In today's NZ Herald, Professor Boyd Swinburn, of the University of Auckland's Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, Epidemiology and Biostatistics, challenges me to write a column discussing whether or not New Zealand should seek to become a Scandinavia of the South Pacific rather than a Singapore (or US) of the South Pacific.
He was responding to my Herald column on Friday calling for Finance Minister Nicola Willis to right-size the central bureaucracy.
I won't be taking up Professor Swinburn's challenge because I already have, many times.
In fact, my column on election night and in the summer edition of Metro, now on sale, deals with this point.
Now I am in my 50s and don't really care about anything the way I once did, I am relatively indifferent between New Zealand being "Scandinavia" or "Singapore".
I prefer "Singapore" but would be quite happy with "Scandinavia" if that were the consensus. The main thing is to choose one and get on with it rather than remain stuck in the middle as we have been since 1999.
But New Zealand voters just don't want either (i) to pay the Swedish taxes involved and/or (ii) do the Norwegian oil drilling and mining that would be necessary for "Scandinavia".
Moreover, voters did choose Scandinavia in, 1975, 1999, 2017 and 2020 but those Labour Governments, especially the 2020 one, proved too incompetent, lazy, stupid, determined to win election at any ideological prices, or a combination, to deliver.
Also, if we were to pay Swedish taxes or do the Norwegian oil thing, we'd then want our schools to, you know, teach kids things, our welfare agencies to genuinely help people rather than trap them in welfare, our prisons to rehabilitate people, and so forth.
Our Wellington bureaucracy has proven incompetent to do these things.
That is despite the defeated Government deciding to increase public spending higher than ever before.
As I put it on Friday, in the article Professor Swinburn objected to:
Everyone accepted government spending needed to blow out because of Covid, and core Crown expenses jumped from $87b in 2018/19 to $126b in 2021/22. But spending never fell back to business-as-usual levels afterwards, passing $140b this financial year and forecast to reach $156b in 2026/27. It risks doubling in the decade from 2018 to 2028.
The coalition partners backed National’s promised 6.5 per cent cut across most of the central bureaucracy. In just a few weeks, Willis and her colleagues found the first $7.5b that can be cut without affecting public services. But this can only be the start.
Either we go down the high-tax Scandinavian model and trust our bureaucracy to spend the money as well as those in Sweden and Denmark, or we need to radically right-size the state.
(I left out Norway because its economic model if so different from Sweden, Denmark and Finland, as Professor Swinburn, I'm sure would acknowledge.)
I stand by this.
To give just one example, and to put it bluntly, people might be prepared to pay higher taxes, but not to pay for schools run by extreme-left, teacher-union radicals who don't believe in teaching kids to read, write, add, subtract, multiply and so forth, but in facilitating self-discovery “learning experiences”.
Otherwise, best to have lower taxes and go private.
Professor Swinburn, if he supports the Scandinavian model - which, like I said, I'd be ok with - could use his time more efficiently lobbying the left to take Damien Grant's advice and spend 2024 and 2025 developing an intellectually rigorous Scandinavian model for the 2030s (not the 1960s) and then getting the best PR, advertising and social-media experts to sell if for them in 2026.
Professor Swinburn and I are surely in agreement that that is the way party platforms should be developed, rather than the PR people coming in first and the experts brought in at the last minute to try to check (usually unsuccessfully) that the overall concept is contemporary, the ideas cohere and the numbers add up.
