Unlock New Zealand’s Potential

The Haps

Henrymania has gripped New Zealand Politics. Paul Henry has a unique capacity to pierce the gloom and hopelessness that’s hung over New Zealand politics for too long. Which Party has he chosen? ACT, of course. The Party’s campaign to Unlock New Zealand’s Potential sums up the Party’s mission to give hands up instead of hands out, and fits Henry Like a Glove.

Henry will start his tour Paul Henry Unlocked: Truth telling for a better tomorrow from this Saturday in Hamilton.

David Seymour acted as Prime Minister for the last week, the AB’s won, the Warriors won, Ryan Fox won. All is well. Seymour also acted as a one-man think tank, giving two speeches with fresh new ideas last week.

#1 parents are fighting a losing battle with social media, they don’t want their kids’ minds destroyed, but their whole class is doing it, and they don’t want to be the odd one out either. Perhaps that dilemma is the case for the Government to intervene, but the proposed social media ban is insane. Seymour’s idea is simple. You can have a ‘dumb’ phone, without internet, to call your parents until you’re 16. A much better way to save childhood without ruining internet freedom and privacy for adults.

#2 innovation trials where Government strikes out certain rules for a limited time in a limited area to bring new technologies here. An innovation trial could help farmers use agricultural drones like Jeremy Clarkson wanted to, or let Uber trial driverless taxis at Queenstown airport. If we want higher incomes we need to be closer to the technology frontier.

Parliament now returns from a two week recess to sit for the next three weeks, expect to see ACT Ministers advancing key bills to unlock New Zealand’s potential.

Unlock New Zealand’s Potential

ACT’s Rally two weeks ago carried the banner Unlock New Zealand’s Potential. This week Free Press unpicks the pregnant phrase and expands on what it represents for the campaign ahead.

It’s for the future, not the past. There are lessons we should learn from the past and traditions we should cherish, but it’s no fun to actually live there. New Zealand First want to go back to the 1960s. The Māori Party want to go back much further (they might not like it if they did).

The truth is that time travel isn’t real and the past isn’t quite as good as people like to remember it (the nostalgic videos don’t often feature women having a great time, for example).

The left promise they will solve voters’ every problem. Several decades and many trillions of dollars later, they haven’t made much progress. In fact, the more involved they get the worse things seem to turn out, just look at government’s top three areas of spending; welfare, healthcare and education.

Our friends in the National Party are caught in the present, less worried about the direction than who’s managing it (them, of course). Bless them.

No Government can take us back in time, nor solve all our problems. With the best will and all the management talent in the world, it turns out Governments are just groups of people with terrible incentives who make lots of silly rules and waste lots of money.

The best Government can promise is a chance for each person to reach their potential. We’re not the first to think this. The American founders knew no Government could make you happy, so they added the word ‘pursuit.’

The problem is our potential is too often locked down by our own limitations. Our hero Sir Edmund Hillary said, ‘it’s not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.’ He meant it’s our own limitations that hold us back, and so it is with New Zealand.

Our Government is too big and wasteful. We have 43 Government Departments. Japan has fifteen, for twenty times more people. The tax Government takes changes the calculus of risk and reward.

If you take a risk and lose, you get nothing. If you win, you share the reward with the Government. We are too highly taxed and it makes us a poorer, less vibrant society.

ACT is campaigning to cut the waste and grow the country as the first key to unlocking New Zealand’s potential.

Processology means we spend too much time in the process and not enough on the outcome. We’ve become a world leader at producing stupid rules, and it’s killed our productivity.

Cutting red tape to grow the economy is the second key to unlocking our potential.

We have a great story of settlement. Most Kiwis have in their family a story of moving to these Islands for opportunity. It might be 600 years ago, 150 years ago, or six months ago. But too many never celebrate one law for all and one future together.

Instead they obsess over who got here first, dividing us into tangata whenua (people of the land, Māori) and tangata tiriti (people of the Treaty, everyone else). This and other outgrowths of identity politics hold us back, because who you are becomes more important than what you do.

There is a better way, and ACT has nudged the country in the right direction. Now the Party will be campaigning to lock Labour out, and unlock New Zealand’s potential. We’re going to cut the waste, red tape, and identity politics, and have a lot of fun doing it.