Free Press

ACT’s regular bulletin

Tête-à-tête
In the Sunday Star this weekend, David argued: "The message would be simple. If you want to have children while receiving a benefit that's fine, but the Government will give entitlements in a form that puts the needs of the children first."

Bonus Content
Jacinda completely evades the argument, but that doesn’t save her from an eviscerationby welfare policy commentator Lindsay Mitchell. Mitchell is a national treasure for her careful research on making welfare work.

Looking Forward and Looking Back
It is said that all countries are obsessed with either the past, the present, or the future. South Africa is busy digesting its past, the United States is caught up in its the present time, the new Asian Tigers, such as Vietnam and China, are only looking forward.

What About New Zealand?
ACT believes it’s better to look forwards than backwards, but we’re concerned that New Zealand is in danger of harkening back to a mythical past that never was. Let us count. All around the world people want to throw up the shutters, close out the world, and return to simpler times.

Backward Cities
The urban planning profession are determined to make us live really close together like people did when trains were really new. Their drive to contain the city has created a massive shortage of urban land and driven up prices.

Cities Looking Forward
ACTs believes the cities of the future will spread out further. New Zealand should embrace ride sharing, congestion charging, and driverless vehicles that will ease congestion and allow people to get around faster, cheaper, and with less demand on infrastructure.

Backward Housing Policy
The Government’s building houses, the Prime Minister is meddling with Reserve Bank, the grumpier opposition members want to blame foreigners and complicate the tax system, the Government won’t rule out land confiscations. The housing debate is another one starting to sound a little bit 1970s.

ACT Housing Policy
ACT has gotten hoarse saying consistently that the housing ‘crisis’ is everywhere and always a land use planning phenomenon, nowhere has a regulatory failure been fixed with additional regulations.

Old Growth
Steven Joyce is making Rob Muldoon look like a hands-off economic manager, but if Winston Peters can make him announce an entire regional economic growth strategy while in opposition, imagine what a NZ First-National Government would be like.

Growth in the Future
ACT doesn’t believe for a moment that politicians or bureaucrats know more about business opportunities than business people risking their own money. What New Zealand should be doing is creating the regulatory environment for growth and innovation rather than picking winners.

Old Education
The Government is happy to see dozens of schools on permanent one year review by the Education Review Office, failing and failing kids in droves. If anything they are attempting to fix it by centralising control of education further through communities of learning.

New Education
ACT believes we should let social entrepreneurs establish schools and let students take their share of education funding to those schools. They are called Partnership Schools and they are going gangbusters. They reflect the fact that communities have more knowledge about their kids than Wellington does.

Old Conservation
The Government has an enormous interest in Landcorp, a business that is quite happy to use taxpayer capital for high intensity dairy conversions when prices are good. It has never been clear why the Government owns farms, especially when it is trying to regulate dairy activity in the private sector.

Conservation Looking Forward
ACT proposes that the Government stop owning things such as farms and, besides paying down its debt, invest in genuine public goods. ACT proposes using the proceeds of Landcorp farm sales to fund community-driven sanctuaries with the ultimate aim of bringing back the birdsong that Captain Cook heard.

Old Attitudes
At the end of your life you must suffer ‘til the bitter end, if palliative care doesn’t work for you that’s tough. Your doctor can do it informally so long as it is ostensible just for ‘pain relief.’ You can commit suicide or starve yourself to death. But you can never intentionally choose how you go.

New Attitudes
Mentally competent adults should be able to choose how they go and when they go, with strict safeguards. It is only right that it is your body, it is your life, and you should be in control.

We Could Go On
New Zealand is at the edge of drifting backward as the grumpy and intolerant look like the political kingmakers. ACT’s mission is to make sure New Zealand looks forward, not backward, upward, not downward, and outward, not inward.

ends

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