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4 March
06
Are
you a New Zealander?
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Next
Tuesday is census day. Once every five years we are required
by law to fill in a detailed questionnaire about ourselves and
our households. The information gathered provides a snapshot
of
New Zealand
and is used in a wide variety of different ways to determine
such things as whether we have enough hospitals and schools,
where new roads should be built, how many police will be
needed, whether a planned shopping centre is viable, or
whether an airport needs to be extended.
But
census time also gives us all an opportunity to reflect on how
life in
New Zealand
has changed over the five years. In other words, do we feel
better about
New Zealand
now than we did in 2001?
In
thinking about that question, we should be mindful that under
Helen Clark’s leadership, the New Zealand
Labour Party has become a social democratic party, and as
such has been heavily influenced by the Swedish Social
Democrats. As she said in a speech to welcome the first ever
visit to
New Zealand
by a Swedish Prime Minister in 2005, “I speak as a long time
admirer of Sweden, its people, and achievements. Sweden
and New Zealand
may be geographically a long way apart, but our shared values,
attitudes, and policies make us among the most like-minded
countries on earth”.
This
week’s guest columnist, Johan Norberg, is a Swedish writer
who has been recognised as one of the most influential
opinion-makers in that country. He gives us an insight into
how Sweden is really doing and concludes that it is not
necessarily a good role model for New Zealand (see here to view >>>).
So,
the question of whether we feel better off today than we did
five years ago, depends to a large extent on whether social
democracy works for you. Clearly, if you are a family, which
qualifies for Labour’s massive wealth redistribution
programme through the working for families welfare package,
then you will undoubtedly feel better off.
If
you are living in a state house with a cheap rent, a business
picked for an economic development subsidy, an employee in a
union that has won a major pay round, or a special interest
group that has been granted significant privileges, then your
life will probably be better today than it was five years ago.
But
if you are an ordinary family struggling to pay the mortgage
and feed the kids, then you may very well feel worse off. Not
only is it harder to make ends meet financially, as your costs
continue to rise, but you will be feeling the discomfort of
the government regulation noose tightening around your neck:
from having to microchip the family dog, to having many more
hoops to jump through if you are building a house, to extra
compliance measures if you do charitable work, to a
never-ending stream of bureaucracy being imposed by newly
appointed government regulators and commissioners.
At
local body level, rates continue to relentlessly rise around
the country, made worse by the fact that central government
has given local authorities new ways to increase their
rate-take. But that’s not all. There is a tsunami of
regulation sweeping through, from trees being given a status
seemingly higher than human life, to water quality standards
being increased to satisfy the demands of a global Green
movement concerned about water quality in Africa, and, to cap
it all, under the guise of District Plan reviews and Resource
Management Act requirements, massive land grabs and property
rights confiscations are currently underway.
These
days, the standard reaction to anything going wrong is a call
for more regulation. Just this week, in response to a report
about a tragic boating accident, officials began calling for
all boats and boaties to be registered. Yet, with tens of
thousands of boating activities taking place around
New Zealand
every day and a minimal number of accidents, the sensible
answer is better education and proper enforcement of the rules
that already exist.
One
possible explanation for this regulatory tsunami is the fact
that there is now a massively expanded public service that is
out there collectively hunting for jobs to justify their
existence! Over the last five years, the state sector has
increased by around 30,000 employees to an army that is almost
290,000 strong.
Yet,
in spite of such a massive increase in staff, the services
provided by the government are not improving across the board.
While some areas that have embraced IT are doing well, in many
critical areas, performance levels leave much to be desired:
health and education services are struggling to cope, police
are unable to get on top of crime, the prison system and CYFS
lurch from crisis to crisis, ACC remains expensive and unfair,
and with the government having monopoly control over
electricity generation, a power crisis is looming.
It
is little wonder that five years on, many New Zealanders feel
that the country is going backwards - grossly overtaxed and
overregulated, with the freedom to live our lives as we see
fit, slowly being eroded away.
The
census asks us a variety of personal questions including our
marital status, income, educational qualifications, whether we
have a disability, and our ancestry. But what it doesn’t ask
us is whether we are a New Zealander!
Australians
are asked in their census if they are Australian, Canadian are
asked if they are Canadian, in the US, they are asked if they
are a United States’ citizen, and in Britain, whether they
are British. But in New Zealand, there is no question that allows you to state that you are a
New Zealander.
This
has caused such indignation that someone recently put pen to
paper to produce an email message “Are you a New
Zealander?” It asks people to read it then pass it on. So
far I have received it 54 times!
The
message states: Many
of us consider that we, and our families, have been in New
Zealand for long enough now that we should be able to claim
that as who we are... regardless of where our ancestors may
have come from many centuries ago or what the colour of our
skin or shape of our face might indicate. If you support us in
our desire to be recognised as New Zealanders in our own
country then there is only one way that this can be achieved:
On the 2006 NZ Census form, when you are asked for your
ethnicity, choose the option "Other" and state your
ethnicity as "New Zealander". If enough people do
this then maybe, just maybe, the powers that be will sit up
and realise that we are proud of who we are and want to be
recognised as such, not divided into sub-categories and all
treated as foreigners in our own country!
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This
weeks poll.
This week's poll asks,
Do
you think question 11 of the Census should include the
option “New Zealander”?
To take part in our online poll
>>>
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