Opinion: Over the past 25 years, the population of New Zealand has grown by 38 percent to 5.23 million people. We’ve grown faster than the global population (34 percent) and only slightly slower than India (40 percent). China grew by only 12 percent.
How have we coped? We’ve had some wins and losses across the board, from the economy and environment to society and culture. Thankfully, Aotearoa remains for many a beautiful and inspiring place to call home.
But we have made insufficient substantial, resilient progress. We still languish, as we have for decades, in the mid-20s to low-30s in the OECD’s ranking of developed countries across a wide range of economic, social and environmental measures.
For example, our GDP per hour worked is 32nd; our savings rate is 24th; our social spending as a percentage of GDP 21st; and our population is the second most overweight/obese in the OECD.
Our economy is more efficient than it was 25 years ago. But it is still less-than-sophisticated on some key global technological and economic measures. Our spend on research and development remains low by OECD standards at 1.5 percent of GDP; agriculture, forestry and fishing have flatlined, contributing the same 6 percent of GDP they did 25 years ago.
Moreover, we still struggle to improve our environmental performance, as the wealth of analysis in our reporting framework, Environment Aotearoa, shows us. The OECD also has some telling environmental measures. For example, our excessive fertiliser use means our nitrogen and phosphorus levels per hectare are the highest in the OECD after Korea, Netherlands, India, Vietnam and Czechia.
As a small country, it should be easier for us than for much bigger countries to bring people together on our economic, social and environmental challenges, reach some common ground, work out goals and policies, and implement them for the long-term benefit for all.
Indeed, we rank second in the annual Democracy Index produced by the Economist Intelligence Unit. Of the top eight countries, Sweden is the largest with 10m people.
But we have a notable weakness in political culture, one of the five categories of criteria evaluated. That’s measured by the answers to eight questions put to interviewees, such as: “Is there a sufficient degree of societal consensus and cohesion to underpin a stable, functioning democracy?”
We’re still in the select group of 24 countries rated as ‘full democracies’. We’re a long way from the deep political dysfunction of, for example, the US, which has dropped into the ‘flawed democracies’ category, ranking 30th overall.
Yet, if we look back over the last 50 years we’ve had the chaos and dysfunction of the Muldoon government; the traumatic reforms of the Lange government; followed by two National and two Labour governments that have attempted only incremental changes, which have delivered only modest gains at best.
Those latter four governments over the last 33 years have failed to devise and sell to voters deep, enduring and beneficial solutions to many of our long-standing economic, social and environmental challenges – housing, infrastructure, productivity, taxation, superannuation, poverty, and pollution.
They underperformed in office because they squandered their time in opposition. They focused on the easier tasks – holding the government to account and massaging their popularity with voters.
But they ignored the hard ones – working across society to devise effective solutions to our long-standing challenges and opportunities, and building support for them.
Regaining office lacking new and better policies and/or support for them, they tried to create an illusion of progress. For example axing, rather than improving, some useful things their predecessors did, and by resurrecting some flawed or failed ideas from their previous time in government.
Meanwhile, the challenges for nations and their governments are escalating rapidly in number, complexity and consequence at home and abroad. Across every domain from economic and social, to environmental and diplomatic, over the next few years countries must achieve an utterly unprecedented speed, scale and complexity of change – and then maintain them for decades to come.
Yet those challenges are also unprecedented opportunities to improve the lot of people and the health of the planet.
Every country has lots to learn about that. For example, just-released analysis by the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment at Oxford University shows that governments in 88 countries spent US$17.5 trillion on 8,000 policies to help their economies recover from the Covid pandemic.
But only 10 percent of that spending had direct “build back better” benefits in terms of environmental and climate adaptation and resilience. Worse, 28 percent of the spending made matters worse by, for example, building non-resilient infrastructure.
New Zealand wasn’t included in the study. But our examples of building back better are very few and far between.
Meanwhile, here’s the key way to think about humanity’s to-do list over the next 25 years. It’s the analysis from the Stockholm Resilience Centre of the nine biophysical boundaries of the planet. If we comprehensively breach those, we will drastically compromise the Earth’s ability to support life as we know it.
