Sometimes I wonder when Australia will pack it all up and federate with New Zealand.
That treaty you're planning on signing with Indigenous Australians? We signed ours 178 years ago. The Manus Island refugees your federal government kept in lock up? We were ready to roll out the welcome mat, only Peter Dutton wouldn't let them come. And how about that prime minister of yours? Ours is Jacinda Ardern, so you might forgive us for feeling a little smug. After all, we're all aunties and uncles now.
This is the weird thing about New Zealand: it's everything to everyone. The country's either paradise or the pits. Progressives celebrate it as home to 'the very hero the global left needs right now'. Conservatives adore it too, as the easiest place in the world to do business. American progressives are moving here to escape Donald Trump, and American billionaires are moving here to escape the end of the world. For some local progressives New Zealand is a neoliberal inferno. For some local conservatives it's a socialist shithole, overrun with virtue signalling 20 and 30-somethings.
Exhibit A: Jacinda Ardern, the prime minister who's gone from head of government to mother of the nation. Jacinda — everyone in New Zealand is on a first name basis with their prime minister, by the way — is a self-described socialist who admits that capitalism cannot provide housing for the poor, denouncing it as a 'blatant failure'. Under her watch the Labour government will build 100,000 new homes, invest billions more in public health and public transport, and phase in free post-high school education. It's a full-throated commitment to social democracy, and a program unseen in this country for almost 40 years.
But it's also a program that's falling apart. New Zealand is unusual, at least for a developed country, in that the state sector plays an outsize role in the national economy. Our largest listed companies are either partially publicly-owned (like Z Energy), mostly publicly-owned (like Air New Zealand) or derive a good chunk of their profit from public contracts (like Fletcher Construction). This means 'business interests' and 'state interests' are sometimes considered one and the same. Advocates for former prime minister John Key would insist that if he could run a bank he could run a country.
No one makes the same argument for Ardern, a political staffer in her pre-parliamentary career. Instead the business sector insists her Labour government must 'prove' it