Keith Melville

Our welfare state will only survive if more people contribute to it than take from it.

I say that as one who received much of my education, welfare, and some employment, from support provided by the state starting with the Plunket nurse, the school dental nurse, and now from my pension.

That should not be read that I reject the view that people should be rewarded for individual enterprise and responsibility.

I do not believe that those who create wealth from their own enterprise and initiative, should be looted to make up the shortfall in state spending especially when much of that spending is often unnecessary and excessive. More on that later.

To me our welfare state, and our health system, will survive only if our tax expectations are reasonable, and only if we can work out a balance between the cost of services our country provides and needs, and the expectations of those among us who create wealth.

There is absolutely no sense in punishing our wealth creators with hefty tax increases, particularly when they can easily discard us and take their wealth offshore.

Having said that, I worry about our health system and I worry even more after reading Victor Luca’s alarming statistics in a recent Beacon publication, about the exponential growth in hospital and health waiting lists.

That got me wondering whether we are actually capable of solving the problems facing our health system coupled with New Zealand’s burgeoning debt, largely stemming from our experience during the Covid crisis.

After reading the results of the Covid 19 inquiry and the reaction of Kiwis to those findings, my conclusion is even more pessimistic than before.

Many Kiwis, including some of our political leaders, seem incapable of understanding or are unwilling to understand the cost pressures our country faces.

Take the inquiry’s finding that about half the money borrowed for the Covid response and recovery ($70 billion in total) was actually spent on things unrelated to Covid.

Those extra things cost $35 billion, a staggering amount. I looked at the reaction to those findings on social media and largely found indifference, disbelief or a blind rejection to that Treasury-backed assertion, and that it happened under the previous two Labour-led governments.

Former Prime Minister and Labour leader Chris Hipkins, who was the Covid response minister in the Ardern Government must take some responsibility for much of that misspending.

He has more big spending plans on the way should Labour be returned to government, starting with $12.8 billion for so-called pay equity.

Pay equity means equal pay for men and women doing the same work, which has long been the legal standard.

The pay equity claim Labour is talking about now has been contrived by the unions seeking it.

It is based on a comparison of salaries and pay rates from different jobs, not like with like.