Speech: Centralising And Dividing Us By Politicising Everything
Thank you for hosting
my colleague Mark Cameron and I here in Southland. We call
Mark the authentic voice of rural New Zealand. He’s the
only working farmer in Parliament. He milks cows in the
morning and questions the Government in the
afternoon. Speaking of primary industries, you can
measure a politician’s commitment to the south by whether
they come here outside oyster season. I always seem to time
it wrong. I’m especially grateful to be hosted by
the business community. Too many people have somehow made
business a dirty word. The word ‘entrepreneur’ is often
said with a sinister overtone. We need to change
that. Let me give you an example of how anti-business
attitude breeds. Labour MP Duncan Webb is a law professor
who never left university until he entered parliament.
Institutionalised, some might say. He has a Bill in
parliament that would force businesses to measure and report
‘social’ goals every year. In his world, business
is bad, but more bureaucracy can make it good. Here’s
ACT’s view. Business happens when entrepreneurs,
investors, workers, and customers come together to achieve
things they couldn’t do by themselves. The beautiful thing
about business is that they come together
voluntarily. Nobody’s forced to start, invest, work
at, or buy from any business. People get involved in
business to trade value for value, and get stronger
together. Win-win is possible through the power of
innovation. We should celebrate business as a
beautiful thing, but can you imagine the current Ministry of
Education putting any of that in the
curriculum? They’re not the only Government
department that need a shake up, but they’re probably the
first. My speech today is
about the current Government’s odd ability to centralise
everything and divide everyone at the same time. They do it
by politicising nearly every aspect of our lives. You pick
an area of Government policy, and I’ll show you
politicians shifting power to Wellington, dividing people,
and dividing wealth. In the initial COVID response,
Jacinda stumbled into success. It was very lucky that we
were the 63rd country to get a case, because we almost
missed the boat even then. On March 15, 2020 Jacinda
was planning to bring people from all over the world to
commemorate our nation’s tragedy in Christchurch. She was
planning to attend Polyfest with people travelling from all
over the Pacific. Six days later, on March 21, we had
the Alert Level System announced. By March 23 the whole
country was at Alert Level 3. And you wonder why people say
a week’s a long time in politics. At that time the
rhetoric from the beehive was about ‘flattening the
curve.’ A few weeks into lockdown, it became clear that we
might eradicate COVID from New Zealand
completely. Sealing New Zealand off from the world was
the easy bit. Reconnecting is the hard part. We still
haven’t done it after 18-months. It looks like we’ll do
two years in national isolation. As ACT has said in
our three COVID policy papers, we need a much nimbler policy
response. We need to set clear rules of the game, but the
Government centralises everything. Take the vaccine
stroll out. Every year, GPs vaccinate hundreds of thousands
of people for many different diseases. They know all about
vaccination. They also have records of their patients’
health, so they know who is vulnerable. You can make a
similar argument about pharmacies. Any sensible person
would ask them to lead a vaccination program. The Ministry
of Health did not ask them. In fact, GPs as late as
September were waiting for the Ministry of Health to sign
them off as being capable of vaccinating people! The
way the rules are made is overly centralised, too. It makes
no sense to have a limit of 50 or 100 people on a
hospitality business. Large venues can’t cover their rent,
small venues pack people in. Perhaps the point was to
prevent large crowds? Why then, can a butchery in a
supermarket open, but not the butcher next to my local
dairy, which can open, by the way. What matters is not
whether a business can operate safely, but whether it has
followed the rules set in Wellington. The Government
should have set the goal of reducing transmission,
hospitalisation, and ultimately death from COVID. It should
have let each business sector work out protocols for doing
so. We remain locked down in part because the
Government is incapable of trusting anyone outside
Wellington to do anything. We could go into the
centralisation of healthcare with 20 DHBs being replaced by
one healthcare agency that knows all. Suffice to say, if it
wasn’t a bad idea before we saw them roll out the COVID
response, it clearly is now. This kind of problem will
be familiar to people in Southland. The Freshwater
laws effectively say you must plant your winter crops before
it’s warm enough for them to survive. Sitting in
Wellington, it might seem like a fine idea to make sure all
winter crops are planted before December 1, but farmers know
that’s nuts. The difference is farmers have local
knowledge. Mark Cameron put up a Bill in Parliament
that would ban the Government from making National Policy
Standards, leaving it to local Government. Labour block
voted against Mark’s Bill, so they are free to continue
ignoring local knowledge. Six months ago, freshwater
laws were the big kahuna of water policy centralisation. Not
anymore, there’s a new water power grab in town. The Three
Waters power grab defies belief. Yes, there is a
problem with Three Waters. There’s a problem with
infrastructure nationwide. That doesn’t mean the answer is
to centralise control of it. The new water entities
will be unwieldy, unresponsive, and distant for most people.
