A CAUTIONARY TALE

It isn't very long since New Zealand was being promoted as the ultimate model for the Irish economy. I remember Mary Harney, in particular, hailing it as a modern day miracle, a country of just three and a half million people that was showing everyone else how it should be done. Successive New Zealand governments had pursued a policy of privatising state enterprises, cutting income support, breaking the unions and letting the market decide. It was Thatcherism at its most bucaneering, the apotheosis of new right thinking - and it was working like a PD's wet dream. Or so we were told.
As the impact of de-regulation sank home, all of the indicators - the ones that we're becoming increasingly familiar with in learned discussions about the Celtic Tiger - were positive. Interest rates were low, growth was strong, confidence was up and - I am assuming this - a significant number of new jobs was being created.
Well - whatever about all that - I've been in En Zed for less than two weeks, and I can tell you for certain that, somewhere along the line, something went horribly wrong.
Economic policy has not changed: there's been talk in the papers this past week, for example, about the privatisation of Television NZ, which is currently in the ownership of the State. And in a similar vein, a taximan ruefully informed me that the government were about to sell off the people's 51% stake in Auckland Airport. Air New Zealand was privatised long ago.
But the wet dream has become a particularly sticky one, and those fabulous indicators are saying something entirely different now. The country's economic performance no longer looks impressive. Even if you never read a newspaper, you could tell that confidence is low - and the media, for what it's worth, are full of stories that confirm it. But there is an even more significant shift, lurking just beneath the surface. You'd have to dig for it if someone didn't alert you - but that doesn't make it any less important.
My own immediate impression is that Kiwis are lovely people - genuinely warm, generous and friendly. But the more you talk to them, the more you realise that everything is not exactly 'sweet as', as the local lingo has it, in the land that many of them think of as paradise. Those who are reflecting on where New Zealand is going, and about what the next ten years might hold, are genuinely apprehensive. Forget about the palpable lack of confidence in the economy - the only thing that the 'modern' politician is likely to evince an interest in - for a minute. Increasingly, those who care in New Zealand, are talking about a lack of confidence among the people themselves. They - and they are talking openly - are talking about a lack of self-esteem.
Any accusations of navel-gazing can be laid to rest immediately. The grim fact is that a wave of social problems has begun to engulf this remarkable and beautiful island nation - and the underlying reality is that no one knows right now where they're going to stop, or indeed, if they are.
The rate of serious crime is hugely on the increase - up 46% according to some estimates. And the incidence of teenage suicide has also risen dramatically. We all know how alarmed everyone in Ireland has become about this problem and rightly so, but the rate in New Zealand, staggeringly, is almost twice as high. In fact, it is among the highest in the world, and the authorities - who are too busy cutting health care budgets to notice - have done nothing even to begin to address it.
Talking to people in bars and cafés, and in their homes, you get the impression that they are embittered. But driving through New Zealand, this is confirmed in the most mundane ways. It would be difficult to express in this context just how beautiful Autedroa - the land of the long white cloud - is. I am writing this in Queenstown - a significantly beautiful pleasure town that lies at the foot of a spectacular snow-encrusted mountain range, appropriately dubbed the Remarkables by some liberal-minded immigrant during the 19th century - and so I am acutely aware of the sheer, awesome majesty of it all. But unmistakably, and perhaps irredeemably, the beauty of this place has been besmirched by the encroachment of corporate interests, and most specifically, corporate American interests.
It would be a very small town, one New Zealander told me, that didn't have a McDonalds. Driving through the ancestral Maori territory of Northland, I had seen it for myself: like some grim parody of Hicksville USA, again and again the night sky was lit up by one shrine to neon and plastic after another. Big Macs were everywhere, and they were shadowed, bizarrely, by Kentucky Fried Chicken outhouses (sorry, outlets).
According to the new gospel of the free market, this of course, reflects nothing more or less than the people's choice, expressing some deeply-rooted Kiwi desire for junk-food. But that doesn't really make any sense. What's very clear, rather, is that the march of the corporations has been facilitated by public policy. To underline the fact, McDonalds have been permitted to locate one of their outlets in a children's hospital - as powerful a symbol as it would be possible to fabricate of the corruption of standards, except this is for real.
I met one brave and determined activist who had launched a campaign on the issue. She has put her own money into producing a postcard that warns: "Don't feed bad food to sick children. Keep junk food corporations out of children's health". At best, it is just the beginning of what will be a long hard battle to re-establish some level of enlightened regulation. But it is a beginning, at least.