Conservatism at Canterbury

In a surprisingly conservative Press article, "Cutting to the Core" (Saturday, February 2), it's revealed that the University of Canterbury is planning a "back to basics" initiative, by axing American Studies and Film and Theatre Studies, in a bid to make the college more financially and academically viable.

As well, as cutting some of its academically light-weight "studies" departments, the college is also breaking up its School of Culture, Literature and Society, with Gender Studies being folded into the school of Sociology and Anthropology.

According to the article, Canterbury's Vice Chancellor Roy Sharp says:

"The Government's "bums on seats" policy, along with a general academic vogue for cross-disciplinary programmes has led to a proliferation of fringe - even "faddy" - study subjects ... "the college will go back to a more traditional look, promoting the central disciplines of "history, philosophy language, literature, the classics."

Pro-Vice Chancellor College of Arts Ken Strongman says, "American studies is going because student demand has dropped, it mixed too many disciplines like history, literature and sociology, and its research quality was not good enough to save it."

Although the College appears to have backed away from ditching Gender Studies, its back-to-basics policy is long overdue and sets a positive example for other universities.

Faddish subjects may have a place in a rapidly-changing field like technology, but they have no place in a funding starved arts faculty. The human condition does not change to the extent that science and technology does, so there is no need to offer dubious courses about pop culture, or films that may be forgotten in 30 years, when a lot more can be learned from studying time-honoured geniuses like Shakespeare and Aristotle.

Whatever happened to the meritocracy?

With student debt in New Zealand rapidly rising, and students taking longer to pay back their debts, one might think more politicians would be asking whether so many students should actually be going to university.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s there was a massive surge in the numbers of students attending higher education, and a correspondingly rapid increase in student tuition fees. In keeping with overseas trends, both Labour and National claimed this increase in enrolments was essential for the country's "knowledge economy."

Whether this surge in university enrolments was really necessary is debatable, unemployment was rapidly increasing at the time and perhaps many young people didn't know what else to do, although technological changes were increasing the need for a more educated workforce.

However, that was then and this is now. Today unemployment is running at about 3 percent and there's a fair supply of jobs, often paying relatively high wages, which do not require an academic degree, and can be learned either on the job or through combined work and study courses at technical colleges.

Unfortunately though, the government and the universities are still committed to outdated principles of egalitarianism and market populism, which are failing both students and the culture/economy of the country as a whole.

In a meritocracy, access to university should be based not on ability to pay, but on ability to pass, yet this cannot be guaranteed if places are offered to students who lack the aptitude, commitment and intellectual curiosity to complete a university degree.

This is an issue that the British Conservative party is at least tentatively addressing, but which still seems to be taboo in contemporary New Zealand politics. Every student who fails a course, increases the cost of a university education for other students, yet universities continue to offer places to students who have not done sufficiently well at school to warrant access to a university.

Egalitarians claim testing is unfair on adult students who have left school some time ago, but this can be be overcome by assessing adults students using aptitude tests instead of scholastic exams.

Not only are intelligent, hard-working students from working and lower middle-class backgrounds incurring heavy debts, because they have to subsidise lazier or less intelligent students, including a few upper-middle class airheads, but they're also having to subsidise students taking academically soft subjects of little cultural or commercial value.

Dumb-downed subjects like American studies, and pseudo-academic subjects like Communications, add little to the cultural or economic vitality of the country, yet are popular with students looking for an easy pass, and subsequently tie-up valuable tax dollars that could be spent reducing fees for those taking more academically rigorous courses.

Similarly, it's not the place of publicly funded institutions to fund ideologically biased subjects like Feminist studies. If you're going to fund Feminist studies, then why not potential subjects with a right-wing bias like libertarian studies or ethno-nationalist studies. Once you open the door to this kind of post-modern market populism then where do you draw the line?

Furthermore, the market populist principle of funding institutions according to student demand, means that universities have to plough for trade and waste precious tax money on advertising, instead of restricting access and attracting students through lower fees.

Market populism and egalitarianism may have been noble or progressive ideas in the minds of Baby Boomers, but for today's students, they're leading to a future of debt and disillusionment.

Belated sense form Cameron

In a refreshingly honest admission, UK Tory leader David Cameron has stated that he supports parents who pretend to be Christians so as to get their children into faith-based schools, arguing such parents are only doing what they think is best for their children.

"I don't blame anyone who tries to get their children into a good school," he said.

Recently, the Conservative leader has attracted criticism from his fellow Conservatives for opposing the building of more grammar schools.

