Billl English announced today a further $1.8 billion slashed from so called “low quality” spending over the next four years
It seems that to this mean spirited Government “low quality” includes services that needy Kiwis rely on such as:
- Home help for sick and frail senior citizens, including in Southland
- Intensive rehabilitation for seriously ill patients in the Manawatu
- Frontline bio-security officer jobs that keep our agriculture safe
- Police cars that get our cops to the scene of the crime
- Adult and community education centres for many thousands of Kiwis
Why? Increasingly clearly, it is to fund unfair and unproductive tax cuts for National’s already wealthy mates.
This is Robin Hood in reverse – taking from the poor and needy to give to the rich.
National slashes it: the rich stash it .
Responding to Loota at 4:04pm.
So you want a country which developes a high tec and advanced service based industry. I suppose this would be developed out of inventiveness, creativity and innovation.
This is precisely what the Labour-Progresive government was doing.
The Progressive Party achieved a fund of $700 million to start the FAST FORWARD INNOVATION FUND, a partnership with government and industry. With the private sector matching government contributions. Creating a $200billion fund to be spent over 15 years.
At election 2008 projects were in process to be implemented.
In the blizkreik of urgency when NACT first sat in the house this fund was destroyed being replaced by The Primary Growth Strategy. Not a single cent of this fund as been released for any research let alone innovation.
We are now another 18 months behind our potential and are arguing about tax and mining National Parks.
What a tragedy!
Hi Vivienne – thanks for the detail. It is indeed a tragedy that such a crucial long term initiative was destroyed by the “pro-economy” NACTs. Did you say a $200B fund?!
The innovation fund you have described is really one element of what I have in mind – a far larger and more ambitious programme of advanced economic development (on the scale and Governmental focus of the much maligned Think Big shemes) designed to transform the NZ economy over a ~15 year period. It would touch education, immigration, employment law, monetary controls, etc. in a co-ordinated and cohesive way.
The overall programme and vision must be able to survive through and indeed be nurtured by successive Governments. It cannot depend on a Labour-Progressive ticket winning 5 or 6 terms in a row to stay on track.
This country’s civil servants will also have to do away with their risk averse/ass covering attitudes as well, to successfully lead and administer such a programme in co-ordination with the private sector. Out of every Nokia, Acer, Samsung or Hyundai which develops from this programme, you can expect a dozen other start ups which have taken public money to “fail” in a fully accountable fashion (albeit having generated skills, technology and a total economic ecosystem on the way). That’s the way it is.
Also I would argue that NZ is currently 20 years behind its potential. The huge upheavals and changes of the Rogernomics era should have incorporated many of these ideas but instead the neo-con free market liberalisation paradigm was too fully bought into.
What we have now is an economy lacking in a rich diversity of well paid, productive professional opportunities for New Zealand graduates who want to do more than push paper. And we are reduced by NACT to bickering over how to slice up a small pie to share between us.
Pretty much what you’d expect from movers & shakers who think Kath & Kim is a training manual. >:(
@ DeepRed – aren’t you looking forwards to getting rich by exporting rocks just like the Aussies?
2
K !!!
Loota. To start a transforamation you need a starting point. Put a programme in place. Then evaluate it. Make neccessary adjustments. It is indeed ridiculous to follow the example of Muldoon and Birch, “Think Big” failed!
THE FAST FORWARD FUND was to follow the above outlined framework giving it flexibility throughout its life time. Utlising the skills within government, which is the public service, working cooperatively and collaboratively with skills in the private sector.
Start small and expand as evidence is gathered. As was done with paid parental leave, mayoral task force on jobs and many other projects under taken over the Clark-Anderton years.
These years were not prefect, nor should they be as creatures named Human Beings were involved and they are fallible. But what was being implemented then was far more caring of the people, the environment and the economy than what is being dictated at present.
Remember October 2008. NO NET CROWN DEBT. What is it now?
Hi Vivienne – I do wish we had that luxury of time on our side. The public service predisposition for nice neat orderly processes with thoroughly structured justifications and deep consideration of multiple contingencies and stakeholders will have to bend a little to accomodate some degree of private sector urgency I think.
