DId you see the one about . . .?

Root cause of poverty – Caleb Anderson :

. . . What we have been told increasingly, and very loudly, by left-wing activists is that crime is a direct function of poverty. That if the system was kinder and more generous to the “poor”, people would not be committing crimes, at least not in the way, or to the degree, we are currently seeing.

The answer we are told is, by and large, as simple as wealth distribution. The implication is that if we give people more money, they will be much less likely to commit crimes.

This is precisely the Maori and Green Party policy. Redistribute wealth, close prisons, give people a voice, provide them with comfortable homes and all will be well.

But if all of this was true, NZ would have less crime than India, and less crime than almost anywhere else, and this should have been the case for a very long time. If this was true people would not be stealing cars, laptops, sports gear, or vaping pens. They would be stealing basic necessities.

Further, if the left explanation for poverty was true we would notice an inverse relationship between benefit levels and crime. When benefits go up, crime goes down. Are we seeing this, any of this? We all know that we are not.

Recently I blogged my view that the real crisis in NZ, and in the West more generally is a crisis of virtue, and especially of duty, of duty to family, to others, and to country. Duty to make your own way, and expect nothing material as of right.

I am NOT saying that people do not need a hand up, that society shouldn’t watch out for the less fortunate. I guess I am saying that to expect someone to turn up to work, and to remember that wealth is generated by someone’s effort somewhere, are reasonable expectations … and to claim some of that wealth as though you are entitled to it is theft.

One of the biggest problems in left-wing thinking is the idea that people are fundamentally good, and that bad systems make them do bad things. This idea is far too simplistic.

While it does bear an element of truth, it is no more true than the assertion that people can also do bad things when they are allowed to get away with it, when it makes life easier for them, or when they are simply angry that someone has something that they do not have.

The solution to poverty, at least in part, is an expectation of turning up to work, of paying your own way, of taking responsibility for those nearest to you, of grasping opportunities that do come your way, of turning up to school, and of seeing welfare as a bridge towards independence.

I get a sense that our new government gets this.

The day the delusions died – Konstantin Kisin :

When Hamas terrorists crossed over the border with Israel and murdered 1,400 innocent people, they destroyed families and entire communities. They also shattered long-held delusions in the West.

A friend of mine joked that she woke up on October 7 as a liberal and went to bed that evening as a 65-year-old conservative. But it wasn’t really a joke and she wasn’t the only one. . . 

Many people woke up on October 7 sympathetic to parts of woke ideology and went to bed that evening questioning how they had signed on to a worldview that had nothing to say about the mass rape and murder of innocent people by terrorists.

The reaction to the attacks—from outwardly pro-Hamas protests to the mealy-mouthed statements of college presidents, celebrities, and CEOs—has exploded the comforting stories many on the center-left have told themselves about progressive identity politics. For many years, they opted for the coping mechanism of pretending that the institutional capture of universities, corporations, and media organizations by the woke mind virus was no big deal. “Sure, students shutting down events they disagree with is annoying,” they would say, “but it’s just students doing what students do.”

October 8 was a wake-up call for those who didn’t appreciate that the ideology of the campus has spread to our cities, supercharged by social media.

We woke up on October 8 to the clamor of street protests in cities across the West condemning Israel even before any major Israeli response to the attacks. We watched celebratory crowds brandish swastikas and chant “gas the Jews” at events purporting to be about the loss of Palestinian lives. We saw Black Lives Matter chapters lionize terrorists. 

In London, where I live, we watched the mayor deliver glib assurances that “London’s diversity is our greatest strength” in the midst of a wave of antisemitic attacks, and as Jewish schools were forced to close because of safety concerns. 

Across the West, we noticed that our representatives refused to condemn Hamas’s kidnappings, and that the legacy media was all too eager to swallow and regurgitate Hamas propaganda.

Prior to the October 7 massacre, many students, alumni, and donors with the “unconstrained vision” trusted that the university—for all its many problems—remained the West’s best environment for civil discourse. 

But then they watched university presidents who were quick to issue statements condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the killing of George Floyd fall silent, or offer the most slippery, equivocal statements carefully crafted to avoid offending anti-Israel groups. They watched an Israeli at Columbia get beaten with a stick, and heard reports about the physical intimidation of students on campuses across the country. They read about dozens of student organizations at Harvard signing a letter holding Israel “entirely responsible” for the massacre of Israelis. 

