New Zealand is a pleasant place, like a museum - some pretty displays without much going on. But smart and well run? No, I can't agree with that.
How smart and well run do you have to be to create a nine-month long black-out in downtown Aukland, the largest city, due to incompetent maintenance in the power grid? Fortunately Australia flew in some giant Constellation aircraft loaded with generators, repair crew and competent electrical engineers.
How smart and well run do you have to be to announce a critical water shortage one week before the reservoir runs dry. Resulting in chartering tankers at great cost in a desperate effort to transport water in from Indonesia?
How clever is it to build a smaller vanity version of Sydney's center-point tower in Aukland - then keep it closed for a few years due to defective design and construction?
Particularly sad is New Zealand's relationship to Australia with the right to residency in either nation. When New Zealanders get very ill they often move to Australia for the duration of their illness, as Australia's health care covers far more treatment options than New Zealand's mean program. In Sydney young New Zealanders are seen as barely legal immigrants who pack eight people into a two bedroom apartment while they work cutting hair, working in restaurants, driving cabs and looking for odd jobs - while spending their off-time hooning around, drinking and creating a disturbance. While partially exaggerated, far too much of this is true.
It's not that New Zealand lacks capital. An Australian study determined that 68% of the foreign investment in Australia's Gold Coast real estate and businesses was from New Zealand. New Zealand exports their capital and most talented labor offshore because there's some mysterious reason they can't be used domestically.
My personal cynical hypothesis, based only on my own experience, is that New Zealand has sent their best, brightest, and most ambitious offshore for so many generations (leaving only the less bright to raise families) that it has permanently changed the gene pool.
Some who live in New Zealand have suggested to me that the real problem lies elsewhere. Although people differ on what the problem is, most admit the problem is there and pretty hard not to notice. |
