Good Government

Governments are often criticised as being overly intrusive in people’s lives and taxing people excessively, while still being inefficient at providing community services. This leads to calls for small government, lowering taxes and handing over the running of things to private enterprise, in the hope of reducing the influence and control of ‘big brother’.

While these critiques can, at times, be valid, it is this narrative that in many ways has led to significant inequality and poverty in Aotearoa New Zealand. For some time, this idea that small government allied to the ‘market’ will determine and meet our needs most effectively has been prominent. However, the associated cuts in funding of a lower-resourced government severely diminish the kind of health and welfare support that is relied on by many in our country.

This, in my view, is a significant contributing factor to how over the past 30 years there has been a rise in homelessness, food insecurity and child poverty. One clear example of this has been how the long-term failure to give strategic oversight and investment into affordable housing, especially social housing, has led to a housing crisis. This and the reduced regulatory protection on workers’ wages and conditions, along with inadequate social welfare income payments, has resulted in many people being homeless or struggling to put food on the table.

And so, in this beautiful country once affectionately referred to as ‘God’s own’, we now have in many cities people living in cars and tents, begging in the streets, and an increased demand for foodbanks and school lunch support.

Governments, after all, are responsible to the people and need to consider the bigger picture beyond individual concerns or that of various sectoral interests. If governments don’t respond they can be voted out, and in a democracy, they are accountable to the wider New Zealand community. Through them we collectively organise and, in many cases, ensure that adequate healthcare, welfare, public or social housing and other basic human needs are available to all. In the field of economics, it has been shown that these basic needs are often more efficiently and reliably provided collectively, rather than individually. The government cannot take its hands off these things.

We need a strong, well-resourced government and public servants, that ensure that we get the kind of health, education and welfare we need. It is important to set standards and regulations that, whether through government, the community or privately run, our services truly support our whānau, or at the very least do no harm. How we resource these services and our communities will determine whether our whānau are supported to flourish or are marginalised as cast-outs from within their own communities.

How we are growing as a nation needs to be measured most importantly by how our people are doing. Good government is our way of collectively ensuring that our most precious taonga, our people, are doing well. Our communal means of providing this investment in supporting our communities is through our taxes. As one economist once noted, tax in its best form equals love.

We need to continue to critique government as our elected officials and push for efficiency, while remembering at the same time that the government needs to be well-resourced in order to provide the oversight and support for our communities, and so that our whānau can truly flourish.

Lt. Colonel Ian Hutson
Mission Officer, Research and Justice Stream – Social Policy and Parliamentary Unit
The Salvation Army