In New Zealand faith-based schools are also becoming more popular, with increasing numbers of non-religious parents perceiving Catholic schools as better at upholding traditional values and academic standards.

On Radio Live, talkshow host Michael Laws, who worked as a education policy advisor from 1985-91, pointed out that in the 1960s and 1970s, many of the country's Catholic schools were in serious financial difficulty, with the government having to step in and fund teachers salaries and learning materials.

Admittedly, the better performance of religious schools may be partly due to their ability to cherry-pick students from public schools, but it's also likely the decline in public sector education can at least partly be attributed to such factors as political correctness and declining standards of discipline.

NZ teacher shortage still concentrated in Auckland

Although education providers frequently claim New Zealand has a shortage of qualified primary teachers, most recent South Island graduates are struggling to find work.

According to Ministry of Education figures published in the Press, the average employment rate for Christchurch graduates between 2001 and 2006 was just 34 percent, compared with 48 percent for Wellington and 68 percent for Auckland.

Teacher shortages in areas like South Auckland are nothing new. In the same way New Zealand graduates on their OE often end up teaching in the worst schools in the UK, young British teachers are snapped up by the rougher schools in Auckland and Hamilton to replace domestic graduates who would rather work somewhere else.

Teachers may profess to have liberal views, but most of them still don't appear to be too keen on living in expensive, overcrowded cities, with high crime rates and diverse classes of difficult to control students. In today's, laissez-faire, kid-centric society, it's hard enough to control a mono-cultural, high socio-economic class of kids, let alone a multi-cultural group of children from rough backgrounds.

In contrast, Canterbury has a more stable workforce because it is regarded as a decent place to live. Living costs are moderate, traffic is tolerable, schools are generally OK, and while crime is increasing, it has not yet reached the rates experienced in the Upper North Island. This high quality of life means that Canterbury tends to suffer less from skilled labour shortages than the North Island, despite the fact that its population is aging faster.

Meanwhile, Auckland's rapidly growing, multi-cultural population, is failing to generate enough of its own skilled workers, and is having to import workers from other regions to maintain basic services. Not only does Auckland have a teacher shortage, but is also has a significant shortage of tradesmen, if pay rates are anything to go by.

Since 2002 the Labour government has been trying to address Auckland's labour shortages by bringing in more British and English-speaking South Asian immigrants. However, the problem with this approach is many of the British immigrants don't want to stay in Auckland (can't really blame them), and band-aid immigration is doing nothing to alleviate accommodation costs and traffic problems.

It's increasingly clear that if Auckland expects to maintain a first world infrastructure, it's going to have to train more of its Polynesian and East Asian citizens to fill the vacancies left by a shrinking Caucasian population.

The driver education myth

Whatever the social problem, liberals always seems to believe that education is the solution.

Take road accidents for example.

According to the liberal mind set, road accidents are caused by a lack of driver knowledge or skill, and greater driver education, in the form of longer, more expensive licenses or defensive driving courses, will solve the problem.

Meanwhile, back on planet earth, most accidents are not caused by unskilled drivers, but cocky skilled drivers.

In terms of driving skill, the most unskilled drivers are probably women and old people, yet statistics show that these groups are involved in the least serious accidents. Although many woman struggle to master parallel parking and using a manual gearbox, their greater maturity and sense of caution means that they are able to compensate for any weaknesses in natural ability and avoid serious accidents.

In contrast, it it naturally coordinated young males, with quick reactions, who constitute the majority of road fatalities - not because they lack driving skill, but because their youthful confidence and impulsiveness leads them to take risks that older drivers wouldn't. Only time and the punitive actions of the police can curb these natural tendencies.

Defensive driving courses might actually give them more confidence in their own ability, thus encouraging them to take even more risks on the road.

Another likely genetic factor in road accidents, is that liberal bogeyman, intelligence. In Australia and New Zealand, European settlers like to make jokes about the inexperience and nerdy dithering of East Asian drivers. However, Asian drivers probably have lower accident rates than their White counterparts. Again, since driving skill isn't a factor, the likely reason for the difference is the higher average IQ of East Asian immigrants.

To see what little impact driving knowledge has on driver behaviour, you only have to observe driver behaviour when a police car is spotted on the highway. Drivers who normally follow too close and attempt risky overtaking manoeuvres, suddenly become polite, model drivers who unwaveringly adhere to speed limits and recommended following distances.

