The Sunday Long Read

The Good The Bad And The Ugly Jan 5th 2025

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The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

What is the purpose of our economy? Is it to allow some people to become incredibly rich at the expense of the many? Or to create the greatest good for the largest number of people over the longest period of time?

If you want to be unashamedly rich in today’s New Zealand, then your ideology will be to have as little interference by the government in your life as possible and the maximum amount of leeway to exploit others and accumulate untaxed wealth. You will talk about your own individual “rights” and “freedoms”and you will avoid any discussion about your “duty” to society and your obligations to your fellow citizens. In short you will be an advocate of Neoliberal Economics which was ushered into our country by the 1984 Labour government and put on steroids by National and other subsequent governments.

If, on the other hand, you believe we are all better off if we share the wealth of the nation, and that government should have a firm hand in guiding the economy because their motivation is the good of the people and not maximizing profits, then you are more likely to look back to the First Labour Government of our grandparents and great grandparents (1935-49) as the kind of society you want. After all it was they who created the welfare state, some aspects of which we still enjoy today, such as our free hospital system and State housing) which involved high levels of state intervention under Keynesian economic management ( so named after the economist John Maynard Keynes).

So much for theory.

I thought, today, I might tease out a little of what these competing ideologies mean in real life by briefly looking into the lives of three men. But before I do, if you do not know me or my work, I should declare that I believe we made a huge mistake in adopting the neoliberal economic agenda of President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the mid- 80’s. That while there were some issues with our heavily regulated society, they were fixable and by-and-large the majority of people were better off when private banks did not control the mortgage market and food banks did not exist because fair wages and fair benefits made sure that people did not go hungry.

OK. So now you know where I’m coming from let me introduce the first of the men I want to mention today.

The Good- Ricky Houghton

I count it as one of the great privileges in my life that I met Ricky Houghton who was a founder and chief executive officer of He Korowai Trust in Northland.

In fact I still have, on my cellphone, a short clip of that day in 2015 when I met first him on a largely barren piece of land on the outskirts of Kaitaia to which he had just transported a couple of State houses that were due for demolition and explained his vision of rescuing old State houses to not only shelter families who had nothing, but to create the opportunity for them to one day own a warm comfortable home of their own.

To fix up the old houses he encouraged a lot of local organisations to chip in – such as North Tech level 1 and 2 to do the painting and decorating, AUT School of Spatial Design to help with the architecture, community based probation services and trades people from Ngawha Prison to work on them.

We kept in touch over the years and six months before he sadly died of cancer, I met up with him again with my camera crew .On the once barren piece of land was a thriving community of 35 homes ( with more on the way) as well as a centre for young mothers which had been created from a couple of school prefabs, although they were so well renovated you would never have guessed it to look at it.

Ricky knew more than many of us how tough life can be. As a child he was put into state care at the infamous Lake Alice Hospital and while he never talked about to me about his experiences there, it was clear he knew, at a deeply personal level, what a wonderful thing it is for a child to have a room of their own in a warm home, and I am certain that was one of his drivers - to give children from low income families every opportunity for a happy and secure start to life.

For Ricky money was a means to an end – the end being a better life for as many people as possible.

For the other men I’ll mention today, money has become an end in itself.

The Bad - Dr Shane Reti MP

I don’t mean to suggest for a moment that The Minister for Health Dr Shane Reti is a bad person and I would certainly not presume to make any comment about the personality of someone I have never met. What is bad, in my view, is the way his neoliberal, money-driven, political beliefs appear to run counter to his training as a physician, his knowledge of the needs of the people of Whangarei whom he represents, the undermining of our free hospital system and wider aspects of the public health system of which he is currently in charge.

Let me take these one at a time.

The Code of Ethics of The New Zealand Medical Profession states in its forward:

“The profession of medicine has a duty to maintain and improve the health of the people and reduce the impact of disease. Its knowledge and consciousness must be directed to these ends. The medical profession has a social contract with its community.”

The code has 12 Principles. It seems to me the following 4 are particularly relevant to the Minister and particularly as a doctor of medicine.

1. “Consider the health and well-being of the patient to be your first priority”

2. “Practise the science and art of medicine to the best of your ability with moral integrity, compassion and respect for human dignity”

3. “Accept a responsibility to assist in the protection and improvement of the health of the community.”

