Cooking The Medical Books: Citizens suffer in stoical silence so National can keep taxes low.

Suffering In Silence: The Government and its cash-strapped DHBs are relying upon the decency and stoicism of the average citizen to get them off the fiscal hook.

 

FUDGING THE FIGURES is what governments do when effective policy solutions are ruled off the table. According to Radio NZ News: “New research shows nearly 40 percent of patients who need hip and knee operations in at least two district health boards are not getting them because of budget restrictions. The study, published in The New Zealand Medical Journal, which looked at Northland and Hawke's Bay, found the drive to cut wait times has left 36 percent of patients with moderate to severe pain and disability untreated.”

 

Clearly, the now retired National Party Health Minister, Tony Ryall, was unable to persuade his fellow “Brat Packer”, Bill English, to appropriate sufficient funds to keep our public health service up to the job of actually serving the public.

 

One doesn’t imagine that English, an essentially decent politician, was very happy about this. But with his colleagues demanding lower taxes for the wealthiest New Zealanders (and some modest covering reductions for the rest of us) he was left with little choice. It would require a Labour-led government of more than usual fortitude and radicalism to institute the fiscal reforms necessary to ready the New Zealand health system for the influx of ageing Baby Boomers steadily falling prey to all the ills that flesh is heir to.

 

Tony Ryall’s response to his increasingly underfunded health system was, however, ethically extremely radical. According to the study published in The New Zealand Medical Journal, he simply invisiblised upwards of a third of New Zealanders in need of non-urgent surgical interventions.

 

Chairman of the Canterbury Charity Hospital Trust, Christchurch surgeon, Philip Bagshaw, told Radio NZ that focusing on the length of time people were waiting, rather than the length of the waiting lists themselves, was “a great way of hiding the scale of the problem”.

 

“It’s become smoke and mirrors”, said Mr Bagshaw. “They’ve created a self-fulfilling prophecy, so they say the waiting list is only six or four months, but that’s because they only allow that many people onto the waiting list.”

 

Smoke and mirrors it may have been, but the practice permitted Tony Ryall to boast that the time spent waiting for elective surgery was steadily decreasing. According to Mr Bagshaw, haemorrhoids, cataracts, hernias and varicose veins – among a host of other debilitating conditions – are simply not being treated in the public system until such time as serious complications render them acute – and costly.

 

Allowing the condition of sufferers to deteriorate to the point where they are forced to seek emergency admission to public hospitals is, not surprisingly, a considerably more expensive proposition, long term, than providing treatment early. “Investing in health early on is not only humane but also makes good economic sense because to do things in a timely way is the cheapest way,” Mr Bagshaw confirmed. “If you deny people treatment ... they come back later with bigger complications and cost more money.”

 

As scams go, however, this is a particularly clever one, because, obviously, not all of those sufferers rendered invisible will end up undergoing emergency surgery. Most will simply go on suffering, unheard and untreated.

 

In other words, the Government and its cash-strapped DHBs are relying upon the decency and stoicism of the average citizen to get them off the fiscal hook. Their deeply cynical – but apparently accurate – expectation has been that the voters will evince little interest in how Mr Ryall’s miracle is being achieved, just so long as the waiting period for elective surgery keeps decreasing. And so it proved. On Election Day, most people accepted without demur that John Key’s government was managing our public health system with considerable skill.

 

So, it’s ‘all good’ for the Government? Well, not necessarily. As the Baby Boomers find themselves relying more and more on the public health system, they are bound to flex their still massive demographic muscles to ensure that sufficient funding is appropriated to meet their growing needs. With everything to fight for in terms of free medical care, there is nothing to suggest that the ageing Boomers will not emulate the exemplary levels of electoral participation demonstrated by older voters generally. In securing their self-interested health objectives, the Boomers will be aided by the short-sighted failure of so many young voters to participate in the electoral system.

 

The politicians of the future will respond to the medical demands of the Boomers in the way politicians always do when presented with a choice between serving the interests of citizens who vote and the needs of citizens who stay at home. If young New Zealanders want a viable public health system to still be in place when they reach their 60s and 70s, then they’d better start voting in the same proportions as their elders. Otherwise the health statistics being fudged will be their own.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Saturday, 8 November 2014.