The events of the last two weeks have shattered the illusion that wokeness is about protecting victims and standing up for persecuted minorities. This ideology is and has always been about the one thing many of us have told you it is about for years: power. And after the last two weeks, there can be no doubt about how these people will use any power they seize: they will seek to destroy, in any way they can, those who disagree.

This unpleasant conclusion is surprising only if you are still clinging to the unconstrained vision. But if there is any constant in human history, it is that revolutionaries always feel entitled to destroy those who stand in their way.

Just as hope about the possibility of peace with jihadists seems suicidally naive, reconciliation with citizens seized by the woke mindset seems a long way off. . .

What we have witnessed over the last two weeks—with enormous pro-Hamas rallies in cities like London, Paris, and Washington, D.C.—has the potential to change the immigration debate in a decisive way. It is much harder to pretend that allowing people to enter our country illegally is a moral good when you watch some of them celebrate mass murder in the streets of your capital cities. . . 

To express concern about border security has for many years been coded as “right-wing.” But how many people, after the horrors of October 7, believe that a secure border is anything other than the most basic test of national security? . . 

The reason the readjustment is necessary and, in my view, highly likely, is that proponents of the unconstrained vision have been allowed to ride roughshod over the concerns of ordinary citizens. They have used this window of opportunity to implement extraordinarily impractical and outright harmful ideas because they take the unbelievable levels of safety, plenty, and freedom we enjoy in the West for granted. The one form of privilege you will never hear them address is the first-world privilege that we all benefit from every day.

They have done this because the fundamental flaw in the unconstrained model of the world is a failure to understand Thomas Sowell’s greatest maxim: there are no solutions, only trade-offs. When you let your institutions be captured by an ideology of intolerance and illiberalism masquerading as progress, that has consequences. When you sow division at home and signal weakness abroad, that has consequences. When you debase the public’s faith in what they are told by the media and their government, that has consequences too. 

Western civilization has produced some of the most stunning scientific, technological, social, and cultural breakthroughs in human history. If you consider yourself “liberal” or even “progressive,” it must surely be clear by now that America and her allies are the only places in the world where your values are even considered values. If our civilization is allowed to collapse, it will not be replaced by a progressive utopia. It will be replaced by chaos and barbarism. 

Will this waking-up moment persist? It depends, in large part, on our courage to look reality in the face. 

As Sowell explained, “When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.”

And the truth is that we have indulged in magical thinking for too long, choosing comforting myths over harsh realities. About terrorism. About immigration. And about a host of other issues. In our hunger for progress, we have forgotten that not all change is for the better. Now the world is paying the price for that self-indulgence. Let’s hope recent events are the wake-up call we so desperately need.

 

We need to get better at building stuff – Josie Pagani :

Building stuff, from power grids to water pipes, roads and train lines, makes a civilisation better, but it’s hard to tell how much of a good thing is too much, or when we are trying to do everything at once so get profligate follies like light rail and Lake Onslow, at a combined cost of $60 billion.

Or a $330 million town hall which will give Marie Antoinette a view of the crumbling water pipes that bring water to the surface to flow down crumbling roads.

Or you get “Think Big”, where some projects eventually turned out OK, but should not have all been attempted at once, with the bulldozers sent into environmentally protected areas, and the government taking on too much debt to pay for it all.

Or you get “successes” that turn out to be more hole than donut, like ultra-fast broadband – loved by the 87% of the population who have it, not so much by the 13% or 650,000 Kiwis who don’t, including my place on the Côte du Kapiti. I don’t remember being consulted about missing out. . .

It took us 40 years to get the Waikato Expressway built, when the Infrastructure Commission says it should have taken less than 20 years. It took 70 years to get Transmission Gully built.

New Zealand does not have a pipeline for the next 30 years for all the pipes, hospitals and roads we are going to need. We do boom and bust, with governments trying to accelerate infrastructure investment so they end up paying too much in tight markets, then turning the tap off so that capability exits. . . .

According to a new report by Infrastructure New Zealand, we could achieve productivity and savings improvements of 13% to 26.5% if government committed to a more predictable infrastructure pipeline, worth about $4.7 billion a year.

We need a much better process for selecting our highest priorities and planning for them, starting with more innovation in financing and revenue flows. Congestion pricing and tolls are no worse than petrol taxes, and sometimes better. There is a debate between what should be funded by taxpayers and what can be privately owned or paid for by users, but there is a more important debate about what we need before we get into who will own things.

