David Cormack
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Trust in Government
🕑 Added 2021-03-07 03:44:00 +0000 UTCA couple of years back, the Labour-led Government announced it was the "year of delivery", then promptly failed to deliver anything of note.
It did have to operate within the confines of NZFirst's whims, but nevertheless that phrase - "year of delivery" - was used as a stick to beat them over and over again.
Despite this, what Labour has managed to do - and in particular Jacinda Ardern - is earn the trust of New Zealanders.
This will largely be down to the crisis response they've shown. The Christchurch terror attacks, Whakaari / White Island eruption, and especially the Covid pandemic have shown that Labour can shepherded the country through a crisis brilliantly.
This was in evidence this week with the tsunami alerts that spread around the north-eastern part of the North Island. Historically, when there have been tsunami alerts you get absolute muppets rushing to the beaches to see what's coming.
This time however the alerts were sent to people's mobile phones, media reported them brilliantly, and even local mayors did media interviews as they drove round their constituencies asking individual people to evacuate.
And to people's credit, they followed instructions and evacuated lower-lying areas.
This is down to the trust that has been established between citizenry and authority.
The Prime Minister already had trust by the bucket-load, but now Civil Defence Minister Kiritapu Allan has been added to the roster of Ministers who are extremely competent at what they do. And they are trusted by us for it.
What this trust has done is built up even more social capital. It means Labour, as well as having a majority in the house, has the goodwill and trust of the people to make right decisions.
And we keep getting rosier and rosier economic news. Unemployment actually went down on the last count, and just this week it came out that the government deficit was $4.4B, which sounds horrible, except we had forecasted and planned for it to be nearly $3B worse.
We have the money.
Spend it.
There are people sleeping in cars. There are kids walking to school hungry and without shoes on. There are schools with mouldy classrooms. Social housing in disrepair - and a lack of housing in general. A mental health system bursting at the seams. Special education crying out for more funding.
We have the money.
We have the things that the money can be spent on.
We have a Government who has earned an unprecedent amount of trust from the public. If they don't start really going for it then what's the point of even being in government?
Many would argue that too much trust in a government isn't healthy - in fact I'm one, I'm deeply mistrusting of most authority to be honest - but at the moment this group seems more benevolent than fascist and that's good.
But they've also been more passive than active.
Comments
Joe Stockman
Firstly - I totally agree. Secondly - I find it hard to understand why they're not. But then I think about how hard it must be to find social policy interventions that are proven to work. Higher benefits are great, but does that risk welfare dependency? Splashing cash doesn't magically deal with long term social ills. I can't help but wonder if they're not stuck for inspiration - but for solid projects that they can believe will work in the long term (beyond what is already underway from the Bill English era).
Maxine Gay
Yes!