Unfortunate Sons

 

Fortunate Son - Creedence Clearwater Revival 1969

 

CREEDENCE CLEARWATER REVIVAL's Fortunate Son stands alongside the very best of the anti-war songs to come out of the United States tragic involvement in Vietnam. Written by John Fogerty and released in September 1969 (as the B-side to CCR's runaway hit Down On The Corner) the song so accurately captured the spirit of the times that by December it had climbed to No. 3 in the pop charts. Rolling Stone magazine rates Fortunate Son No. 99 of its 500 Greatest Songs Of All Time.

The accompanying video montage features some of the most iconic images of the era. It is important to bear in mind, however, that the troops pictured fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan are professional soldiers and reservists - not conscripts. Uncle Sam had to learn something from Vietnam - even if it was only the unwisdom of forcing the sons and daughters of registered voters to fight and die in faraway places!

Video courtesy of YouTube

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

A Professional Engagement

Somebody's Son: There is a world of difference between deploying professional soldiers to kill the State's enemies and shipping out the conscripted sons (and nowadays daughters) of its citizens. The Vietnamese, unlike the Japanese and the Germans, posed no imminent and/or existential threat to the United States, which is why the decision to send tens-of-thousands of young conscripts to fight and die in its paddy-fields proved to be such a huge historical mistake. (Photo: Horst Faas/AP)

 

NEW ZEALAND’S PARTICIPATION in the war against Islamic State has already prompted angry criticism from the Left. This country boasts a pacifist tradition extending back at least 100 years, to the First World War and the persecution (among many others) of the conscientious objector, Archibald Baxter.

 

Less honourable, perhaps, and certainly less grounded in the pacifists’ profound ethical objection to the taking of human life, is the Far Left’s historical opposition to “imperialist wars”. Significantly, their protests against these conflicts were generally organised on behalf of “the victims of capitalist aggression” – whose victories in such “wars of national liberation” were eagerly anticipated. These were the unabashed revolutionaries, who, in anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, chanted: “One side right, one side wrong. Victory to the Viet-Cong!”

 

Somewhere in the “middle” of the Left stand those who are willing to accept that in some circumstances (World War II being the most cited example) the taking up of arms is not only an urgent, but also a profoundly moral, necessity. This idea of the “Just War” goes all the way back to St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas, whose arguments are still drawn on by members of the UN Security Council whenever decisions have to be made about whether or not to authorise the use of military force.

 

The greatest anti-war movement of the last century was undoubtedly the international movement against the US involvement in Vietnam. All three of the great anti-war traditions: the Christian prohibition against waging “unjust war”; the revolutionary socialists’ objection to “imperialist war”; and the pacifists’ uncompromising opposition to the taking of human life; were intermingled in the global “mobilisations” against the Vietnam conflict.

 

What elevated the anti-war struggle in the United States to a cultural watershed, however, wasn’t opposition to US imperialism, or even the appalling loss of life, although both of these considerations played a part. No, what really transformed the anti-war protests into a genuine mass movement was conscription. Overwhelmingly, the young men sent to fight and die in South-East Asia were draftees – conscripts whose “number” had, quite literally, come up.

 

Not In My Place: American university students whose call-up had been 'deferred' strove to rescue their conscripted brothers by ending the war in Vietnam.

 

One of the few ways to avoid the draft was to enrol in a course of university study. It is only when one grasps the importance of “deferment” that the crucial role played by university students in the American anti-war movement makes any historical sense. As the number of American soldiers in Vietnam began to escalate, those whose service had been deferred felt an increasingly urgent obligation to bring the conscripts home. Young working-class Whites, Blacks and Hispanics were literally dying in their place – and for no good reason. The US wasn’t battling Hitler in Vietnam, it was napalming and carpet-bombing peasants whose only crime was an iron-clad determination to rule themselves.

 

America’s experience in Vietnam brought home to its leaders the huge risks entailed in fighting what came to be seen, increasingly, as an unjust war with conscripted citizens. If a government’s intention is to use its military resources for any other purpose than national defence against an imminent and existential threat, then it is best that the soldiers, sailors and air personnel employed are professionals – not draftees.

 

Doing Their Job: New Zealand's highly professional special forces personnel in Kabul, Afghanistan.

 

A professional standing army, precisely because it is not composed of the voters’ conscripted sons and daughters, may be deployed in relative political safety for any number of purposes (many of them, these days, decidedly dark). The usual left-wing suspects will complain – but with considerably less effect than during the war in Vietnam.

