KEY POINTS:
We have become a nation of cheapskates, penny-pinchers and greedies.
These are contemptible traits in any individual, let alone a society, but we seem to have acquired them in epidemic proportions.
And the worst of it is that they are not just crippling our economic progress and stuffing
up our lifestyle; they are creating a raft of social problems that are rapidly becoming intractable.
At the core of it is the money-grubbing, bottom-line avidity common to today's business that sees staff as a major liability rather than its most precious asset.
The attitude is to extract the greatest amount of work possible from as few workers' as possible, to pay them as little as possible and to treat them merely as a bum on a seat, a pair of hands and a brain - not a person but a human resource.
Which is, ironically, thoroughly counter-productive since a loyal, contented, well-rewarded and well-looked-after staff will always give the boss their best shot and do their utmost to make sure his business thrives.
Not so the poor employees who know they're doing two men's work for one man's pay and whose boss has just announced that he expects a 20 per cent increase in productivity this year - but the department's operating budget has been cut by 10 per cent.
The drongos who run such businesses aren't intelligent enough to understand that, so our low-wage economy stumbles ahead at a snail's pace because the workers who produce the goods and services don't give a damn.
And our social problems mount because that same low-wage policy, with its disgustingly inadequate hourly rates, ensures that both mum and dad have to work far too many hours to try to make ends meet while their kids look after themselves.
(Memo John Key: fix that, and all the other seemingly insurmountable problems, such as the growing underclass, hungry children and overcrowded prisons, will largely take care of themselves.)
But cheapskates and penny-pinchers aren't to be found only in business; they're everywhere you look.
In fact, in the past week this newspaper has been full of them.
There's the determination of the Auckland district health boards to dump Diagnostic Medlab, which has provided an immaculate medical laboratory service for as long as I can remember, in the interest of "saving" a piddling $15 million - which it won't, of course, because such "savings" never eventuate.
Now you don't cut that much out of a contract without severely reducing services, and such it appears will be the case - collection staff down from 293 to 161, collection rooms down from 80 to 43, pathologists cut from 25 to 16 and turnaround times for urgent test results up from 12 to 48 hours - all highly counter-productive.
No one seems the least concerned about how this will affect medical efficiency, doctors and their patients, particularly the elderly, the infirm and mothers with young children. All the cheapskates can see is the false-economy pennies they've pinched.
Then there's the stadium for the rugby World Cup.
When Trevor Mallard's $500 million idea of a waterfront stadium, which was as grandiose as it was ridiculous, quite properly went down the gurgler, a $385 million Eden Park redevelopment seemed eminently in order.
But no. Now there is talk of spending about a quarter of that on a temporary upgrade, an alternative that would leave us no better off in terms of a true international venue than we are now, and show us up to the world for what we really are - a cheap and nasty little country at the bottom of the world.
As if all that isn't enough, we have some obscure Government "advisory group" cavilling at spending a bit of money in building our roads properly.
This group, set up apparently to figure out ways of bridging a $900 million road-funding gap, is grumbling that Transit New Zealand shouldn't have spent $65 million on twin tunnels and an "eco" viaduct on Highway 1 up around Puhoi.
That same group is also whingeing about the $320 million plan to put the Southern-Northern Motorway link under Victoria Park instead of further cluttering up the airspace over it.
And just to prove that the penny-pinching, cheapskate mentality goes right to the top, Transport Minister Annette King piously avers that there is sometimes a tendency "to gold-plate what we do". Give me a break.
We have had to put up with one of the worst and most dangerous roading systems in the developed world for as long as I've been alive, and it staggers me that just when the road builders start to get things right and create roads of which we can be proud, a bunch of parsimonious nitpickers, all of whom are no doubt sucking liberally from the public teat, tell us we shouldn't spend so much.
It would have been much better for the group to have recommended to the Government that it provide the necessary $900 million shortfall from the excessive profits it annually extracts from its long-suffering citizens.
A billion dollars invested in the road and rail infrastructure right now would pay for itself 10 times over in the next decade or so.
But the long view seems invisible to our politicians, businessmen and bureaucrats.
Politicians think in three-year election cycles, bureaucrats in one-year bonus cycles and businessmen in six-monthly profit cycles.
All they can perceive is short-term gain.
While the rest of us suffer the long-term pain.
