I have just given up on a fight with Microsoft’s AI entity ‘co-pilot’ which wanted me to shift over and let it write this week’s editorial. Already deeply disturbed at the fatuous level of political discourse clogging up the airwaves and stifling meaningful debate this close to a critical government election, I didn’t trust myself with a bent paperclip.
The metrics and optics of our coalition government are way beyond tone deaf and the agony for families taking the brunt of every reckless pronouncement looks suspiciously like starving the peasants into extinction. Probably to make way for the fictional cost savings of AI.
This week, the mean streak extended over unemployed teenagers and their beleaguered parents in the face of vanishing school safety nets, impossible student loans, the highest unemployment figures in years and immigration statistics of over 100,000.
All things the government should be fixing first.
Economist Shamubeel Eaqub told RNZ’s Midday Report the costs far outweigh the benefits and any savings would be a transfer from the poor to the crown and have significant long-term impacts.
Social engineering doesn’t have a nice ring. The practice of using centralised planning, public policy, mass media, or law to intentionally shape, influence or reform human behaviour and social relations on a large scale, dehumanising others – and probably in the process dehumanising yourself – should be beneath us.
The sort of thing Stalin did to Ukraine’s grain farmers in the 1930s.
Central government collects taxes and passes 10 percent of its revenues on to local government, which is clearly not enough. Margaret Thatcher would be gladdened at how that works out with Wellington holding the purse strings over Auckland’s democracy-deficient city shorn of its watchdog regional council and share of the tax pie.
Beware that fate. All the rest of the country watched and learned, resoundingly saying no to the Local Government Commission and the machinations of ACT Party political hacks over the last three decades.
Last November (a prime month for getting shoddy stuff past the citizenry at large) the coalition government fielded a 30 page ‘discussion document’ proposing a major local government shake-up to replace the country’s remaining regional councils with ‘Combined Territories Boards’ made up of local mayors.
It probably dovetails with its proposal to open up 60 percent of our conservation estate for private enterprise and the global financial hegemony to cherry-pick.
The regions are well aware of the fallacies. Candidates have not been lining up to be mayor of amalgamated Auckland’s elected ‘governing body’ and councillors are kept way down the city pecking order behind senior officials whose names we barely know but who lord it over 11,000 staff members, all with corporate ladders to climb.
But the world is changing.
Washington’s extractive grip on the world is slipping and America needs (and probably wants) a quiet reset. A new world order based on trade and respect for national sovereignty is being modelled as I write.
Middle powers are emerging. Canadian prime minister Mark Carney is a mild-mannered master of clarity and the world’s connectivity is a powerful tool. His speech in Davos in February, ended with a question from media. ‘Could Canada win Trump’s trade war?’ He flashed his increasingly familiar glinting smile, leaned into the mic and said quietly: “We already are”.
He is pitching a way forward to the world and last month met Trump’s tantrum about entirely fictional trade deficits with the US with complete composure. The only imbalance was on the other foot, he said. With irrefutable figures. Canada supplied America with 90 percent of its oil and gas – and sold it to its long-time trading partner at a discount. What’s not to like?
Remarkably, Canada’s pivot to alternative middle powers and trading clients had already been completed. Treaties signed. Goods in transit. Money transferred. With cold finality. No going back. Canada now fields its own trade tariffs while Trump-watchers chortle at the newest irony of Canada’s near monopoly on the sequence of locks that bar the freighter routes from the Great Lakes to the ocean.
We colonials always had the reputation for bland disrespect for the North Atlantic ideologies around class and privilege. It made us great fighters and valuable employees.
We should be at that table. We always were.
What happened to our happy-go-lucky nation of ‘she’ll be right’ and a fair go for everyone? Well educated, cheerful young Kiwis went off to conquer the world on the proverbial smell of an oily rag and a streak of constructive bloody-mindedness.
That is the inalienable difference between the left-right biases for our historical electoral landscape.
Centrism is verbiage in the context of the coalition government’s ethos. We either want everyone to have a fair go or we want power and to win at all costs.
Enough exacting political research was been done by the much maligned Left to make fast progress to bring monopoly supermarkets to heel and to demand that Australian banks rebalance lending towards productive businesses and industries instead of its monoculture of housing speculation.
Education, health and home ownership build family stability and communities that collectively protect rights and their flow-on benefits of combatting child poverty, empowering rangatahi and repopulating our main streets. It’s not rocket science.
• Liz Waters
© Gulf News & Waiheke Weekender Ltd 2026
