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ACT : The Future Hon Sir Roger Douglas ACT New Zealand 10th Annual Conference Christchurch 6 March 2004 Don Brash has put the cat firmly in the middle of the political pigeons. How should ACT respond? Firstly by acknowledging that Brash was right in what he said. We have to ask ourselves why this one speech overshadowed 7 years of similar statements by ACT; why it reduced Peters from being a threat to National to being a non-entity. Answer - voters believed Brash meant what he said. That comes from having a consistent message which leads to credibility and ultimately confidence. Richard, in difficult circumstances, ran ACT's best campaign at the last election. Unfortunately, the policies run during the election have subsequently been overshadowed by irrelevant side issues. Secondly, by reminding Brash and the public that in the main the Brash speech while dealing with some important issues of principle was not about solutions to the issues facing New Zealand today. This is what I had to say 8 years ago in my book 'Completing the Circle': "One fundamental problem I see is one of public apathy, of defeatism, of believing that our problems are so big that we can't do anything about them. The same sort of things are happening all over the world - gangs in Los Angeles, endemic poverty in a deteriorating Britain, violence and an unravelling society everywhere - and we think this is inevitable. I don't believe it is. I've talked to a lot of people about what they feel is going on in New Zealand. There is an extraordinary agreement about what is right and what is wrong. I've seen what happens in focus groups that research New Zealanders' attitudes. The interesting thing is that for the first twenty minutes, research groups of every persuasion - left and right, young and old - all talk about Maori and nothing but Maori. Even more interestingly, they don't use the word 'Maori'. They use words like 'youth', 'crime', 'unemployment', 'drug abuse', 'violence'. In the context of these polite research groups these are the code words used for Maori. These problems affecting Maori are worrying New Zealanders deeply. The relationship we have between our two races is fundamental to our national identity; it is part of what makes us New Zealanders. I remember a touching piece in a magazine written by a man remembering his nervousness at his first day at his first school. But then a little Maori boy came up to him and put his arm around his neck and said, "You're my mate". And so they were all through primary school. That's what our relationship should be. It's a part of our heritage and part of our living culture. I know this is true because I've seen young New Zealanders overseas, and if they're celebrating it's not long before someone starts doing a haka. Most of us older types remember the warmth between Maori and Pakeha. This relationship between us is central to our identity as New Zealanders. And people quite rightly perceive that this relationship is deeply threatened by what is happening, by the unravelling we see all around us. So my view is that people's perception of social decay is absolutely accurate. And my second point is this. While the underclass that has developed is largely Polynesian and Maori this is not a racial issue. It is a family one, and it has an economic and social root not a racial one. Studies show that children (Maori or Pakeha) born into an unstable home are equally at risk of offending against society. For both races, a dysfunctional family increases those chances a hundredfold. The assumption that race and crime go together is totally false. (San Francisco story) Realising this makes the problem quite approachable. Solutions are possible. All it requires, like other economic and social problems, is constructing circumstances in which people's natural vitality and natural ambition to do well for their family can be expressed. First it requires us to look at the problem and how it arose. The central paradox this country faces today is that you don't cure poverty by simply throwing money at the problem. 60 years ago the emphasis of the welfare system was to make people independent - the problem is that exactly the opposite has occurred. The emphasis today is on the State and people's welfare is incidental (e.g. Government's attitude to providing education, health and prisons). The system has become a monstrous perversion of what was originally intended. The State unfortunately has become husband, father, provider, employer and big brother to hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders, and in the process, our values as a country have been changed profoundly. We hear about the violence in the home and in the pubs, the statistics of abuse, battery and rape. We see the signs of:
When you spoon-feed people all their lives, you rob them of the incentive or even the ability to get out and make a living for themselves and their families. Just giving people money makes them poor. To break the cycle we've got to set people up to take care of themselves and their families with dignity and independence. The only moral or ethical policy is one that works. The rest are lies - and in the case of social welfare, expensive, dangerous and deeply damaging lies as well. The fact is you can forget unemployment, poverty and ethnic background as causes of deep family problems like these - the popular tags are superficial symptoms rather than fundamental causes. The pivotal issue is the quality and nature of the family and its ability to bring up children well. Studies show that when we look at multi-problem kids, kids from what we might call chaotic families, they are fifty times more likely to be severely disturbed than those who suffer simply from poverty or simply from unemployment. Chaotic families manifest themselves in five or six ways:
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