 

Professional soldiers look forward to war. Fighting for their country is exactly what they signed-up to do. Should they fall in battle, their families, their comrades and their country’s leaders will mourn and honour them, but at the back of everybody’s mind will be the thought: “They knew this might happen, but they weren’t deterred. They died doing the job they’d always wanted.”

 

Try making an anti-war movement out of that!

 

True pacifists are few and far between. Anti-imperialists almost always have a dog in the fight. And unjust wars, providing the “enemy” is rendered sufficiently terrifying, and providing the participating military forces are made up of highly-trained professionals just itching to get amongst it, are unlikely to cause the governments that wage them very much in the way of serious political bother.

 

Few Kiwis will march in the streets for Islamic State.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 7 November 2014.

The Men Behind The Wire

 

The Men Behind The Wire - The Wolfe Tones, 1973

WHEN JOHN KEY reassured us that any New Zealand soldiers sent to train Iraqis would be safe "behind the wire" of Iraq's army bases, it dislodged a little stone from the wall of my memory. "The men behind the wire?" Why did that phrase have such a familiar ring? And then I remembered the back bar of the Cook, in Dunedin, and men with thick Belfast accents, and learning the words to a new song born of "The Troubles".

Watch this video and struggle, as I did, with images of young men wearing balaclavas, carrying sub-machine guns and firing rockets - not from the dusty streets of Gaza or Mosul but from the terrace houses and narrow alleyways of Londonderry and Belfast. Understand that those children hurling stones at the retreating squaddies aren't stateless Palestinians from the West Bank but British subjects from the Falls Road. Absorb the fact that those gun-toting terrorists belong not to IS, but to the Provisional IRA. There are no Muslims in this footage - just good Catholic lads and lasses!

The song itself, written by Paddy McGuigan of the Barleycorn folk group, protests the British Government's decision in 1971 to "intern" (i.e. imprison) IRA suspects without charge and without trial in special camps (hence "the wire"). Recorded by Release Records in Dublin The Men Behind The Wire topped the Irish charts for three weeks in January-February 1972.

Our soldiers will not be "behind the wire" in quite the same way as the martyred Irish nationalist, Bobby Sands, and yet the phrase is curiously fitting. For the struggle in Northern Ireland, like the struggle we are about to join in Iraq/Syria, was also born out of religious schism and imperial arrogance. And so, as we watch the video, let us all recall that repression breeds resistance; that guns and bombs solve nothing; and that it is only when people finally agree to sit down and talk to one another that peace and justice become possible.

Video courtesy of YouTube

 

 

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

Risk and Resilience: Introducing John Key’s “Free Thinkers”.

A Good idea - Or What? John Key's appointment of ten "free thinkers" to let him know what he doesn't know about national security is yet further proof of this Government's unwavering commitment to excellence in public relations.

 

FREE THINKERS! Wow! How very different this National Government is from its predecessors. Can anybody imagine Rob Muldoon appointing a group of “free thinkers” to help him identify the potential security risks confronting New Zealand in the 1980s? Crikey! Imagine what a group of “free thinkers” might have been able to do in relation to the Springbok Tour of 1981. I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again: this is a National Government like no other!

 

So, who are these free thinking New Zealanders? And what mix of talent and experience has Prime Minister Key assembled among the ten members of his new Strategic Risk and Resilience Panel (SRRP). If the Panel’s main function is to “imagine the unimaginable” and to inform the Government of all the things that it doesn’t know it doesn’t know, then let’s take a look at what they bring to the table?

 

Let’s start at the top with Ian Fletcher, currently the head of the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB). I must confess that the man responsible for maintaining the security of government communications would not have been my first choice in the free thinking stakes. Indeed, the less free such a person is with his thoughts about such matters the better – I would have thought. But, maybe the PM knows something about Mr Fletcher’s job that the rest of have yet to be told?

 

Then there’s Sir Peter Gluckman, the Prime Minister’s Science Advisor. This looks like a better choice – although Sir Peter’s association with what some are calling an exercise in muzzling the Government’s scientist critics – people like Mike Joy – does rather militate against freedom of thought. Doesn’t it?