4. “Accept a responsibility to advocate for adequate resourcing of medical services and assist in maximising equitable access to them across the community.”

So how can Dr Reti acknowledge those Ethical Principles of his profession and yet defend the scrapping of the most progressive anti-smoking legislation in the world which he must know is going to result in thousands of untimely deaths? The answer has to be money. Sales tax? Lobbying from the tobacco industry?

Reti knows the needs of people in his own electorate and that the health statistics show Māori and Pacific Peoples have the worst life expectancy and general health statistics in our nation, and yet when he scrapped the Māori Health Authority Te Akai Whai Ora he stated in Parliament that health system should be “based on need,” the logic of which escapes me.

He sacked the Board of Health New Zealand Te Whati Ora claiming there was an overspend of $130m a month and installed Prof. Lester Levy as the organisation's commissioner and charged him with saving $1.4 Billion from the health budget.

So close on 3000 “back office” staff lost their jobs, there is now a shortage of nurses (despite the fact that half the graduating nurses this year did not get hospital positions) a shortage of doctors, and a broken promise on the Dunedin Hospital rebuild.

The fact of the matter is that far from it being an overspend problem Public Health has been UNDERFUNDED by consecutive neoliberal governments for several decades and now, surprise surprise, there is talk of private/public partnerships in the hospital sector.

This is straight from the neoliberal play book. Run down a public service, claim a private business could do it better and stage a takeover using a lot of public money.

What is bad here is that public health was created as aservice to people. What Reti and the coalition government in which he is Health Minister are intent on doing, is to spend less money on health so rich people can get the tax breaks they were promised at the last election.

The Ugly - David Seymour M.P. Soon to be D.P.

Again my use of the word “ugly” does not refer to David Seymour’s appearance or what I make of his personality because, yet again, I would not presume to comment on the character of a person I have never met.

What I find ugly is his hardline neoliberalism and his ideological belief, no doubt born in large part of his time working for a Canadian Think Tank called The Frontier Centre for Public Policy, then funded by the wealthy conservative businessman Peter Monk and the Conservative Heartland Institute ( known for its denial of climate change and the negative impacts of smoking.)

The Frontier Centre is part of the Atlas Network a Washington, DC-based non-profit conservative organization that describes itself as working to support a growing network of more than 500 “free market” organizations in nearly 100 countries promoting free market ideas.

It is, if you like, the think tank of conservative think tanks.

While Seymour is on record as denying the ACT Party has any connections to The Atlas Network,and calls it a conspiracy theory (Interview with Mihingarangi Forbes 5/2/24 ) there is however evidence of his personal connection to it, including his own 2021 State Of The Nation address in which he referred to “his old friends at the Atlas Network which he described as “ an umbrella organisation for free market think tanks all over the world” and celebrated a recent finding that, amongst other things New Zealanders “believe in keeping their own money”.

Source: https://www.elocal.co.nz/Articles/3893 ( see third and fourth columns)

In the same speech he refers to the fact that the Atlas Network is chaired by Debbi Gibbs who is the daughter of wealthy businessman Alan Gibbs,a founding member of the ACT Party which we sometimes forget stands for the Association of Consumers and Taxpayers, which was founded in 1993 by former National Party MP Derek Quigley and former Labour Minister of Finance Roger Douglas which took us from a protectionist economy to an extreme free market economy through extensive deregulation.

In a very good article almost a year ago Guardian writer George Monboit looked at how The Atlas Network operated and asked “What links Rishi Sunak, Javier Milei and Donald Trump? The shadowy network behind their policies?”

“The Atlas Network’s dark-money junktanks are behind neoliberal policies around the world” says Monboit before listing the agenda of Argentine’s Far Right President Javier Milei.

A crash programme of massive cuts

Demolishing the public service

Privatising public assets

Centralising political power

Sacking civil servants

Sweeping away constraints on corporations and oligarchs

Destroying regulations that protect workers, vulnerable people and the living world

Supporting landlords against tenants.

And a lot of Milei’s right wing “reforms” have been carried out under urgency.

Does any of that sound familiar??

But wait. There’s more.

Who funds the Atlas Network?

Here’s what Monboit says

“The Atlas Network itself and many of its members have taken money from funding networks set up by the Koch brothers and other right-wing billionaires, and from oil, coal and tobacco companies and other life-defying interests. The junk tanks are merely the intermediaries. They go into battle on behalf of their donors, in the class war waged by the rich against the poor. When a government responds to the demands of the network, it responds, in reality, to the money that funds it.”

“But the worst is yet to come. Donald Trump has never developed a coherent platform of his own. He doesn’t have to. His policies have been written for him, in a 900-page Mandate for Leadership produced by a group of thinktanks led by the Heritage Foundation.

The Heritage Foundation is – you got there before me – a member of the Atlas Network. Many of the proposals in the “mandate” are, frankly, terrifying. They have nothing to do with public demands and everything to do with the demands of capital. Project 2025 provides a roadmap for “the next conservative President” to downsize the federal government and fundamentally change how it works, including the tax system, immigration enforcement, social welfare programs and energy policy, particularly those designed to address climate change.”

OK. So much for ugly money-driven politics overseas. Let’s get back to David Seymour who, as I previously noted, denied in his interview with Forbes that ACT had any connection to The Atlas Network.

You no doubt know he wants to change the status of The Treaty through his Treaty Principles Bill which Luxon agreed could go to a first reading, but stay tuned because Luxon is party to one of David Seymour’s legislative aspirations - the innocuous sounding, but actually very scary Regulatory Standards Bill which was raised by him as a private members Bill in 2021 and defeated but was however agreed at the time of forming the current Coalition.

When read carefully (as it has by a number of distinguished academics such as Prof. Jane Kelsey and Prof Jonathon Boston ) you find it is an extension of the Rogernomics agenda of the 1980’s which is to have an economic constitution rather than a political one.

In short, the interests of Big Money and profit will override the interest of The People.

You can expect regulations to be relaxed to give entrepreneurs more leeway to do whatever they want without having to explain themselves. And the result? In a recent interview with Melanie Nelson, Professor Jane Kelsey reminds us of the leaky homes debacle and how people lost their savings when finance houses collapsed.

So, regulations which may irriate entrepreneurs, can protect people ,places, and environments from falling prey to wheeler dealers with their eyes on the money and not the long term consequences of their action..

That National are complicit in the running of this Bill means that where the were once seen as a broad church in the centre right, it now has to be considered a hard right party of austerity, low taxes, driving down wages, and increasing untaxed wealth. How many of National’s traditional base ,I wonder, are happy with Luxon agreeing with so much of the tiny ACT party’s extreme right -wing agenda?

If the Regulatory Standards Bill becomes law ,as the coalition agreement suggests it must, then what you can expect is an economy in which the haves will increasingly have more, and the have nots will have even less.

That prospect is so ethically ugly I struggle to keep looking Seymour’s agenda in the face. But challenge it we must.

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If you want to know more about what Seymour’s Bill will do please listen to my Head2Head interview with Melanie Nelson who brought this under-the-radar bill to my attention just before Christmas and has been doing a grand job to wake up as many people as possible to the perils of his bill.

You can find it here

https://bryanbruce.substack.com/p/episode-29-melanie-nelson-on-fighting

Melanie has an excellent interview with Jane Kelsey on the background to Seymour’s Regulatory Standards Bill which you can find here:

A Legal Straitjacket: Jane Kelsey on Neoliberalism and the Regulatory Standards Bill

You can also read Prof Kelsey’s submission here:

Jane Kelsey's Submission on the proposed Regulatory Standards Bill

Melanie also has an excellent interview with Prof Jonathon Boston on the issue

The "Everything Bill": Jonathan Boston on Why New Zealand's Regulatory Standards Bill Matters

And if you wish to make a submission by January 13^th here is the link to the template

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sUG-9yxkkWc0OaiWGPy-PaTTqnzyf2r5Y0W8syvzYss/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.o6beziefqe19

Reference to David Seymour working at the Canadian Centre for Public Policy and what he learned there is in one of the Centre’s Newsletters which can be found here:

https://fcpp.org/2023/08/11/david-seymour-from-the-frontier-centre-for-public-policy-to-the-heart-of-new-zealand-politics/