It's also interesting that most liberals usually agree with the statement that "it isn't bad roads that cause accidents, it's bad drivers." However when questioned on an issue like gun control, most left-liberals vehemently disagree with the argument that "guns don't kill people, people do."

Given that a high proportion of fatal road accidents in New Zealand occur from head-on crashes, I would have thought that the fact that we don't have any inter-city highways with median crash barriers might have some bearing on our road accident statistics.

Unfortunately though, as the current debacle over broadband shows, New Zealand governments are more concerned with funding such things as funding for sex-change operations then in addressing unfashionable concerns like providing the country with a first world infrastructure.

Ideology and education

As someone who believes that too many people go to university these days, I was mildly pleased to hear that the University of Auckland is planning to restrict entry to all undergraduate courses for 2009 ("University Senate back plan on numbers," New Zealand Herald Dec 4, 2007).

The university says it is making the changes to cope with a shortfall of money driven by cut backs in central government funding. Hence the university is planning to limit entry for art, education, science, theology and first year law. Not sure about the science limits, but the other cut backs sound excellent.

Over the last twenty years, the value of a university degree has steadily declined, as more and more marginal students, who have neither the academic aptitude or the intellectual curiosity for university-level courses, have drifted through the system to satisfy the government’s crude targets for more "human capital" throughput.

Unfortunately, as I read on, I realised that my initial impression, that for once common sense might trump ideology, was too good to be true. Predictably, the University deputy vice-Chancellor, Professor Raewyn Dalziel, says the institution plans to establish a taskforce to increase enrolment of under-represented students:

"The special admission schemes which set aside places for Maori, Pacific, and other under-represented communities operating in facilities which already restrict entry will be expanded."

If, by "under represented communities," the University means students from low-income families, then this looks to be another kick in the face for hard-working students and parents from lower-middle class families who tend to suffer the most from affirmative action policies.

While low-income families receive generous government allowances, and upper middle class kids can usually rely on parental support, students from middle-income families are caught in the middle - too well-off to be eligible for allowances, yet not rich enough to be able to rely on significant help from their parents. Now their opportunities to cover the cost of their courses, through scholarships or other subsidies, are likely to be further limited.

As I’ve said before, only indigenous minorities have a reasonable case for preferential treatment, and even then, they too should have to accept cutbacks in quotas when others groups are having to make sacrifices.

Less preaching, more education

Like 19th Century Methodists, today's liberal academics love to preach.

Switch on the discovery channel or pick up a history book, and you're likely to hit a barrage of left-liberals messages about saving the environment or the evils of European imperialism.

However, it wasn't always this way, as Fred Reed points out in a recent column "A Craving for Tyranny," traditional western education used to follow a quaint, old-fashioned idea called objectivity:

"I went to a small, very Republican, Southern college these many years ago. In those days communism was thought poorly of. Yet in my survey course on philosophy, we learned what Marx thought, not what to think about Marx. The readings represented his ideas fairly. For further knowledge, go to the library. We were expected to come to our own conclusions, and did. A different world."

When I was at secondary school I used to get annoyed by religious sermons and prayers at assembly time. However, in many ways I think today's situation is much worse. Now the preaching goes on 24-7.

"Education, education, education."

For some reason English-speaking countries seem to excel at generating hubris in regard to the education sector. Central government’s in New Zealand, Australia and Great Britain are constantly engaged in pointless reforms to fulfil the needs of the “knowledge economy,” as if skilled work was something completely new, which didn’t exist prior to about 1985.

In many respects, English-speaking countries would be better served by down-playing the commercial importance of education, and providing students with more honest advice about the benefits and limitations of education in today’s world.

When I was at secondary school in the late 1980s, students were advised manual work would become a thing of the past, and that students with high education levels would invariably obtain higher paying jobs. This was in line with right liberal government policy that discouraged teenagers of average and above average intelligence from taking up practical apprenticeships (those yuppies really had it in for the manual trades).

The result has been a major labour shortage in manual trades, and a surplus of tertiary graduates with degrees in subjects like corporate communications.

By falling for the hubris of corporate managers who talked up the so-called “knowledge economy,” the governments’ of Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada have created major structural problems within their economies which are proving difficult to reverse. University graduates have also had a very difficult time finding work because of the competition between the sexes.

In the social sciences, humanities and biology, females now outnumber males by a sizeable margin. Subsequently, suitable jobs for arts graduates are now hotly contested and many lose out. In the 1960s, many working class males with arts degrees and higher school qualifications moved up into white-collar work. Today, many male arts graduates from working and lower middle class backgrounds are moving back down into manual work.

