Quit Whinging

- work at the fix.

Quit Whinging

- work at the fix.

Woe is me!

Really? Is that the best I can do? But (I hear you ask) is there so much that is wrong with politics in New Zealand now? Yes, I can list the problems.

It’s easy to criticise. That merely requires reasonable powers of observation. The ills of our society are trumpeted by the media, by the parliamentary opposition, by everyone who is disadvantaged by the bureaucracy, by the legislation, by the circumstances of life.

And how do we fix these problems? Well, there is the Kiwi method. Simple. What we are doing now is wrong, too dark for our lives, too black. Well then, simple! We should go for white. Surely that will work? Reverse all the recent decisions that made things, recently, worse.

We can do that every three years. What’s not to love? Yet we know all too well what results from these oscillations - a jerky, but inevitable, decline.

However, being too gradual leads to the “slow boiling frog” syndrome. Reform should be gradual, but not too gradual. And carefully thought through, to avoid cures that are worse than the disease.

I hear mutterings from the back - what is this about reform? What indeed? Historically, some reformers have torn down establishments, murdered thousands, and set their societies back decades before a better era was finally established.

New Zealand is not like that. Our government system has proved capable of serious, effective, long-lived improvements: including votes for women; social security; secret ballot; land registry; public health; clean water; free education, and hospitals, and libraries. All ferociously opposed in their turn, by reasonable and responsible people. Why? Because all these were, at their respective times, reforms, and we all share a policy of “beware the unintended consequences”.

But in hindsight, all are lauded as being in the forefront of international improvements in life and liberty; we are famous now for the foresight of our forebears.

And we ain’t done yet. We should learn from our history, and follow the most successful and long-lasting examples of government reform.

Typically, the workable pattern was concentrated on things that went cleanly together, and were difficult to organise in isolation. The first Labour government, elected in 1935, passed the Reserve Bank Amendment Act, the Housing Amendment Act, the State Advances Corporation Act in 1936, and the Social Security Act in 1938. Taken together these provided affordable housing, healthcare, and benefits for unemployment, sickness and maternity — which we still enjoy ninety years later.

Here I must confess a conflict of interest — I am both a landlord and a shareholder. Gouging rents are not uncommon, exploiting desperate tenants. Genuine balance should be enforced by law, for tenants and for employees. The worker has enough cash to last till Thursday. The corporation can last for decades.

The simple answer is sectoral wage agreements. I have heard the objection that collective bargaining merely replaces one imbalance with another. But employers are not poor powerless victims. They are backed by capital, shareholders, retained earnings, legal counsel, HR departments, and the ability to wait. An employee alone is backed by this week’s groceries.

Step one: restore genuinely fair collective bargaining. Why this first? Because it’s the one reform that doesn’t require prior structural change to achieve. A government with the will could pass an Employment Relations Amendment Act tomorrow.

Next: transparency and democratic integrity reforms — such as a lobbying register, revolving door restrictions, and deliberative, randomly selected citizens’ councils, will become more achievable when corporate power in the workplace is partially rebalanced. Then, once the nexus between wealth and influence is thus weakened, legislation will become more socially responsible.

Following on: public election funding — which requires politicians to vote against their own donor interests, but more achievable once the lobbying and transparency reforms have shifted the political mindset.

How would lobbying reforms alter matters? A simple example: with a political culture largely shorn of undue commercial influence, it becomes possible to enact sensible changes to infrastructure, such as subsidised rooftop solar. We should start with this because it reduces long-term government infrastructure costs — deferred investment in grid transmission and distribution — while the householder bears most of the capital cost upfront. Solar is now the cheapest mode of generation; rooftop systems reduce grid loads and increase resilience. Yes, there will be disparities in affordability, but good subsidy design should reduce that objection.

You may ask, how do we pay for all of this? The costs so far would be negligible. Labour market reform, lobbying register, cooling-off periods: virtually nothing.

Citizens’ councils, based on the Irish Citizens’ Assembly, perhaps a half million dollars per issue addressed — less than a ministerial overseas trip.

Public Election Funding, based on the total declared campaign spending for 2023 election, at most $17 million including TV advertising. That’s under $1.50 per person, per year, and most importantly, it restores the balance between the parties — and removes the single greatest source of undue influence over the people we elect to govern us.

Most important of all is this — simple to state and politically almost impossible to achieve without everything above: look at the total national cost of each decision, not the sectional interest it serves. And legislate for truthful analysis.

Quit whinging. Work at the fix.

Peter L Collins © 2026