 

What about Therese Walsh? Well, as the Chief Executive of the 2015 Cricket World Cup, she clearly knows a great deal about the organisation of sports fixtures. Exactly how that knowledge might usefully contribute to “imagining the unimaginable” isn’t immediately obvious. Perhaps she’s learned the knack of envisaging what the rest of us simply can’t imagine: a consistently good New Zealand cricket team! That really would be a boost to our national security!

 

Karen Poutasi, head of the NZ Qualifications Authority, was obviously chosen to improve the quality of the nation’s spies. Who could question her ability to imagine a new and improved iteration of the New Zealand SIS agent? One whose culinary sights are set slightly higher than the ordinary meat pie, and for whom the contents of Penthouse magazine holds not the slightest interest.

 

And who better than Keith Turner, the chairman of Fisher & Paykel, to anticipate the dastardly plans of Islamic State engineers to adapt the electronics of his firm’s washing machines to some devastating new purpose? The potential threat to the nation’s delicates and coloureds is huge. We could be facing terror in every laundry; mayhem on every clothesline! Isis meets Elba is just too awful to contemplate.

 

Now, as everybody who watches Boardwalk Empire knows, when Al Capone was eventually brought down it was not by a Thompson sub-machine gun, but by the ineluctable laws of double-entry book-keeping. In this respect, panel member, Richard Forgan, from the global accounting firm PWC, clearly has much to contribute. Perhaps he’ll be able to have the Islamic State arrested for tax evasion?

 

Hugh Cowan sits on the Earthquake Commission. When it comes to imagining everything that can possibly go wrong, he’s a good man to have around. Hugh knows, from bitter experience, that what the government (and the rest of us) don’t know can be, quite literally, earth-shattering.

 

Lieutenant-General Rhys Jones, the former head of the NZ Defence Force, is already very good at imagining the unimaginable. He was, after all, able to imagine that New Zealand’s award-winning war correspondent, Jon Stephenson, might be foolish enough to jeopardise his international reputation by claiming he had been somewhere he hadn’t, and met someone he didn’t. That Lt-General Jones wasn’t able to go on imagining such nonsense indefinitely might be considered a weakness. But at least he has proved that imagining things that never happened is a crucial element of the NZDF’s skill-set – one that Lt-General Jones is now very well placed to pass on to his colleagues on the SRRP.

 

Helen Anderson is a director of Niwa, Branz and DNZ. In a world as festooned with abbreviations and acronyms as the “intelligence community” she should fit right in. Keeping one’s thinking free of unnecessary words and phrases can only improve the SRRP’s (which Ms Anderson must surely be referring to already as “Syrup's”?) overall effectiveness and efficiency.

 

Speaking of which, one can only applaud John Key’s appointment of Productivity Commission chairman, Murray Sherwin to Syrup’s distinguished membership. Ensuring that New Zealand gets more national security ‘bangs’ for its Treasury ‘bucks’ can only be a good thing. Can’t it?

 

So, there you have it. The Prime Minister’s free-thinking panel. Those of you who are disappointed that the SRRP does not include people like ‘New Zealander of the Year’, Dame Anne Salmond; investigative journalist, Nicky Hager; former Court of Appeal Justice, Sir Edmund Thomas; TPPA opponent, Professor Kane Kelsey; or that other tireless campaigner for our national sovereignty, CAFCA's Murray Horton; must understand that when John Key talks about “free thinkers”, he is not talking about those thinkers determined to keep us free.

 

This essay was posted simultaneously on The Daily Blog and Bowalley Road blogsites on Thursday, 6 November 2014.

“By Their Fruits Shall Ye Know Them”: There’s nothing ‘moderate’ about John Key’s government.

Wolves In Wolves' Clothing: What Key and Joyce, both inveterate poll-watchers, clearly grasped after National’s last-minute failure in 2005 was that when push came to shove, the New Zealand electorate just wasn’t ready to take yet another wild ride into political and economic upheaval. National had to learn how to "make haste slowly".

 

NEW ZEALAND’S LOVE AFFAIR with John Key, like most enduring relationships, is based on trust. Ever since he wrested the leadership of the National Party from the scary Don Brash, it has been Key’s unwavering mission to present both himself and the party he leads as ordinary, decent and (most important of all) non-threatening. Looking back over the past six years, only a fool would say he hasn’t been extraordinarily successful.