All of this should have been highly predictable to policy advisers but students going through the education system were given little warning.

Despite all the reforms initiated by central government, there hasn't exactly been a dramatic increase in education standards. More students are graduating with poor writing skills and weaknesses in basic mathematics. Rudimentary knowledge of history, geography and hands-on science is also declining, as seen in the Channel Four documentary That’ll Teach Em'.

Similarly, spending on manual skills training has also fell significantly. At the risk of offending a few jocks, this hasn’t been helped by sometimes excessive spending on sports facilities (the school I went to had an excellent metal workshop, sitting idol, because the school management couldn’t sort out getting a new teacher at the same time that a large amount of money and effort was being pumped into a new sports hall).

Let’s face it, only a few students end up as professional sportsmen, and a lot of students who aren’t academically inclined also need to have some practical skills. Similarly, despite the high spending on sports, most students get relatively little basic physical exercise like running and swimming.

If the governments’ real aim was to increase education standards, then they could have given more attention to the unfashionable field of IQ testing, which can potentially help identify learning disorders, and guide teachers in identifying their student’s strengths and weaknesses. Instead, they have followed a muddled combination of political correctness and half-baked commercialisation.

Teaching teenagers is often made impossible by discipline restrictions in which teachers are not even allowed to raise their voice in a forceful manner. Schools let students get away with poor grammar at secondary school, only for them to fail their first year of tertiary study. Market populism reigns in the universities where subjects like American studies receive significant funding, despite being neither intellectually or commercially useful.

Where there are opportunities to try meaningful reforms in education, bad ideas seem to drive out good. Although schools talk about tailoring education to the needs of the student, they rarely seem to do this in practice. As far as I know, subject-based streaming is almost never used in public education in English-speaking countries, despite the fact that it would allow for far more focused teaching. If you are competent at English, but poor at maths, why should you have to sit through your English-literature class with a bunch of semi-illiterates?

Similarly, theories from psychology are often used in a simplistic and poorly informed manner. An example of this is the idea of dividing students into visual, auditory and hands-on learners. For practical reasons, academic subjects at higher levels simply cannot be taught in a range of styles and the scientific basis for such teaching ideas is weak.

Perhaps one of the worst aspects of today’s education system is commercially driven dishonesty.
As tertiary institutions in New Zealand have become semi-commercial enterprises in competition with each other, the needs of the institution have taken precedence over those of the student. Faculties market their courses in a flattering light and give misleading information about how many graduates find jobs through their programmes. Similarly, many practical courses are padded out with unnecessary theory that is not necessary for entry-level work, yet tutors (often baby boomers, who forget that students now have to pay for much of their education) are often reluctant to admit this.

Competition between institutions also means that a lot of taxpayers money is wasted on advertising and marketing aimed at attracting more students. However, for most subjects there are more than enough students passing through the education system. The biggest problem is finding jobs for them once they graduate, something for which governments and universities seem to feel little responsibility.

Another liberal misconception is the belief that education can solve a nation’s economic and social problems, summed up in Tony Blair’s banal catch phrase, “education, education, education”. Education can’t kick start an industrial revolution, reduce inequality, or pull a country out of a prolonged recession. If education could do these things, Argentina would be as rich as Australia, and Russia would be economically equal to the West. Similarly, education can’t cure unemployment, reduce crime, or protect the environment.

By over-stating the role of education, today’s elites make it harder for educators to focus on teaching itself. Teachers are often harassed by neurotic parents and over-bearing civil servants that clamour for incessant reforms. This discourages many of the best teachers from staying on while encouraging education departments to over-assess students and cram too many subjects into the curriculum.

Education should be focused on getting the basics right at the secondary level, promoting high academic standards in universities, and practicality in technical colleges. The drive towards commercialisation and premature specialisation has left many students ill-equipped for the needs of the workforce and perhaps more importantly, without the skills or direction to begin to correct the mistakes made by today’s elites.

Managerialism in universities

Watching the 2003 film Luther the other day, reminded me of a Quadrant article by Malcolm Saunders on the topic of managerialism in Australia’s universities.

The revenue gathering fixation of today’s universities seems to have some similarities with the 16th Century Catholic Church’s preoccupation with selling indulgences.

According to Saunders, Australian university administrators are more concerned with securing research money and racking in tuition fees than with providing value for money.

The unfashionable researcher who works on the smell of an oily rag can be compared to the rebel priest who focused on serving his parish rather than his Church’s coffers.

