Order Paper: Poised for the 2020s: three different visions for a tricky election

It might be a wee while until people get to cast their votes in Election 2017 but the strands and themes of the election are becoming clearer.

The starting point – for all that this will stick in the craw of many on the Left – is what departing prime minister John Key described as a new mood of confidence among New Zealanders.

Presumptions of New Zealand’s essential second-rateness used to bedevil not just commentaries but also everyday conversation about the country’s prospects. It was there in terminology such as “third world” or “banana republic” to describe the country.

Culturally we saw ourselves as not just a backwater but emotionally and socially second rate. Bitter, self-reproachful tomes such as The Passionless People or The New Zealand Experiment cast a long and harmful shadow on the country’s self-image.

It wasn’t just a “colonial cringe” or a “cultural cringe” as some people called it at the time. 

It was a long, protracted whimper, a kind of whining tinnitus that sounded behind almost all debates, discussions and commentaries about the country’s future.

It was a kind of repeated, oppressive, dour and downbeat outlook, and it dominated discussion about the country’s geo-political and socio-economic outlook for a couple of generations or more.

And it’s pretty much stopped.

Oh, you will still hear it from time to time but it is not the all-pervasive note of futility that used to ring through the entire public discourse, whereby the presumption was not only was New Zealand’s future pretty well rooted but that New Zealanders lacked the commercial, social, cultural, or even spiritual ability to make a better future.

So the question really is, what to do with this promising outlook, this shift in mood? The parties giving the clearest answer are National and the Greens.

Optimism
That might sound like an odd thing to say but what distinguishes both is their policies and general “mood music” are based on a sort of presumption of optimism about New Zealand’s potential future.

The two approaches are quite different. The past two weeks have seen sizable announcements from Finance Minister Steven Joyce and Prime Minister Bill English. Both hinged on this year’s budget, which Mr Joyce will deliver on May 25.

The finance minister declared a goodly increase in what was already a large infrastructure building programme over the next half decade; Mr English provided the latest iteration of National’s wide-ranging, and actually quite radical, social investment programme. They also both announced a further reduction in the government’s net debt target.

The infrastructure investment – the details of which will be fleshed out in the budget – is on a scale not seen since the first half of the 1960s, when there was large-scale building of hydroelectric dams, electricity networks, roads, schools and universities.

To some degree – in fact to a large degree – there is a chunk of backfill going on here. Successive governments, since the 1980s, have tended to skimp on this sort of investment.

But it is not just backfill. It is based on both growth projections and also the clear indication New Zealand’s population is going to hit five million earlier than anticipated.

Yes, the hot-button issue of immigration is a factor. But more importantly, fewer New Zealanders are leaving than was expected, and, given the state of much of the world, more coming home.

The challenge to this is from the Green Party, and here things get quite interesting. The Greens have, gradually, weaned themselves away from the party’s reflexive negativity. The party has not completely moved away from this, not by any chance – get them on climate change and you wonder why any of us need bother planning anything because we’re all doomed anyway.

But the party is talking up other aspects of its policy.

It has formally banned the word ‘neoliberal’ from its MPs’ pronouncements, and its parliamentarians tend to shy away from anything that might suggest they want to ban anything.

BusinessNZ, while wary of some of the more ambitious goals about renewables, cautiously welcomed the Greens’ electricity policy last month. The employer group noted that, in sharp contrast with last election’s back-to-the-1970s state-controlledd model, developed with Labour, this one is based on the electricity sector as it now is, and has a far more acknowledged role for competition.

There are still plenty of traces of the old Adam in the mix – there is a ban, this time on fossil fuel generation – but the willingness to embrace new technology and to allow people to produce and trade their own electricity  and allow for more transparency around billing and pricing, is all very market friendly.

Throwback
The third vision, or strand, if you like, is the nostalgia model.

Fearful of the future, this involves a throwback to the statism of the past. New Zealand First leads the charge here: Party leader Winston Peters this week called for the government to rule that entering the Pike River mine is safe; for the cabinet to take control of the exchange rate; and for a command and control immigration and, effectively, labour market policy that would probably even make the 1970s Labour Party wince.

Labour itself is caught between these three strands of Election 2017. It has a bit of all three – and appears, thus far, unable to choose between them.

Its pre-election congress is this weekend. We should know, by Sunday night, if it is going to choose or not.