New Zealand Engineering 1997 September

Editorial

Policy Rules!

Something seems to have been forgotten in the debate surrounding this month's superannuation referendum: national wealth. If New Zealand was indeed the Switzerland or the Saudi Arabia of the South Pacific the question of how people provided for themselves in old age would not really even occur. Instead, we now have politicians doing what politicians do best, squabbling about the mechanisms for doling out a shrinking share of the pie.

This is not a debate we see happening in Malaysia. When New Zealand prime minister Jim Bolger met Microsoft supremo Bill Gates a few years ago they talked vaguely. When Malaysian prime minister Dr Mahathir bin Mohamad meets Bill Gates, they are talking serious real estate deals. There is no nonsense about level playing fields here. Mr Gates is being offered tax holidays up to 10 years, a highly sophisticated infrastructure, and a well educated, hard working, English-speaking workforce.

All those Asian immigrants our hapless treasurer was busily lambasting last year come from countries that 50 years ago had been devastated by war and imperialism. Twenty five years ago the notion that we would be snapping up Korean cars by the turn of the century in preference to British ones would never have occurred. But the advantage the Asians have had is that someone once told them they were "not developed". That got them going. Then they realised this isn't a goal but a journey. We haven't realised that yet.

Our schools are turning out proportionately fewer literate children, our hospitals are turning away the sick, our scientific institutions are in disarray, our sewerage systems are leaking, our roads are congested, our air and water is getting dirtier, our corporates are foreign-owned exploiting monopolies, our economy waddles from real estate boom to bust. Like frogs in a pot we are coping with a gradual increase in adversity, not changing the rules.

It would be easy to blame politicians, after all that's what they are for. Whipping boys to distract attention from the bureaucracy. But the real malaise in this country is that policy has become an objective in itself. In Asia the objective is simple: national wealth. Here policy is the objective. Perhaps the clearest example of this is in the telecommunications sector. The policy is to let the sector operate like any other part of the market. There are no attempts to measure the "success" of this policy because whether New Zealand benefits from it or not is irrelevant, the policy itself is the objective.

The effect of this mind-numbing stupidity is to disengage those people who make things happen from positions of power in the economy and consequently undermine national sovereignty. Government at all levels isn't about delivering wealth to its people, it's about delivering policy. Strangely enough policy is not generating growth but to the mandarins that doesn't matter. After all Malaysia has very poor policy.