The New Health Fixation

In the 1990s, Tony Blair introduced the catchphrase “education, education, education”. Having overdosed on banal managerial writers like Anthony Giddens and Charles Handy, Blair simplistically believed education was the answer to solving problems like economic inequality and low productivity.

The fixation on education of course hasn’t really worked and the West’s attention deficit democracies have moved onto other political fixations. Today the new focus for centrist progressives is health spending. With the baby-boomer generation soon eligible for pensions, the health conscious elderly represent the prize demographic for political strategists.

New Zealand’s Labour government discovered this recently when they put public money forward for an ambitious sports stadium in Auckland. In opinion polls across the country there was strong opposition from voters who preferred to see the money spent on reducing hospital waiting lists rather than sports.

The new emphasis on health presents problems for the National party, which has traditionally been seen as the fiscally conservative party.

Socially conservative voters who usually vote for National may now end up voting for Labour if it continues with its relatively generous funding of the health sector.

National could respond by increasing health spending and reducing investment in areas like tertiary education. However, that could encourage more graduates to leave the country and undermine the nation’s tax base. National also has to face the prospect of a growing Maori, Polynesian and South-Asian population, which overwhelmingly backs Labour.

The big loser in the new funding priorities is likely to be long-term investment, which can be seen in the lack of government investment in savings incentives and research and development funding. With an aging population, and a neo-liberal economic orthodoxy still in ascendency, the main political parties are likely to continue with a short-term approach to economic problems.

The Labour’s government myopic focus on social spending is highlighted by commentator Colin James:

“Helen Clark’s government is fond of strategies. But is it strategic?Look at its new-spending in the 2006 Budget: of the $2.2 billion new operating in the 2006 new operating spending, mostly on health, education and “working families”, $25 million goes to research, science and technology. Fixing up old people certainly gives them higher quality of life. But it says nothing about how today’s young are to have the higher incomes to pay for the care of the old in the future”.

Although National’s Bill English has tentatively talked about mending the relationship between National and the scientific community, the arrival of the "Cameronesque" John Key, who appears to be more concerned with public image than development, does not bode well for those concerned with the country’s long-term economic prospects.