THIRD WAY OR THIRD WORLD ?

It’s always irritated me to read New Zealand commentators or politicians, short of a cliché, complaining that New Zealand’s becoming a third world country, third world health if there’s a tragedy, third world traffic systems if there’s a hold-up on the motorway. They haven’t sat in a traffic jam in Cairo, tried to do business in Africa, or endured private security in Peru. New Zealand has come from a primitive, isolated group of islands in 150 years, to be upset if our education, health, life expectancy isn’t up there with Sweden, Canada or the U.K. We benchmark ourselves against the word’s best. That’s how it should be. We don’t measure our hospital waiting lists or pre-schools against Papua-New Guinea or Botswana. New Zealand has done well because we have consistently drawn on the best of rational thinking from Europe – the lessons learnt from the age of enlightenment. The rule of law, independent courts, professional public service, honest police, property rights, democracy, freedom of and freedom from religion, tolerance and public responsibility for advancing education, health, social security to liberate people from their ancient fear of old age, illness or accident.

Working in third world countries, you get stunned when corruption is a common standard, when it’s expected people take personal advantage of political and economic opportunities that so often exist when politics, bureaucracy, business and tribalism collide. This is endemic when the state is intrusive in business and public affairs, it creates a moral hazard that the ruthless and opportunists graze on. New Zealand is a first world country but with a growing third world attitude to our many problems. Knowing what’s right or wrong should not be the matter of ethics training or anger management courses. Over the past few weeks, three stories topped our media. A policewoman working part-time as a prostitute, a politician employing vulnerable immigrants who have sought assistance, at probably illegal pay rates, murderers of their own children get special treatment based on their race. If this is not wrong then nothing’s wrong. Cultural sensitivity has become a cultural veto – that’s wrong and strikes at the heart of what we were once proud to claim as an English-based system of justice. Some even want to distance themselves from hundreds of years of British legal experience and experiment with …… what ?This absence of clear, predictable, values and principles provides a vacuum driven by confused political correctness, which has been excused by political spin. Closing down an issue, knocking it off the front page is good politics but it’s dealing with the symptoms. Proportional representation has accelerated this morbid trend. To form a government, there have to be coalition governments. Anything goes, therefore everything goes, whatever it takes. The unseemly verbal brawl between Foreign Minister Peters and journalists in Washington was just embarrassing. Winston Peters has developed a paranoia of the media of Nixonian proportions. The relationship between the media and the politicians is the same as the relationship a dog has to the tree. But they are part of the process and need to be fed and flattered. I was hopeless at it, Helen Clark may well be the best at this in New Zealand history. Some of the Wellington media have become embedded in the bowels of government and suffer Stockholm syndrome, living as hostages in the unreal environment of Wellington, awash with consultants, advisors, and corporate relations offices that need to keep onside with the bureaucrats and politicians, their paymasters. Some commentators are now political participants and have their favourites and shamelessly promote them. Winston could learn from Steve Maharey who gets rave reviews from insiders to the puzzlement of his colleagues, kind of like another celebrity ‘deep throat’, Paris Hilton. Politicians find it hard to contradict journalists because they always have the last word, writing up the story and explaining who won. My problem with them was that they always printed what I said not what I meant.

Meanwhile National has advice to be cool, whatever that means, making Don Brash cool would be like trying to repackage Mr. Burns of The Simpsons, his look-alike. They tried it with their previous leader, Bill English, a James Cagney look-alike, and that didn’t work either. The whole idea is wrong, National has never been cool but it has been calm, the role of conservatives throughout the years. Their slogan should be to raise standards through old values and new ideas, but I suspect being cool represents new values and old ideas, a market already captured by others.