Starting small and evaluating the results over the next several years is an option that I feel will be impractical, because invisible deadlines are looming. Our economy is already too weak to sustain the basics for our communities and our citizens without many cuts and compromises. Then there are claims that NZ’s strategic competitiveness in ag/hort will be significantly eroded in a few years time as we sell our IP, our expertise and our methods overseas. If our largest earner of hard foreign currency starts sliding in international competitiveness, we will be in real trouble.
Also, let me suggest that the evidence gathering phase can largely be bypassed as the evidence has already been gathered. By Singapore, by Taiwan, by Japan, by South Korea, by Finland, by the Netherlands, by Sweden, by China, by Australia and others.
What is required now from both the Government of the day and the public service is urgency in learning how those lessons are relevant to NZ and then implementing those relevancies on a wide and well founded scale. Yes there will be trial and error and yes there is going to be learning from the experimentation, but this is not an unfamiliar path that other small nations have not trodden before.
The patient is losing blood on the operating table. There’s no time left to organise a randomised controlled trial now, just time enough to get in and get ones’ hands dirty to try and make something of the situation.
And don’t be surprised if the Government needs to spend, and spend a lot, to push this transformative process, to the extent of deficit spending. In the private sector, borrowing capital for productive purposes promising good ROI is not shyed away from. Lets take that attitude onboard as well.
$200B in new investment over 15 years, including private contributions is what you inferred and that seems a fair sum to me.
Loota.
The research had been done. That is why THE FAST FORWARD FUND
was created. The Labour-Progressive Government (L-P) did take note of what was going on internationally.
But of course you and your ilk are in the 19th century and want to dig everything up. It’s the NACT who has created the patient dying on the operating table.
It is very easy to wreck something. The consequent repair phase takes alot longer than the wrecking phase. This is exactly what NACT has done with the axing of so many constructive, meaningful and well researched projects implemented by the L-P government. This current wreck took one session in the house in urgency, just after the election, destroying 9 years of considered policy implementation.
Remember L-P inherited the economic destruction of the Shipley government, stopped the nation bleeding and implemented the repair job.
Remember 2008 lowest unemployment in a generation. Now over 6% and rising
Along came NACT with the scaple and slashed it to pieces yet again.
READ SOME HISTORY instead of sticking doggedly to the free market idealogies.
Vivienne – I’m afraid you’ve taken my comments badly simply because I critiqued certain elements of the approach Labour-Progressive took. Especially that it was too slow, lacked the understanding and backing of the public service, missed the element of clear and publicly visible urgency/priority from the top and was all too easily undone. Labour/Progressives may have at least be in the ballpark though, NACT has no concept.
Now, as a manufacturing professional I HAVE INDEED studied the history of how China, South Korea, Japan, Singapore and other countries (as well as individual companies) undertook huge periods of economic growth and achieved advanced industrialisation. So what exactly would you like to know? I’m sure I can discuss the issues they found with you. Of course it is also clear that their rapid development was NOT thanks to free market policies.
I’m actually surprised that you managed to interpret my suggestion that the Govt may have to spend up large in support of some of these economic initiatives as being “free market ideology”. Surely my suggestion is about as non-free market as you can get?
You should know that I worked for several years at one of NZ’s most advanced and internationally recognised technology export companies – one with dozens of global clients and supply chains stretching around the world. Call me 19th century if you wish, but no, I don’t think so.
The upshot of it all is that for whatever reason and circumstance, Labour-Progressives were not able to create a lasting New Zealand movement towards a high added value, advanced economy which would outlast their own administration. I don’t say this as blame and please don’t interpret this way, I am saying this as simple outcome which needs to be learnt from.
Now this robustness of movement is exactly what has to be done, because any successful effort to create an advanced industrial and advanced services based economy needs a time frame of 15+ years, minimum.
Therefore, the movement must have such wide backing and buy-in that it can outlast any individual term of Government, as well as the shorter term/opposing agendas of any single political party or set of public servants.