Similar issues of public concern

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Forums › Politics › Similar issues of public concern - NZ and UK

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gzt

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#3058569 3-Apr-2023 18:19

Handle9: It’s amazing that Jacinda Ardern caused the same problems in the UK as in New Zealand. Does her power know no bounds?

Likewise school attendance has become a topic in UK:

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/jan/13/cultural-shift-since-pandemic-causing-attendance-crisis-in-english-schools

GV27

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#3058771 4-Apr-2023 09:21

Handle9: It’s amazing that Jacinda Ardern caused the same problems in the UK as in New Zealand.

Does her power know no bounds? (Or there may be some systemic economic problems which are very difficult for individual governments to solve.)

I frequently hear this as a way of dismissing issues at a top level which conveniently means no digging into the things we've specifically done to make our problems worse than they could have been.

Our RBNZ and monetary policy during the Covid period being a prime example. 'Everyone else has inflation, please ignore the fact we run up an actual $9B loss to the taxpayer with our LSAP program that would come in handy given we now have an entire region that needs rebuilding and left the OCR on the floor for longer than we should have, and removed LVRs for no justifiable reason. But it's OK, because everyone else did it and stuffed it up too!"

To which my mother would probably ask: If everyone else jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?

Some problems are difficult for governments to solve but some have very different root causes and we have a lot of control over, even though the outcomes look the same around the world.

elpenguino

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#3058781 4-Apr-2023 09:47

GV27:

Handle9: It’s amazing that Jacinda Ardern caused the same problems in the UK as in New Zealand.

Does her power know no bounds? (Or there may be some systemic economic problems which are very difficult for individual governments to solve.)

I frequently hear this as a way of dismissing issues at a top level which conveniently means no digging into the things we've specifically done to make our problems worse than they could have been.

Frequently, criticism of the Ardern government is accompanied by an inference that things could and should have been done differently (i.e. better). There's usually no detail of what precisely could have been done better. You might think that with hindsight, the better path that should have been taken would be obvious now but I didn't hear it in your post.

New Zealanders also often run down their governments for having a lack of talent and experience. We might wish we were a larger country that would be immune to strife due to its' inherent greatness and perhaps some salvation figure to guide us.

But here you have larger countries around the world who use the same method(s) to address issues and who then suffer the same consequences. Maybe, just maybe, what was done was the least bad thing to do ?

Most of the posters in this thread are just like chimpanzees on MDMA, full of feelings of bonhomie, joy, and optimism. Fred99 8/4/21

GV27

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#3058824 4-Apr-2023 12:21

elpenguino:

Frequently, criticism of the Ardern government is accompanied by an inference that things could and should have been done differently (i.e. better). There's usually no detail of what precisely could have been done better. You might think that with hindsight, the better path that should have been taken would be obvious now but I didn't hear it in your post.

I didn't realise I had to have a fully costed and worked suggestion for something before I could offer up any criticism at all of a government institution that's currently presiding over inflation running at about 200% of their actual target, with little to no consequences for what is quarter upon quarter of abject failure.

There were people pulling their hair out at the time about RBNZ suspending LVRs when they did it, and how slow they were to reinstate them. RBNZ's performance has been subject to huge amounts of criticism, from former staffers, commentators and even former senior leaders. All in real time. No 'hindsight' necessary. I'd suggest many people perhaps just tuned out some very informed and valid criticism because they wanted to feel good about the decision makers at the time, and wouldn't accept that there could be such a major issue under their watch. That doesn't change the reality of it.

Seeking to dismiss the problems that remain unaddressed the outright falsehood that 'no one said anything at the time' is even more of a hard sell, given the reappointment of the Governor despite the bank destroying its own credibility as an inflation-fighting force, and as we might be about to find out the hard way, the resultant threat to economic stability - literally the reason for the bank's existence in the first place.

And with all due respect, I'm not the Finance Minister, Prime Minister or RBNZ Governor of the time. Two of those people are still in their roles. Maybe your questions should be to them about their comments around house prices or negative interest rates that they made at the time.

Rikkitic

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#3058830 4-Apr-2023 12:30

freitasm:

The problem I see is religions tend to turn people into bigots, instead of teaching acceptance.

I fully agree with this sentiment and I have a fairly strong anti-religion bias as well. But I think it is important to remember that religions have also fanned the flame of knowledge when there was nothing else to keep it from going out. They did this in a distorted and self-interested way, but they did it. Without the church and medieval monks, would western civilisation have been able to rekindle at all? Whether religion did more good than harm I dare not say, but at least it did some good.

Plesse igmore amd axxept applogies in adbance fir anu typos

Kyanar

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#3059570 5-Apr-2023 22:55

Rikkitic:

I fully agree with this sentiment and I have a fairly strong anti-religion bias as well. But I think it is important to remember that religions have also fanned the flame of knowledge when there was nothing else to keep it from going out. They did this in a distorted and self-interested way, but they did it. Without the church and medieval monks, would western civilisation have been able to rekindle at all? Whether religion did more good than harm I dare not say, but at least it did some good.

You mean "would it have needed rekindling at all?" To which my answer is "no" because the Dark Ages wouldn't have happened in the first place.

Organised religion has set back humanity by literally centuries. Possibly even millenia. It has no place in a modern world (or any world, for that matter). You can have beliefs, you don't need a monolithic organisation whose sole existence is to parasitically leech off the rest of society while trying to codify its own opinions as laws to oppress groups they don't like and spread themselves like a fungus.

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