Will it Make the Boat Go Faster?

The Haps

We remember those who fell protecting freedom and democracy this long weekend. Lest we forget.

Earlier in the week, ACT continued to fix what matters, with policy releases designed to honour the ANZACs and help children make use of the freedom they defended.

Clearing council bureaucracy for war grave restorers makes so much sense it’s hard to believe it’s necessary. But, volunteers up and down the country who seek to restore war graves face council bureaucracy that makes no sense. ACT will campaign this election for a national directive to permit the restorers in every council jurisdiction.

Taking a fraction of the current taxpayer subsidy to Kiwisaver and using it to give Year 11s (5th formers) a live exercise in investment has had rave reviews. It is not a policy for children from households who already invest, it is a policy for those who don’t.

This is what education should do, spark possibility that children don’t see at home. It should also move New Zealand as a country into more productive investments, and improve our outlook on business as a force for good.

Will it Make the Boat Go Faster?

Productivity growth – producing more for an hour of work so we can keep being first world – should be the most important goal for our country. The cost of living crisis is not really about the cost of living, it’s about why we can’t afford first world prices on our wages. Unfortunately we’ve been tied up doing everything but focus on productivity for the last twenty years.

As we’ve said before, productivity growth since 2010 has been 0.2 per cent per year. People have got ahead mainly because asset prices have risen. If you don’t own assets then you’re even further behind. Hard work doesn’t pay off so you conclude the system is rigged and either leave or vote for socialists. Poor productivity is the most divisive force in New Zealand today.

It doesn’t need to be this way. Perhaps the best example of leadership in New Zealand sport was Peter Blake’s constant question to Team New Zealand. With Blake’s culture, the team was the first to successfully defend the Cup outside America.

Blake had everyone on the team base asking, for everything they might do: ‘Will it make the boat go faster.’ This week Free Press borrows from Blake and asks ‘will it raise productivity in New Zealand?’

We talk a lot about making New Zealand more productive. More investment, skills, and trade, less red tape, a smaller more efficient Government, etc. That all helps, but the genius of Blake’s question is that it stopped people wasting time on the wrong activities.

As a country we’ve done at least five wrong activities that have held back productivity growth lately.

1. Safetyism

New Zealand is obsessed with an impossible task: regulating away every risk. As one civil defence director said after declaring a state of emergency last week ‘You only need one gust for a tree to fall on a car and someone dies… I am feeling quite glad people weren’t out – we don’t know how many lives we may have saved.’

The statement is literally true, he doesn’t know how many lives he might have saved, if things were completely different and a tree had actually fallen over and someone had actually driven under it and actually died… who knows how many people might have died in a parallel universe? We cannot fault his logic.

Of course Free Press readers know there’s a real cost. Businesses who lost money that day because people were scared and stayed at home. The ultimate version of this was COVID, where safety from one risk was put ahead of every other goal. Safetyism is also the reason we ended up with cones taking over our roads like a horde of orange Daleks.

The obsession with safety at all costs, rather than a balance recognising total safety cannot be achieved, has cost New Zealanders a fortune.

2. Climatism

The obsession with climate has had no effect on the climate, but a major effect on productivity. The Labour-New Zealand First Government ‘invested’ $4 billion in a fund to reduce emissions. The ban on oil and gas exploration speaks for itself. The requirement for companies to report on their emissions (which the current Government has restricted to large companies) has been a massive distraction.

3. Live Like Kings Regulations

Want to have endless holidays, sick leave, and triple glazed windows? A special category of regulation that hasn’t made the boat go faster is luxury regulation. Why not have another public holiday here and there? Why not have 10 days’ sick leave? Why not mandate every home to be ‘healthy’ even if the landlord couldn’t afford that standard for their own house that they have to live in? Why not mandate triple glazing on new homes – in the winterless north?

Luxury regulations are a special kind of regulation where we legislate higher living standards than we can actually afford. We give up something else to pay for it, such as lower pay for more sick leave and holidays, or less homes built. Because these choices are forced, we are worse off overall.

4. Treatyism

Where to start? While productivity growth has been in the tank, we have been forced to start meetings with rituals almost nobody present understands. We’ve been forced to pretend that a culture without written language, that burned down a third of New Zealand’s forests and sent countless species extinct has special scientific knowledge we must bow down to. We’re required to ask permission to do things and sometimes pay a tithe for that permission. Little wonder we’ve struggled to raise productivity.

5. Identitarianism

Identity politics has been rife for the last fifteen years. New mothers are told about ‘chest feeding.’ This term is designed to perpetuate the bizarre fiction that you don’t need mammary glands to feed a baby. Forget the fact that we are mammals precisely because females use those glands to feed offspring. Endlessly confusing kindness with patronising stereotypes chews up time that could be used for making the boat go faster.

Workers are taught to deal with Māori clients as if they’re some sort of alien species, while just this weekend the Courts held that Pacific employees should have been sacked over a cup of tea instead of by email. Apparently they are now more English than the English! All this time putting people into boxes the individuals likely don’t fit into anyway has not made the boat go faster.

The Coalition Government has made progress removing many of these barnacles from the ship. Employment law, climate policy, the oil and gas ban, and resource management are some examples. Nonetheless we still have too much activity that does NOT make the boat go faster, and everything to campaign for in 2026.