What's the most tedious element of this year's general election is the complete failure of pretty much all politicians to admit to what they can't do.
Child poverty is not and cannot be eliminated by government. Because an element of child poverty is about the poor choices a small proportion of people make as parents. A small number of parents (the left pretends it is zero, some on the right try to conflate this with all on welfare) are at best useless, at worst malign and unfit to be parents. Oranga Tamariki exists because there are people who abuse their children and neglect them, but no quantity of money thrown at people in poverty will eliminate it. I'd argue the best solution to poverty is to get out of the way of people finding ways out of poverty, through employment and entrepreneurship and most of all, allow more housing to be built. The barriers to all of this are the fault of governments, central and local, and this is what politicians should focus on.
Poverty doesn't exist because some people are wealth or on high incomes. As with parents, a very small number of wealthy people are so because they cheated or defrauded people, but by and large it is a mixture of hard work, entrepreneurship, opportunity and chance, and more than a few people have been wealthy and lost most or all of it. The narrative from the left that because some people are rich, that means they took it from the poor is nonsense. However, government can unjustly enrich people through protecting their businesses from competition, from printing money to inflate asset prices that government then constrains the supply of (see housing), from paying contractors or staff to undertake government work at taxpayers' expense, regardless of the cost. Removing barriers to competition, ending monetary incontinence and reducing the role of the state generally will reduce all of this.
Tax cuts don't take money from anyone, they take money from the capacity of politicians to spend other people's money. You can make assumptions about what they wont spend the money on, but whoever or whatever it was meant to be for, is not taking money from people "in the future". It wasn't their money in the first place, and for more and more people, if their taxes are too high, they'll just go somewhere else. That's when you get to the Berlin Wall theory of taking from the People - that successful people emigrating is stealing from the people you wanted to give their taxes to. It's just nonsense.
There is always going to be a crisis in healthcare as it gets rationed by queuing and political/bureaucratic decisions. This is a feature of public healthcare systems that are taxpayer funded. Politicians can pretend they can "fix" this, but as long as the health professionals know they can get public sympathy for politicians to force people to pay them more, to deliver the same, and there is no discipline on what is and is not delivered by those who pay, it will continuously fail to deliver. What can be done is to more closely link what consumers want with what they get, including services tailored for them. This is why Maori health providers can be critically important if they deliver what consumers want, but it is also why this shouldn't be determined by a single Wellington based bureaucracy (or two in fact). If you want universal healthcare, you're not going to deliver everything everyone needs when they need it, there are going to be compromises, and those compromises better be based on need.
Education of children isn't "one size fits all" and a Minister and a Wellington bureaucracy cannot know what is best in terms of techniques and content to teach all children everywhere. Education fails, in part, because of failing parents, some because of neglect some because they don't know what to do, so linking education to what parents want is critical to improving it for children. Teaching unions, which primarily exist to benefit themselves and their members, have no monopoly on what is best for children, because their first interest, as in all lobby groups, is what is best for their members. Education needs to break out of being captured by producers and by bureaucratic conceit. One side of politics thinks the producers should decide, the other side thinks it can decide, both are wrong.
Housing is a disaster and they are all to blame, but local government is to blame the most. Look internationally (not Australia and the UK which have the same disease) and NZ's housing costs are insane. Nobody is willing to embrace the fundamental reform needed to fix this long-term problem, which requires treating planning on a property rights approach, liberalising building laws and liberalising immigration of those who will build. It requires local government to get out of the way, and although the state can build more homes, it's simply nonsense to claim that this is the dominant answer. ACT is closest to the right answer, but ACT is compromised because David Seymour wants to appease NIMBYs in Epsom (and likely Tamaki too).
Finally, the economy matters and it is economic growth (which some of the Greens reject as a concept) that enables more of everything. It enables more housing, better infrastructure, access to more technology and pharmaceuticals and expertise in healthcare, wider education and a better standard of living. Government is an enabler of this only to the extent it provides a safe, secure and confident environment to invest, whether it be through law and order, property rights and a low, simple, easy to understand tax system.
If you think politicians know best how to spend your money, then you're either admitting your own lack of intelligence or you're imbuing them with knowledge (and knowledge from public servants) to do this. Few politicians have been great successes in their own lives in creating wealth for them and their families and others, and even fewer public servants have been. If politicians allow you to keep more of your money through tax cuts, then you too have choices how you spend that. If you are worried about poverty, then don't wait for a politician to tax you more and hope it will get to someone in need, donate your own money, property and time to helping people directly through a charity or even personally.
So if you choose to vote, think about what most politicians aren't telling you. Many aren't admitting that they don't generate most of the wealth in the economy, that they money they spend is actually yours and that of millions of others, and that the more they spend, the more they have to take from you or (in many cases) your children and their children. You can pick politicians who say they'll make things better with more of your or other people's money, or give you something "free" which involves taking it from you or other people in the first place. Most politicians are in this group. Or you can pick those who want to get out of your way, and will focus on what government ought to focus on. Law and order, protecting individual and property right, and enabling others to maintain, upgrade and develop the infrastructure, services and economy that makes people better off.
New Zealand remains relatively poor per capita compared to most developed countries, and is only just above former eastern European communist dictatorships. Those trying to sell you Scandinavian standards of living and public service without commensurate economies are lying to you.
Hardly anyone talks about productivity, that to pay people more to do the same, means there is less money to invest, less money for producing or consuming other goods and services. Nothing is for free. If the government changes it wont be 1984-1993 Douglas/Caygill/Richardson redux, as if half the population even know what that was anymore. It might tinker a little to stop the slide getting worse. However if it stays the same with a lurch to the hard-left, it will just worsen a bit faster. What might worsen more is the growing culture of entitlement and belief that society is made up of the oppressors and the oppressed, and the only solution to this is to do the same, in reverse. For that is the underlying philosophy of the Greens and Te Pati Maori (and the bulk of Labour), who only see people through the eyes of Orwellian intersectionalism.
Unfortunately, the record of National, for almost every time it has ever been in government, is not to reverse anything philosophically, but to say it is better at "delivering". The reason being is that too many of you keep wanting a government to deliver, rather than letting you take more charge of your own life and charge of what you want to do for your family, community and society. I can only hope that maybe some semblance of a different approach might come out after Saturday, but I'm not holding my breath.
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