Mike Moore: Attitude needs adjustment

It always irritates me to read New Zealand commentators or politicians, short of a cliche, complaining that New Zealand is becoming a Third World country. They talk of Third World health if there's a tragedy, Third World traffic systems if there's a hold-up on the motorway.

They haven't sat in a traffic jam in Cairo or tried to do business in Africa.

In 150 years, New Zealand has come from being a primitive, isolated group of islands to now be upset if our education, health and life expectancy aren't up there with Sweden, Canada or Britain.

We benchmark ourselves against the word's best. We don't measure our hospital waiting lists or preschools against Papua New Guinea or Botswana. New Zealand has done well because we have consistently drawn on the best of rational thinking from Europe - the lessons learned from the age of enlightenment.

The rule of law, independent courts, professional public service, honest police, property rights, democracy, freedom of and freedom from religion, tolerance and public responsibility for advancing education, health and social security help to liberate people from their ancient fears of old age, illness or accident.

Working in Third World countries, you encounter corruption as a common standard. You feel stunned to learn that it is expected that people take personal advantage of political and economic opportunities that so often exist when politics, bureaucracy, business and tribalism collide.

This is endemic when the state is intrusive in business and public affairs. It creates a moral hazard that ruthless opportunists graze on.

New Zealand is a First World country but with a growing Third World attitude to our many problems. Knowing what is right or wrong should not be the matter of ethics training or anger management courses.

Over the past few weeks, three stories topped our media. A policewoman works part-time as a prostitute, a politician employs vulnerable immigrants who have sought assistance, murderers of children get special treatment based on their race.

Cultural sensitivity has become a cultural veto. That is wrong and strikes at the heart of what we were once proud to claim as an English-based system of justice. Some even want to distance themselves from hundreds of years of British legal experience and experiment - with what?

This absence of clear, predictable values and principles provides a vacuum driven by confused political correctness, which has been excused by political spin.

Closing down an issue, knocking it off the front page is good politics but it is dealing with the symptoms. Proportional representation has accelerated this morbid trend. To form a government, there must be coalition governments. Anything goes, therefore everything goes.

The unseemly verbal brawl between Foreign Minister Winston Peters and journalists in Washington was just embarrassing. Mr Peters has developed a paranoia of the media of Nixonian proportions.

The relationship between the media and the politicians is the same as that between a dog and a tree. The media need to be fed and flattered. I was hopeless at it, Helen Clark may well be the best at it in New Zealand history.

Some of the Wellington media have become embedded in the bowels of government and live as hostages in the city's unreal environment, awash with consultants, advisers, and corporate relations offices who need to keep onside with the bureaucrats and politicians.

Some commentators are now political participants and shamelessly promote their favourites. Winston could learn from Steve Maharey who gets rave reviews from insiders to the puzzlement of his colleagues, kind of like another celebrity "deep throat", Paris Hilton.

Politicians find it hard to contradict journalists because they always have the last word, writing the story. My problem with them was that they printed what I said, not what I meant.

Meanwhile, National has advice to be cool, whatever that means. Making Don Brash cool would be like trying to repackage Mr Burns of The Simpsons, his look-alike. National has never been cool but it has been calm, the role of conservatives throughout the years.

Its slogan should be to raise standards through old values and new ideas, but I suspect being cool represents new values and old ideas, a market already captured by others.

* Mike Moore is a former Prime Minister of New Zealand and director-general of the World Trade Organisation