The misleading numbers have been used to hide low productivity, anaemic productivity growth, low capital per worker, and falling GDP per capita relative to the rest of the developed world.
BusinessDesk data suggests no government was more cynical than the just-defeated Labour regime.
With near-record departures of 118,200 in the 12 months leading up to the election, Labour opened the doors to a record 237,100 arrivals, over 100,000 more than in any previous business-as-usual year.
Net migration reached a record 128,900. That’s like adding a new Napier and New Plymouth in the same year. But this time it didn’t work, economically or politically.
Headline GDP still fell over the same period and Labour was decisively thrown out.
National is under pressure to keep the doors open from some of its wideboy property developer donors, to help them sell cheap micro-apartments.
At least National is cynical. Labour and the Greens are merely gormless, unwittingly serving the same economic interests when pushing for greater urban density.
The good news is that Christopher Luxon’s Government won’t get away with the same immigration scam as its predecessors to hide poor economic performance.
September quarter GDP data was so terrible that per capita GDP has finally become the measure by which economic performance will be assessed.
Ironically, per capita GDP is useful shorthand for the more complicated “Living Standards Framework” and “Wellbeing Approach” developed by Bill English, Grant Robertson and the Wellington bureaucracy. It turns out they tend to track per capita GDP anyway.
Whatever the living standards matrix or wellbeing measures are, the best bet is they too are worsening.
None of this will be turned around without radical economic reform. Government spending needs to return to pre-Covid levels. We need to somehow end our economic over-reliance on bank debt backed by residential property and build bigger and more active equity markets.
The law and order and welfare systems need to become both tougher and softer.
Criminals must be caught and locked up and welfare can’t be a lifestyle choice. But the systems need to care about their clients and genuinely support them to become free and independent of the state.
Looking out over the next quarter-century, even more important to GDP per capita is what Education Ministers Erica Stanford and David Seymour achieve in the school system.
This can’t be about returning to the past. New Zealand never had the universal, egalitarian school system Peter Fraser promised in 1939 and nor was one needed.
Officially, most people left school at 15 or, unofficially, before. For most, it didn’t matter if they had learned much. Hardly anyone went to university or needed to. Private schools and elite state schools provided a truly world-class education to those who did.
The Lange and Bolger governments’ reforms partly responded to the need for this to catch up with a changing world. Introducing fees helped pay for university students to more than double from 1985 to 2000, from under 60,000 to nearly 140,000.
With all students needing to learn the basics in primary school and most secondary students staying all through year 11, many continuing to year 12 and a growing minority to year 13, Tomorrow’s Schools allowed schools to innovate in response.
The school curriculum was rewritten several times to make it less academic and more focused on skills. The qualifications system changed from selecting a small minority to go to university to giving everyone a certificate describing what they can do.
Private and elite state schools opposed the Lange and Bolger Governments’ reforms, saying they would dumb down the curriculum. Far-left university academics wailed that reforms would worsen equality, forgetting that they were among the tiny number who went to university in the 1950s or 1960s, while most of their classmates left school in year 11.
For the communities they serve, New Zealand’s elite schools remain among the best schools in the world. So too are others that innovative, including Kura Kaupapa Māori. The so-called kōhanga reo generation is now a mainstay of the Māori middle class and commercial elite.
But complete disengagement from school is growing and average performance is falling.
National’s new rules about how many hours each teacher must spend on particular subjects is a step back to the 1970s. They are unmonitorable, unenforceable and wouldn’t be the best approach for every community anyway.
Partnership schools have promise
What will make a difference is the promise in the National-Act Coalition Agreement to reintroduce partnership schools and allow all state schools to become one.
The objective is for new schools to open and others to expand offering different approaches to education. Some will be motivated by various cultural traditions, like Anglican, Catholic, Te ao Māori and Pasifika schools.
Others will be committed to different educational philosophies, like Montessori, Steiner, Reggio Emilia, or a traditional grammar school education. Most will be run by not-for-profit trusts. Others will be for-profit operations, focused on delivering whatever local parents want, like the existing ACG schools.
Unlike private schools, partnership schools will be free. They won’t have to follow the state-mandated curriculum, including rules about how many minutes a day must be spent on each subject.
They can offer qualification systems, pay rates for teachers, school hours and school terms they think are best.
Their existence will depend on parents and students choosing them. It is much more likely to raise average performance than the status quo.
The teacher unions are vehemently opposed. They will particularly attack existing state schools wanting the freedoms and funding of partnership schools.
If they go too far, Luxon would be best advised just to make all state schools partnership schools.
That would eliminate union-inspired conflict in communities. It would allow schools that care about meeting the individual needs of their communities to get on with it.
This time next year, we’ll know if Luxon, Stanford and Seymour are up for it.
Matthew Hooton has over 30 years’ experience in political and corporate communications and strategy for clients in Australasia, Asia, Europe and North America, including the National and Act parties and the Mayor of Auckland
