Thanks Bruce
You and a billion others I suspect
Sadly, three decades of neo-liberal politics and four decades of privatisation and five decades of increasingly-powerful farmer-lobby and business-interest groups have left NZ as a painted facade of what it used to be strung out to cover what it now is:
We have increasingly conservative mainstream political views and an almost complete dismantling of the once-universal public health, welfare and housing schemes
Privatisation of the delivery of essential services such as power, water, energy, internet has created a bunch of semi-monopolies where energy supply companies and their ilk answer solely to their shareholders and what were once "services" and "rights" for ordinary Kiwis have become unaffordable luxuries for those at the bottom while those at the top are creaming it
The bell-curve of wealth distribution which was short, fat, and symmetrical 50 years ago is now enormously wide with no distinction between the squeezed-to-death middle-class working poor and genuine poor who, together, make up the big, wide, horizon-to-horizon "foot" of the bell. There's nothing where the "middle class" used to be, and there's a very narrow but exceedingly tall uber-wealthy 1% who own everything
The "capture" of government by farming and business lobbies has allowed developers to price land and housing out of the reach of ordinary folks (a professional couple with two good incomes will struggle to buy a house in any of our major cities) and has allowed farmers to privatise the profits of 100 years of "free" provision of infrastructure such as roads, electricity, water and waste-disposal (just dump it in the river); while the costs (housing & rental subsidies for working families, environmental clean-ups, a resurgence of third-world diseases such as Rheumatic Fever & Typhoid among the poor and homeless) are absorbed by the public purse
Despite living in an agrarian paradise, fresh produce (fruit, veges, dairy products, meat) are more expensive here than they are in the countries on the other side of the globe to which we export them; and the children of the poor are suffering an epidemic of rickets, type-two diabetes, chronic obesity and rotten teeth living on a diet of processed crap and McDonalds
Our once-pristine rivers (when i was a youth I tramped all over our hills, never owned a water-bottle and never hesitated to drink out of any stream) are down to about 5% "drinkable", 40% "swimmable" and the rest are only "wadeable" if you want to risk skin ailments
The folks who got rich pouring factory shit and farm effluent run-off into those rivers have long since retired to mansions around Queenstown where they share the pristine Southern Alpine environment with the American and European billionaries who helicopter in from time to time to their mansions. Meanwhile the folks who clean the toilets and mow the lawns of these mansions live in housing "schemes" subsidised by BOTH national and local government (the cost of subsidy is too high for just one branch of government to bear because of all the millions property developers have taken out of the local economy) - because housing is so expensive there that working folks were sleeping in their cars or moving elsewhere to the point that squillionaires couldn't get anyone to clean their helicopters or wash their windows
Despite all this it's still a pretty good place to live . . . in that there isn't much corruption, our cops don't carry guns, you can still see green stuff when you look out the windows and I still leave my house unlocked and my cars in the driveway with the keys in them
But our "clean green" image is just that - an image - and we do genuinely have poor and homeless folks who live in cars and whose kids are malnourised . . .
I don't have a vocabulary adequate to describe just how wrong it is for a country with the best natural resources in the world to have kids who are hungry and who go to school with cold bare, feet
Just my $0.02, as they say
