Peter Davis NZ

Paul Henry in an interview with Paula Bennett asks “what have we got be proud of in this country now?”. Well, quite a bit.

For example, it is not all that long ago that we excelled ourselves in how well New Zealand did in dealing with the pandemic: we experienced fewer deaths than we would have in a normal year; our restrictions on activity (other than at the border) were lower than most other countries; we were middle of the pack on inflation, low on unemployment, and middling on economic growth. We should be proud of this record. Apart from anything else, if we had experienced the mortality rate of the United Kingdom we would have had death counts not far off those recorded among our troops in the Second World War.

Nevertheless, the mood has darkened since that period of sunny optimism, a mood accompanied by an unexpected and unprecedented undercurrent of disinformation, conspiracy theory, and alienation in the fluid and uncertain circumstances of a global crisis. This is the winter of our discontent.

So, what can we be proud of?

Our level of well-being is world class. For example, according to the Prosperity Index compiled by the London-based Legatum Institute, a conservative think tank, we are the tenth most prosperous country in the world. And we are happy with it too; thus. a UN agency ranks us as tenth in the World Happiness index. Furthermore, we rank fifteenth on the Social Progress Index and ninth on Social Justice.

We also do well in the related areas of educational and health systems performance, notwithstanding assertions to the contrary. According to the OECD’s PISA ratings, out of  40 countries we are tenth  on reading, seventh for science, although quite a bit lower for mathematics (and our socio-economic differences are large); not bad for a system that has been highly criticised. As for health, we are short of useful comparative data, but the OECD figures on numbers per capita of doctors and nurses – a highly contested area – show that we are above the OECD average, above Canada but some way below Australia; we are generally middle of the pack on most measures.

Not only are we doing well on well-being, but we also have world-class settings for governance. There are a number of measures: Liberal Democracy is central to our political system and we are ranked sixth in the world; The Economist’s Democracy Index has us as second only to Norway; on the Cato Institute’s Human Freedom Index we are also second, and The World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index puts us at seventh for our legal and rights framework. We also do very well on our perceived lack of corruption, being second equal in the world. This is not uniform, however; according to the OECD’s Trust in Government we are only middle of the pack, and on Freedom of the Press we are just eleventh in the world – but we are viewed as a model in the Asia-Pacific region.  

This all seems very positive. But perhaps we have not tackled the hard areas, like the economy. The record here is mixed.

We do some things well. On the ease of doing business we rank first in the world and according to the Heritage Foundation we are fifth on their Economic Freedom Index. We also have low public debt and a world class sovereign wealth fund (NZ Superannuation Fund), and our employment characteristics are impressive: our unemployment rate is among the lowest in the world and the proportion of the relevant age group in the workforce is world leading. By contrast, the number of young people not in work, education or training is only middling internationally. We could do better.

We are also well rated on aspects of our tax system; for example, we have the third most tax competitive system.

But then we get to the negatives. We have about the worst current account balance in the OECD right now. We have also dropped down the international rankings for export intensity, our R&D investment is low, as is our productivity and innovation generally. These are features we cannot be proud of, and they also keep us relatively poor and diminish our social and physical infrastructure.

There are other features of public policy that mark us down: we have a high level of reported violence against women; we have one of the highest levels of obesity in the world; our child poverty rate is still not something of which we can be proud; we have one of the highest levels of imprisonment in the developed world, second only to the United States (US) among European and Anglophone countries; our house prices are extraordinarily high; and our environmental credentials are questionable.

So, there are negatives, and we need to front up to them.

In summary, what have we got to be proud of? Well, we are a plucky little country which has made its own luck and carved out a distinctive international niche which is respected by others. That’s something to be proud of and nourished.

Tip O’Neill, a former Speaker of the US House of Representatives, once said that “all politics is local”. By the looks of the furore over potholes and ramraids, that seems apt. But let us not forget the role that informed, evidence-based debate of a broader kind can and should play in our deliberations on our country’s performance, both positive and negative.

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