Saunders goes on to say, this managerial culture of cynicism, cronyism and blind institutional allegiance is driving many Australian academics into early retirement. If this is true, it sounds pretty worrying (and wasteful) given that western nations are facing a looming shortage of high IQ workers.

Although Saunders appears to be writing from a liberal perspective, his dislike of the current cultural climate of academia should resonant with many conservatives. I particularly like the following comment, which could apply to many workplaces:

"While the physical conditions under which academics work has probably never been better, the cultural climate in which they pursue their disciplines has never been worse."

In response to Saunders article, US legal blogger Terrence Berres summed things up nicely with this pithy comment:

"The seemingly incompatible bed-partners – liberal economics and postmodernism – have joined forces to ensure that Australian universities serve economic rather than academic cum intellectual ends."

Surrendering culture to the left

When I was at Canterbury University in the 1990s, the student newspaper featured heated exchanges between left and right-liberals about the value of an arts degree. Right-liberals taking business and engineeering papers dismissed arts degrees as pieces of "toilet paper" with little commerical value. Left-liberals responded by claiming that right-liberals are culturally illiterate and only interested in the narrow commercial value of education.

Whatever the practical or commercial value of an arts degree, most people with arts degrees do get jobs of one form or another and many do get into positions of power and influence, and whether right-liberals like it or not, most people with arts degrees are left-liberals.

In the mid 1980s, right liberals in NZ believed they could negate the influence of the liberal -left by commercialising the state and privatising state assets. They failed to take into account that the culture of the public sector, at both the local and national level, is primarily dominated by the liberal-left.

In state education the liberal-left has gone from strength to strength over the last twenty years despite the best efforts of the liberal right to contain it by fiscal means.

In 1999, I spent a year studying honours level history. At the end of the course the lecturer asked the class about their political views. There were about a dozen people in my tutorial group and I was the only one to claim to have right wing or centrist views. Although some of the group kept their opinions to themselves, most claimed to be left of centre on social and economic views.

Besides monopolising state education, left -liberals are dominant in many areas of international govenrnance, central government, local governmment, public broadcasting, arts management, environmental conservation, mental health (public and private), many areas of the non-profit sector, and in museums and art galleries.

Contrary to the promises of neo-liberal reformers, the state has not been downsized in New Zealand and currently has access to more money and staff than ever before.

In education even commerically orientated courses popular with right-liberals are affected by left-liberal viewpoints. For example, business schools teach the idea that business leaders are "made not born", even though the latest research in psychology and the natural sciences emphasises the genetic aspects of human capabilities.

Left-liberal influence in broadcasting can be seen in the public funding being provided for low- brow programming like prime time soaps and reality television, based on the egalitarian argument that all tastes should be catered for.

Unlike libertarians, traditional and empirical conservatives don't believe that the influence of the liberal-left will simply wither away through fiscal attempts to downsize government. In order to reduce the power of the contemporary liberal left, it will be necessary to carry the fight into the academy and the media to expose its weak intellectual foundations.

Dumbing Down Culture

In recent decades there has been a steady decline in the intellectual content of many aspects of Western culture from secondary education and television, to museum displays and political commentary. Although this intellectual decline is portrayed as the inevitable effect of economic deregulation it has also been fuelled by a suspect ‘blank slate’ theory of human nature.

American evolutionary psychologist Stephen Pinker describes the contemporary definition of human nature as a ‘blank slate’ theory since it is based on the assumption that human nature is infinitely mouldable. However, it is arguable that most of the population believes that genetics are at least as influential in shaping human capabilities and behaviour. Now evolutionary psychology is starting to confirm the common sense assumption that human nature is primarily influenced by genetics.

In contemporary thinking it is assumed that if ‘boring’ high culture, and intellectually challenging subjects, can be made more appealing to less educated, lower IQ people then such people will become more cultured and intelligent. However, if human intelligence is primarily determined by genetics then this is an unrealistic goal that will result in a big waste of resources.

In contemporary secondary schools many students are leaving school at 18 with little more knowledge than many children who left school at 15 in the 1950s. In my view, a large part of the reason for this is because a lot of teaching time is devoted to abstract discussions that only benefit a relatively small proportion of students- those that have a natural interest in abstract thinking. Children who lack the aptitute abstract thinking would be better off being taught more facts and practical skills. Although secondary education shouldn’t be as dry and rote learning orientated as it was in the 1950s, the pendulum has clearly shifted too far in the liberal direction.

