see as our birth-right heritage, will be irreparably damaged by nutrient run-off and effluent pollution. Most of these calls for mitigation have been fobbed off with platitudes or openly ridiculed as an anathema to prosperity.

The great outdoors is also under threat from exploding numbers of tourists. Apart from a token gesture to provide public toilets in a few places, the Government has flatly refused to put a cap on visitor numbers, or for that matter, on dairy cows. Public tolerance on both issues is at breaking point, even if that is not acknowledged in Wellington.

More sinister is the difficulty faced by Waikato University and the Waikato District Health Board in establishing New Zealand’s third medical school. With a drastic and acknowledged shortage of New Zealand-trained general practitioners, particularly in rural areas, it was not unreasonable to expect that existing medical schools in Otago and Auckland would support the concept. Their response has been, however, to oppose the idea with a counter proposal of their own for a new National School of Rural Health.

While they claim a school of rural health could address the shortage of health professionals in rural communities and would avoid the costs of setting up a third medical school, it is not difficult to assume there is an element of parochial self-interest at play here.

It would appear that the proposed Waikato medical school, which will only take adult post-graduates, while the existing schools will only accept secondary school leavers or those who take prescribed courses with no guarantee of entry to the medical school, poses no competition to Otago and Auckland. There is no place in the training of future doctors for such parochial stupidity

The needs of the community at large must be put ahead of self-interest and profits if we are to avoid our own Brexit or Trump.

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR