We are in this together. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Learn from mistakes. Break out of your silo. Do not perpetuate practices that make so sense, just because it is how we have always done it.
NEW CONSTRUCTION
Wrong pattern: What did we learn from Level 4? Move destinations not people. Do not continue to build on the Los Angeles development model. Car-based systems are unsustainable. There are never enough roads and even going to electric cars involves an unsustainable manufacturing and end-of-life footprint.
Paper Chase: The way we develop new site plans is white-collar welfare. We employ experts to write long, expensive reports to say before other opposing experts, the effects will be de minimis. Instead, create sustainable prototype site plans and then find the right land and adapt them to local features.
Wrong Funding: Council planning and building departments have become money-hungry monsters, with development contributions, fees and meter running because new development generates new income tax and GST for central government, but local foots the bill. Change the funding model. Revenue sharing of tax. No fees for developers, but far more master planning so development goes where it is needed, not where a land-owner wants to make a dollar.
Fortress NZ: Why does a country the size of Colorado have the hubris to think it knows best, thus requiring building materials made to an overseas standard like the EU or US must encounter legal barriers that effectively keep out better products? Because when Building Codes are written, MBIE invites the trade associations to sit on the code-writing committees. They argue health, safety and unique NZ conditions, but the truth is simpler, they seek to keep out competition.
HEALTH
If you want to win the war against pandemic viruses, rebuild immune systems.
Since the body’s origins as a single-cell organism, it has developed a far more sophisticated protection system than anything medicine has invented.
Why do we quarantine an infected patient for 14 days? To allow the body to fight off the virus. All vaccines do is alert the body’s immune system to a new invader.
In NZ, the 21 deaths from Covid-19 were over 60 with underlying health conditions, over half in a single dementia unit, meaning people with weak immune systems. 1,500 New Zealanders were reported by the Ministry of Health as having been infected, yet all the ones with healthy immune systems recovered.
It is time the Ministry of Health actually lived up to its name. Instead of ambulance chasing, focus on improving health. Identify what builds strong immune systems and invest both funding and education in those areas.
Work with the sugar and fat industries to move to healthy food products. Fund the fast food restaurants to invest in R&D that commits to move away from foods that weaken health.
Make it easier for people to get outside and to use their bodies more. Make exercise a part of life, not a visit to the gym.
MONEY
Poverty is when a nation fails to understand wealth creation.
The risk of the Wellbeing Budget becoming a lolly scramble by the rich, powerful and well-connected is great. You don’t fight poverty by increasing the number of people dependent on government – clients or service providers.
People want to work, to have meaning in their lives, but this required creating meaningful and gainful employment. You can’t “invest in children” as if they were another industry. Investment must be in building real communities, not using Orwellian words like “social housing” to refer to concentrating poverty and locking it in.
Community-building begins with understanding what a community is, and different groups of people has different needs.
For example, government is fond of saying Maori live in overcrowded conditions, but listening to Maori leaders one hears objection: “We live as whanau – sometimes 10 or 20 people in a home because that is how we want to live. The English home for husband, wife and three children is a cultural imposition”.
To end poverty, build communities that create wealth. It does not have to be sophisticated, wealth creating is about taking care of the basics first, then engaging in trade to import money for goods & services. It is about a local balance of trade. Any chain or franchise that sucks more money out of the community than it pays back is a parasite that spawns poverty.