 

Had Brash won the 2005 election New Zealand would have been plunged into a period of acute political instability.

 

Faced with a government determined to relegate the Treaty of Waitangi to the status of an historical relic, and abolish the Maori seats altogether, the Maori Party, the Greens and (with much less enthusiasm) the Labour Party would have found themselves mobilising not only a furious Maoridom, but also a very significant swathe of Pakeha society as well. The resulting clash of a very significant minority of the population with “the racist Right” would have made the 1981 Springbok Tour protests look like a tepid historical dress rehearsal. After three years of increasingly violent and ultimately fatal confrontations, it’s likely that Brash, the National Party and their rabid Act allies would have been consigned to electoral oblivion. The Right’s electoral rehabilitation would have taken at least a decade.

 

In a very real sense, then, National (and New Zealand) dodged a bullet in 2005. And the two National Party politicians who appreciated just how big a bullet it was that had whistled over their heads were John Key and Steven Joyce. It’s not that these two politicians underwent some sort of Road to Damascus conversion from far-Right fanatics to kitten-eyed moderates – far from it. What they grasped was that any further attempts to impose the entire right-wing agenda in one fell swoop were bound to produce exactly the same electoral failure.

 

Brash had taken his inspiration from Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson. All three of these politicians were “policy aggressors” determined to overturn “the conventional wisdom” in the name of a radically reconfigured New Zealand economy and society. But what Key and Joyce, both inveterate poll-watchers, clearly grasped was that National’s last-minute failure in 2005 was only partly due to Brash’s personal stumbles. When push came to shove, the New Zealand electorate just wasn’t ready to take yet another wild ride into political and economic upheaval. If National was to capitalise successfully upon the electorate’s growing disenchantment with “Nanny Helen’s “ “political correctness” and a Labour Party fast becoming unrecognisable to “Middle New Zealand”, then the negative legacies of Richardson, Shipley and Brash had to be expunged.

 

And nobody does expunge like John Key. In spite of the fact that in his earliest incarnation as a National Party back-bencher, the MP for Hellensville boasted a decidedly reactionary political profile, John Key, as Leader of the Opposition, proved to be extraordinarily adept at presenting himself as “Mr Moderate”, “Mr Bloke-Next-Door”, “Mr Guy-I’d-Like-To-Have-Beer-With” or (if you were a woman) “Mr Guy-I’d-Like-To-Shag”. If Brash’s mentors had been Douglas and Richardson, the policy aggressors; Key’s were Sir Keith Holyoake, Jim Bolger and Clark herself: incrementalists all.

 

But just because, as a politician, you’ve decided to make haste slowly, doesn’t mean that you don’t get to where you’re going in the end. A dispassionate review of the Key Government’s legislative achievements since 2008 could only conclude by observing that notwithstanding all the taunts of National having turned into “Labour-Lite”, this is a very right-wing government indeed. It’s unrelenting hostility to all forms of environmental protection; its opening of our land and sea to mineral exploration and extraction; its blank refusal to take any meaningful action against Climate Change and its determination to protect the dairy industry from any and all forms of practical regulation: these are only the beginning of what is now a very long list National’s reactionary victories.

 

And just consider what has characterised the opening shots of National’s third term. Dismissed as mere technical adjustments, the Government’s changes to the Employment Relations Act place New Zealand at the far right-wing reaches of the OECD. (As the CTU president, Helen Kelly, quite rightly points out.) Then there is Bill English’s and Paula Bennett’s extraordinary decisions in relation to state housing. At a time when people are living in caravan-parks and cars, the idea of selling up to a third of the nation’s state houses represents a sudden and utterly unmandated return to the darkest days of Jenny Shipley. And as if these measures weren’t reactionary enough, it now seems certain that Key will commit New Zealand military forces to the confused and almost certainly ineffective US-led war against the Islamic State.

 

“Moderate”? “Labour-Lite”? Not really. John Key’s government is every bit as bad as its predecessors. It is, however, a great deal better than most of them at pretending it isn’t. And to those who find it impossible to see “that nice Mr Key” as being anything other than the soul of reason and common sense, I can only offer the words of St Matthew’s Gospel:

 

 “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits.”

 

This essay was posted simultaneously on The Daily Blog and Bowalley Road on Tuesday, 4 November 2014.

National's Housing Policy: Squander and Squalor.