Similarly, at the tertiary level many practical training courses are padded out with pop psychology, politically correct theory, and unnecessary management concepts that would be better taught at a later stage of left out completely.

Given all the abstract theory that is taught to today’s students one would expect that their general knowledge would be high and that they would have a big interest in topics like science, politics, and history. Sadly, for the blank slate theorists, there has been no popular increase in 'hi-brow' media such as classic literature and broadsheet newspapers.

Surprisingly, although there have been a lot of initiatives to cut costs in education the number of para-professionals in the public education sector as a whole also increased substantially. In fact as education has become more commercialised it’s actually got more expensive and inefficient.

If education were primarily driven by commercial considerations then it would make sense to make education more conservative and less progressive. In the private sector it is prudent to trim any activities and staff that are of unproven value. Yet in most Western countries education providers continues to add new courses, pad out existing courses, and keep kids at school longer without any evidence that pupils are actually benefiting academically or professionally.

In cultural institutions like museums there has also been a lot of rhetoric about market driven reform and the need to appeal to a wider audience with a ‘dumbing down’ of exhibitions in many cases. However, again staff numbers and wages have increased without any clear evidence that this has stimulated tourism or increased public knowledge of art, local history, natural science, e.t.c.

In public television there has bee a decline in intelligent drama and comedy, in depth news and documentaries. Again, although this may make some economic sense it is noticeable that the number of staff in television has not declined. Hence, as a cost cutting exercise television reform hasn’t really succeeded. If cost cutting were the main goal then public broadcasters could simply reduce the number of channels and programmes without having to compromise quality. This could also minimise advertising as fewer channels would allow broadcasters to sell advertising space at a higher premium.

Public spending on culture in recent decades has been premised on an optimistic, ‘more is good’ philosophy based on a particular view of human nature. If people are moulded by their environment then this is perfectly logical. However, if human nature is largely a given, then an uncritical, expansionist policy is likely to prove counter-productive, regardless of whether it is driven by the state or the private sector.

Creativity and Competition in N.Z

New Zealand’s brain drain of scientist, engineers and technicians is strongly related to the Government’s lack of investment in research and development and its excessive reliance on free trade policies. According to the National Party the main reason for New Zealand ‘brain drain’ to Australia and Britain is higher wages. However, for many scientists and engineers the primary problem is not high wages but lack of job opportunities. Since 1984 New Zealand has slashed its spending on research and development while Australia has steadily increased its spending in this area. For example, Australia allows tax writes offs for R and D and has a protected motor industry that employs a significant number of engineers. It is not so much high wages that is attracting New Zealand graduates but a wider range of interesting jobs that don’t exist back home.

New Zealand has one of the most open economies in the world. Subsequently, N.Z companies cannot afford to devote as much spending to research and development as its overseas competitors who receive more government assistance. This has been reflected in the limited growth of productive new companies and products in N.Z over the last two decades. In contrast the number of managerial professionals employed in areas like accounting is very large compared with many other developed countries. The New Zealand economy is over focused on efficiency at the expense of long-term growth.

In the 1930s the Austrian economist Joseph Shumpeter pointed out that if there is too much domestic and international competition in an economy, there will be little growth because companies cannot afford the luxury of investing in R and D. Subsequently, the government needs to step in to provide protection for emerging industries and assist with research and development. This provides a partially sheltered breeding ground for developing new products and services. In Europe and America the heavily protected arms industry has been the nucleus for many new products such as radar, G.P.S. the Internet and the silicon chip – none of these products could have been developed without government assistance.

In Arts and Culture the Labour government has already acknowledged that domestic producers need some protection from overseas competitors. For example, it has introduced quotas for New Zealand music on radio and this has proved to be relatively successful. It has also set up a new agency, Creative New Zealand, for promoting the Arts. However, it has been much slower at helping emerging industries in farming and manufacturing, with Jim Anderton practically a one- man show in the unfashionable field of economic development.

Admittedly in some areas wage rates are the primary factor for the exodus of New Zealand graduates. Doctors, dentist and nurses have incurred large student debts and can pay off their debts much more quickly overseas. However, Labour has started to address this problem by introducing an interest right-off for students that stay in the country- this kind of national interest thinking is well overdue. Another reason why workers are emigrating is the increasing gap between wages and house prices. If the Government did more to address this problem by slowing immigration and introducing a capital gains tax, then there would less incentive for young people to leave the country. High land prices benefit aging landowners at the expense of young productive workers and the national economy.

If New Zealand continues to put free market ideology over pragmatic development it will continue to lose highly skilled workers overseas.