Nothing will get done without slashing consenting and bureaucracy. Consent times have increased by 150% over a five year period. Costs have increased by 70% over the last seven years. New Zealand infrastructure developers are spending $1.29 billion annually to consent their projects. . .

We need to recognise that consenting processes are often carefully camouflaged anti-development efforts.

Nearly every day the news features someone somewhere who wants to stop something. Nimby lobbies on the right fight housing intensification. An anti-modernity left celebrates a win in the courts to stop a new road.

We need a more muscular and unapologetic embrace of effective government, capable of responding to problems quickly, and building stuff fast.

We have spent the past six years de-industrialising, with industries like wood processing, aluminium, methanol and oil refining all shrinking or being pushed to leave when demand for their products is growing to our north-west.

The development sector – construction, housing, health, transport – is pleading for greater certainty from a new government. Without a national plan, there’s a risk that the cities with the loudest voices will get infrastructure while our towns miss out.

Work with the people who build stuff and agree a 30-year pipeline with local communities, and then we will get our own development success story.

Giving voice to our future – Sir Peter Gluckman :

It was an opportunity missed.

The election has come and gone, with virtually no discussion of the long-term issues that profoundly affect our country.

We were distracted by trivia, amused by accidental misstatements and apparently entertained by “gotcha” questions from the media.

There were pitifully few discussions of serious, long-term, strategic issues confronting our nation. . .

And yet the complex and multi-generational challenges that we face will keep coming, becoming more complex as they are left poorly attended, and we must be able to respond. And rapid changes – environmental, technological and sociological – will continue to compound our world.

A few of those challenges immediately come to mind.

• Our human capital is being threatened by an underperforming education system which has fallen well behind global benchmarks. The rising challenge of growing mental health concerns, especially for our young people, needs to be understood and addressed at its roots.
• Nearly half our population is effectively closed out of house ownership as a result of constrained land supply and immigration policy, fuelled by a decade or more of very low interest rates. This threatens our social cohesion and is foreign to our traditional values.
• We have major deficiencies in our local infrastructure (transport, hospitals, housing) for which there is no visible funding solution and which impair the productivity of our people and assets.
• Our traditional sources of export income (particularly agriculture and tourism) are threatened by global pressures on carbon-intensive industries, and by our very high reliance on one trading partner. Desirably, we would diversify this earnings base. The need to do so is highlighted by our trading and investment deficit with the rest of the world (our current account) which stands at close to $30 billion per annum.
• We must meet our climate obligations. We need urgently to build more resilience into our housing and other infrastructure to protect against the risks of climate change events. This raises major issues in terms of funding, and insurability.
• We have a number of young businesses developing new ideas and processes in IT, agritech and medicine. These businesses need the support structures to ensure they thrive, including access to capital and know-how.
• We remain unclear about our place in the world and how to ensure our ongoing relevance.
• And we have a clearly contested view of how we might develop as a diverse and multicultural society and liberal democracy, but one based on and respectful of the Treaty/Te Tiriti. . . 

Currently, our debates in the public square too often feature contentious rhetoric and short-term point-scoring rather than a serious and open discussion. The three, four or five-year political cycles of our representative democracy do not deal well with problems of a longer-term, inter-generational nature. Nor do our siloed decision-making processes and our lack of strong, well-funded regional decision-making bodies.

We tend to focus unduly on our own backyard with too little reference to our peers globally, where many of the challenges we face are currently being addressed and where we can find many useful proxies. . .

As another example, Wales has shown the value of a Commissioner for Future Generations, whose role is to ascertain whether policies are developed with regard to their inter-generational effects, bringing the voice of the future into today’s debates.

The core role of any government must be competent inter-generational stewardship to ensure the long-term health of our human, social, cultural, environmental and economic assets.

New Zealand’s future as a united, cohesive society will depend on open discussion and resolution of what can appear to be irreconcilable worldviews.

We need to require that our leaders honestly confront complex problems and promote serious discourse on long-term issues. We should expect greater resolution, by consensus, of matters that span political cycles and seek (and reward) less adversarial cross-party initiatives.

Bold and innovative leadership and developing clearer national goals for our collective future is the key to building more enduring levels of social and institutional trust and cohesion, and consequently a stronger and more resilient nation.