Free Market Solutions: In 1890, Jacob Riis, one the world's first 'photo-journalists', published How The Other Half Lives, depicting the lives of New York's slum-dwellers. This is what affordable housing for the poor looks like when the provision of this vital social need is left to the tender mercies of "the free market".

WHAT IS IT ABOUT the National Party and state housing? What is it about supplying safe, warm and affordable housing for the poorest New Zealanders that they do not understand? Are Bill English and Paula Bennett so wedded to the notion that ‘the market must decide’ that they are willing to live with the squalor it inevitably engenders?

 

All around us we see the consequences of allowing market forces to set New Zealand’s housing policy. Young, well-qualified Kiwis, holding down good jobs on good pay, cannot afford to buy a house. While young families, struggling to survive of a benefit, cannot even find one. Property developers and builders, responding to market signals, construct dwellings for those in search of large and expensive dwellings. The smaller, cheaper homes New Zealand so desperately needs exist only in the dreams of the homeless, and on the drawing-boards of progressive architects.

 

And what is the National Government’s response? To sell up to a third of the state houses entrusted to it by the wisdom and compassion of earlier generations of New Zealanders! When thousands of their fellow citizens are living in damp, over-crowded houses; or caravan parks; or their cars; Mr English and Ms Bennett are proposing to reduce the State’s stock of housing for the poor. Why in God’s name would they want to do that?

 

National’s comeback is that the provision of social housing is best left to religious, charitable, and other not-for-profit institutions. The State, they say, is a poor landlord. The country’s poorer citizens, they insist, will be better off in the care of the Salvation Army; or their local Iwi; or a city council.

 

Really?

 

From what possible source will the not-for-profit sector acquire the resources to construct social housing on a scale even remotely commensurate to the urgent need of the homeless? What bank is going to lend money to an institution whose prospective clients are required to endure the most precarious of living conditions? There are very good reasons why very poor people are refused mortgages. (As the whole world discovered in 2008, when the US and UK banks’ insane decision to lend money to people who couldn’t possibly pay it back triggered a global financial crisis.)

 

Nor is there the slightest historical justification for believing that the housing needs of the poor can in any way be satisfied by the charitable impulses of churches, individual philanthropists, or even – heresy of heresies! – by the good offices of the free market’s mysterious “invisible hand”.

 

We have all, at some time, used the expression “how the other half lives”. But how many of us realise that it has its origin in a scandal arising out of market-driven housing “solutions”? It was in 1890 that one of the world’s first “photo-journalists”, Jacob Riis, published How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York, a collection of photographs depicting the horrendous living conditions of the city’s slum-dwellers. The free-market’s “solution” to New York’s ever-increasing demand for affordable housing was to construct gimcrack, windowless, disease-ridden, fire-traps where whole families were forced to eke out their sorry existence in a single, fetid room. To their credit, New York’s middle-classes were shocked into action. Their radical reforms owed little to market forces.

 



State Provided Solutions: A street of "State Houses" in New Zealand.

 

And neither did the radical reforms of the First Labour Government. Because, fundamentally, market failure was the problem. Daringly, Labour’s reformers borrowed the capital required to house the homeless casualties of the Great Depression from “NZ Inc”, in the form of Reserve Bank credit. We paid ourselves back out of the increased revenue generated by the housing programme itself (state houses were built, as a far as possible, out of local materials) and, over time, out of the rentals of the tenants themselves. (Being immortal entities, states can wait a long time for their loans to be repaid!)

 

Has the Government truly forgotten that there is NO non-squalid market-driven solution to a market-induced crisis in affordable housing? Mr English and Ms Bennett certainly haven’t forgotten. If you press them they will admit that their own government may end up lending the potential purchasers of state houses the money needed to acquire our long-ago amortised assets. Yes, that’s right, National’s “market-driven” solution to the housing crisis is to require taxpayers to heavily subsidise private investment in property they already own because the new owners’ “independence” from the State better qualifies them to manage the nation’s stock of social housing than the State itself.

 

But even if that were true, the State’s alleged indifference as a landlord is almost entirely attributable to the National Party’s longstanding antipathy to the idea that when it comes to putting a roof over people’s heads we are, and must remain, “our brothers’ keeper”.  Ultimately, the Government’s market-driven alternative can only be achieved by squander and squalor.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 4 November 2014.