Imagine politics free of tribalism
James Shaw might not feel bitter about how under-appreciated he was by his own party, but I certainly do. The former Green Party co-leader and Climate Change Minister holds a view that I believe many Kiwis hold, but perhaps don’t talk about enough.
Shaw knows that political tribalism – and our Parliament’s inability to work together for the greater good – holds us back big time.
As someone who has thus far spent my adulthood as an unconvinced swing voter, his aptitude for building consensus, forming relationships across the House and being OK with swallowing a few dead rats in the process, are traits I want more politicians to possess.
The Shaw lovefest aside, there are numerous areas ripe for the bipartisan picking; areas that simply shouldn’t be as politicised as they are, and areas that truly hinder our progress as a nation.
In my mind the top two contenders would be education and infrastructure.
Starting with the former, Kiwis are worried about the state of our education system. We hear from all our politicians, regardless of their political stripes, that a good education is one of the greatest ways to set our children up for bright futures.
At a macro level it also sets our country up for future social and economic success.
Honestly, that’s enough commonality to get started with.
Parents, teachers and educators, and our younger generations, are all disserved by the educational politicking and the chopping and changing every time a new government is voted in.
Labour was already on the pathway to bringing back structured literacy – teaching our kids to read through understanding phonics, rather than an alphabet memory game and some clever guessing – and National is now picking up that mantle and turbocharging it.
I truly hope the next few decades re-embed structured literacy and it doesn’t get politically tampered with again.
National’s policies of banning phones in schools and “teaching the basics brilliantly” were vote winners among many parents I speak to. My only gripe would be that studies show that 5- and 6-year-olds do benefit more from playbased learning, and that learning to read or write when they are seven or eight does not disadvantage them in any way.
A future centre-left government could reconsider the emphasis on reading, writing and maths for those first two years of school, but it should think twice before tinkering any more than that.
I recently learned that the school entrant age only dropped to five during the war because of a childcare shortage, and that we were one of the only countries that didn’t put it back up post-war. Perhaps a cross-party conversation about what the starting age should be, and whether children would benefit from starting in cohorts rather than the day after their fifth birthday, would be good places to begin.
The other thing Labour especially should re-think is its view on charter schools. I was originally a sceptic but after visiting a couple and hearing about families’ experiences, I have changed my mind.
Charter schools have a place in our educational ecosystem and Labour’s union-driven dislike of them is archaic.
The education system must cater to the majority, and other options and targeted solutions should exist for those who require a different approach to learning.
I believe our politicians have a duty to build consensus in education – from early childhood through to tertiary. We need to mature in our approach to a system that should be above politics. Parties may well be surprised how the electorate responds if education ceases to be a political battleground.
Moving onto infrastructure, in recent years our two major parties have essentially fought about whether roads or public transport should take centre stage.
The glaringly obvious answer is that we need both.
We have talked for decades about how political whims and pet projects in the infrastructure realm create headaches for the private sector that then has to deliver on them.
Kiwis are bored by the endless politicisation of infrastructure and our politicians need to grow up and get on the same page for the benefit of NZ Inc.
In my view, Labour’s approach to our ageing and ailing three waters infrastructure was better than National’s, but hey, we had an election and now we’ve got Local Water Done Well, so let’s move on, shall we?
Bipartisan agreement on the 30-year pipeline of projects and the structure of our infrastructure systems is a must if we are ever going to make meaningful progress. Building cross-party consensus on the fundamentals of our society needs to become the politically intelligent, not suicidal, thing to do.
Building cross-party consensus on the fundamentals of our society needs to become the politically intelligent, not suicidal, thing to do.