The centre’s latest report shows humanity has now crossed six of the nine boundaries, up from three just 14 years ago.
Three years ago, our government commissioned the centre to produce a planetary boundaries report on New Zealand based on our data. We were the first country to seek such specific analysis, appropriately so given we have the largest stock of natural capital per capita in the world, according to the World Bank, and are so dependent on it for our livelihood and wellbeing.
But in common with every other society, our current cultural, social, economic and political systems and values are accelerating our boundary breaches.
If we changed our deeply dysfunctional political culture, we could figure out how to get back within the boundaries. By working with nature – not against it – we would make our lives far better in every sense of the word. We would have a future.
‘As a small country, it should be easier for us than for much bigger countries to bring people together on our economic, social and environmental challenges, reach some common ground, work out goals and policies, and implement them for the long-term benefit for all’. Yes one would think so Rod but this doesn’t seem to be the case. Working with nature doesn’t seem to be in our dna and neither does working together across social boundaries. You say we need to change our political culture and I’d certainly agree with that too but what about our personal culture of maintaining living standards way beyond the carrying capacity of the biosphere?
I enjoyed this column although it seems to me to miss a whole lot. No mention of growing threats from regional wars: Russia-Ukraine, Israel and Hamas and the Middle East, etc. NZ is very vulnerable to the lack of free flow through the Suez Canal and Red Sea, and it is appropriate for the government to support the attacks on those who are attacking shipping. But this is also very worrying. I am also very concerned about the truancy rate in schools and seeming lack of appreciation for a sound education of our children. NZ seems to export educated people – a brain drain, and import a lot of untrained workers for menial tasks. Noting “our deeply dysfunctional political culture” seems to say a whole lot.
“As a small country”…
Many “recent” (<20 years) immigrants are coming here stuck in a system that support entrenched privileges that unsustainable. When my father came in the 60s, he was living 2 to a room and sending money back home. Immigrants now could be living 4-6 to a room and sending money back home.
The progress of our "social" democracy has not been better for all. Only for some.
In key areas of the economy, we have increasingly relied on inporting workers from overseas, at the same time not providing for the increased demand that a larger population creates for housing, education, health, transport services, and other social services. We’ve increasingly relied on the import of workers from overseas rather than training our own to fill gaps in a health service that has become increasingly unattractive to potential recruits. In these areas, as in water and drainage infrastructure, the pattern has been to cut costs and push problems to the future. Wider issues of environmental degradation get pushed down the list, or get a greenwashing response. We desperately need a mechanism for addressing infrastructure and environmental issues that is not captive to the whims of each new government, and that allows responses to proceed that may extend over decades.
Our collective flouting of key planetary boundaries is rapidly becoming the dominant influence on the global economy – and therefore on our own lives.
It should also be obvious by now that the economy is an energy system, not a financial one. Money is merely a proxy for access to energy. Alas, there too the media are letting us down.
Until these realities become obvious to voters, they will continue to pin their hopes on the Ponzi scheme of endless GDP growth, and politicians will continue to sell delusional optimism. As their promises repeated fail to stack up, electorates could so easily fall for the simplistic lies of Trump-style autocrats. We saw the outcome of that in 1930s Europe and in the death camps of Stalin and Hitler.
Last year’s weather bombs are a mere shadow of what we can expect from unmitigated global heating. Already we’re seeing around five million excess deaths per annum and significant economic damage. Without rapid, decisive action, sea-level rise will displace millions; extreme weather events will lead to large-scale crop failures, increasing poverty, and massive disruption to global trade. Here in New Zealand, our biggest trading partners are China and Australia. Both are particularly vulnerable.
One analysis suggests we could see a billion climate-related deaths in the lifetime of today’s children, and several billion people may become climate refugees as their homelands become too hot or humid for human habitation. What price productivity, GDP per hour worked, obesity stats or saving rates? They’ll become trivial issues.
Given our current collective inability to rein in our GHG footprint, only a fool would now choose to bring kids into the world… unless, of course, responsible citizens are willing to take a hit for their kids’ sake, as well as using their collective voice to expose our leaders’ toxic fantasies.