The Government has tried to say they are five times more
efficient. They told the people of Whangarei that they’d
pay $4000 per household for water if the council kept
running it, but only $800 if the Government runs the same
infrastructure. I asked Nania Mahuta if she could name
any other example of something becoming five times more
efficient by letting the Government run it, I think it’s
fair to say she didn’t have an answer. Then
there’s the undemocratic Governance, where you get seats
at the table based on who your ancestors were. Kate Shephard
is on the $10 note for the simple idea of one person, one
vote. New Zealand’s Government, academics, media, and even
judiciary have dumped that idea too easily. I know
Southland Institute of Technology is an innovative gem of
the South. Unfortunately, not every polytech was so well
run. It’s fair to say many of them were useless. In the
real world, businesses go broke, more useful ones take their
place, and everyone gets better off over time. In
Labourland, all the polytechs got merged so the failure
could be shared around. You just have to ask yourself, why
would creative hard-working people stick around in an
environment where your efforts make no difference. If you do
a good job, the Government will take you over. If you do a
bad job, the Government will take you over. Your
current local MP here got so desperate in the face of this
bureaucratic barbarianism that she fled to
Parliament. Centralised education doesn’t stop with
polytechs. Remember when the Government wanted to take the
power of parent elected Boards of Trustees and establish new
entities called Hubs? Well they backed down after public
outcry but now they’re quietly centralising control of
education anyway. When this Government was elected,
the Ministry of Education employed 2600 people. That is
separate from people who work at schools. In fact, that’s
more than one bureaucrat per school, there are only about
2500 schools in New Zealand. Now there are 3500
bureaucrats. The Education Minister says they’re there to
manage property. Who was managing school property for the
first 150 years of education in New Zealand? In any event it
is more centralisation. Not to mention these bureaucrats are
imposing a history curriculum that says nothing about
business or technology, whatsoever. Then there’s the
Resource Management Reforms. There are two kinds, the
Govenrment’s kind, and the kind that National Party’s
gone along for the ride on. There’s the
Government’s Natural and Built Environments Act. Under
this act, the Minster for the Environment in Wellington
could end up deciding what sort of houses are built in your
street. There will be a regional planning committee, that
refers disputes to the national planning committee, that
refers to the Minister. It is centralisation on
steroids, but everyone is getting in on the act. The
National Party just signed itself up to a Labour Party idea
that Wellington should decide what sort of houses can be
built in practically every street. Instead of locally
decided council zones, the Government in Wellington will
decide that three three storey homes can be built on any
section. The Medium Density Residential Standard will be
imposed on every residential area of the five largest cities
and anywhere else the Minister chooses. It allows an
eight-metre wall one metre from your boundary and you have
no right to say anything about it. Forget the fact
that there’s a major infrastructure funding problem
nationwide, now if you build three, three storey homes in
the middle of a single-family home suburb, the Council must
connect you. The problem with all
these policies is that they are divisive. They’re managing
to centralise power but set people against people at the
same time. Every aspect of our lives is politicised as
the Government tries dictates from Wellington. Farmers
feel under assault from an avalanche of regulation that the
Government has unleashed on them. Employers and set
against employees as Government tries to put new costs on
employers. They think they are helping employees but they
forget that bother need the other. Remember, business is
voluntary cooperation, but Labour doesn’t get
that. Landlords have basically been designated a
terrorist group. The Three Waters proposal turns us
from a nation state, where citizens are born free and equal
with the same political rights, to an Ethno State where you
have to check your family tree to find out what your
political rights are. The only people the Government
does want to work with locally are the gangs. Remember the
days when the Government worked beside law abiding citizens
to stop the
gangs? All of this is a real
shame. We need policies that respect local
knowledge. Why did charter schools work? Because
people in struggling communities often have more insight
into why they’re struggling than people in the
one-size-fits-all-and-paid-well-fortnightly-without-fail
Wellington civil service. If half the charter schools
were presented as proposals to the Ministry of Education,
they would have found a way to kill them before they opened.
Luckily they did open and they worked. We should let
councils make planning decisions, then restrict the
decisions they can make to protect property rights, instead
of dictating from wellington what can be built in your
street. We should let councils enter into voluntary
agreements with their neighbours if they really think there
are benefits from economies of scale in managing three
waters. We should make employment law a matter between
employers and employees. We should allow schools to
self-govern, and Polytechs, too. We should look to
primary healthcare to do vaccination roll
outs. Altogether, we should stop the politicisation of
everything. Each New Zealander should be born free with an
equal chance at life, not commodified into
identities. We should be uniting New Zealand behind
good ideas to create wealth rather than dividing people and
dividing wealth. The first step is to abandon this
Government’s fetish for
centralisation.INTRO CENTRALISATION DIVISION LOCALISM