What Government is:
The government is a small number of people elected by the population to represent the whole.
What Government does:
The Government sets policy and rules around those policies that allow the population to live in harmony and security with others and the environment.
Government policy should be compared to a three legged stool where the three legs of the stool represent, social, environmental and economic direction with each and all of them being interdependent.
We need to set national policy and standards that allow New Zealand to have good social policy & outcomes, protect our natural environment and also to grow our economic base. Like any three legged stool it will fall over if the three legs aren’t equal and the same goes for New Zealand directions and policies.
Social policy is concerned with the human needs for security, education, work, health and wellbeing and usually aims to improve human welfare and meet human needs for education, health, housing and economic security.
Environmental policy is the measures taken by a government regarding the effects of human activities on the environment, particularly those measures that are designed to prevent or reduce harmful effects of human activities on ecosystems, usually defined as a government’s plan to address issues such as pollution, wildlife protection, land use, energy production and use, waste generation, and waste disposal.
Economic policy are the actions that government takes in setting levels of taxation, government budgets, the money supply and interest rates as well as the labour market, and other areas of government interventions into the economy.
What Government should do:
Prior to the appearance of the Covid 19, Coronavirus we seemed to be heading down a track where the environmental policies were taking precedence over everything else.
With many regulatory changes making it harder for the Primary Producers of New Zealand to maintain a safe secure supply of food for both internal consumption and also export markets. Then the Covid 19 Coronavirus came along and our country’s debt levels spiralled up to approximately 57% of GDP.
So we have got different effects on each of the three legs of our stool (social, environmental & economic) with no real balance between them as a result of the lockdown and the government’s reactions to the Coronavirus. Although the government’s actions were required and served their original purpose, they have also had and will continue to have perverse outcomes in some cases.
The New Zealand agricultural industry produces food and fibre and often delivers it into Europe at a much lower overall level of environmental impact than what it can be produced with locally in Europe.
We can still produce food & fibre and protect/improve the environment; we just can’t do both overnight. We need to ensure there is a balance between production and environmental protection that allows this production while still allowing for improvements to our environmental footprint without driving members of that sector into bankruptcy.
Overall the most important mission for the government is to restore the balance between the three legs of the stool (Social, Environmental and Economic) to allow New Zealand to have good social policy & outcomes, protect our natural environment and also to grow our economic base.
We believe that it is critical that government ensures the ability for business to prosper as this is the only way that we will be able to fund the other two legs of the stool.
We believe that the government must increase the staffing levels in the Police, Armed Forces, Hospitals & Emergency Services with a sinking lid policy on all other non-critical bureaucratic positions to enable a reasonable balance in cost neutrality for this change.