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The Greater Good

Entry 670, on 2008-01-10 at 22:00:44 (Rating 3, Politics)

Politics tends to go in cycles. In New Zealand we basically swap between center-left Labour and center-right National lead governments every 2 or 3 terms. Currently we have a quite long-lived Labour government which will very likely be voted out at the elections this year. They will lose the election not because they are a bad government (although some of their policies and decisions could be a lot better) but because people always want change after a while.

Previous governments, starting in 1984, have pursued a laissez-faire economic model where government owned assets have been sold off to mostly foreign corporations. In many cases this hasn't worked well. Our national airline was almost destroyed and now the government is the major shareholder after a rescue. Our telecommunications infrastructure has been atrocious because of Telecom's insistence on pushing poor, antiquated services for inflated prices. And our rail system has been run down to the extent that the government has had to buy back the track.

Now the private rail operator is playing a dirty game of refusing to pay a fair price for the track at the same time it invests in competing road services. The government has become frustrated after 3 years of negotiation and is considering buying the rail operation back as well.

Before the previous more right-wing government was voted out they created a market-driven electricity network which has delivered mixed results (at best) so maybe its time for Labour to do the opposite and set up more state owned corporations before National takes over.

Its clear to me that private enterprise cannot be trusted to produce the best result for everyone. After all, their overwhelmingly important raison d'etre is to produce maximum profits. This aim is completely opposed to the greater good of balancing financial, environmental, and public good factors which a modern society requires.

I don't expect that the fundamental economic model we use, which has been quite successful in the past, will change straight away, but its this government's duty to steer things in the right direction while they still can.

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