Mini-Hoon: How performative politics & the capture of democracies corrodes trust in Government

I spoke with Victoria University of Wellington political scientist Natalia Albert this week about her excellent substack post titled: The Politics of Trust: What the Wellbeing Era Got Right (and Wrong).

I highly recommend it, along with Natalia’s many previous posts on the quirks and features of Aotearoa’s deeply frustrating political economy. She wrote this week about trust in Government, in particular after the previous Labour Government’s detour into talking about ‘Wellbeing’ as some sort of governing framework.

We got to talking about how the nature of politics has become increasingly performative, especially in our social-media-soaked worlds, which are now full of tribes shouting at each other to get attention in a time of dwindling attention spans. But why exactly has this led to an obvious erosion in trust in the arms of Government and other institutions of authority?

We talked about these and other things in the video above, which is available to all, as part of my public interest mandate to cover issues in our political economy, such as housing, poverty and climate.

I have always been surprised when I’ve asked Finance Ministers and Prime Ministers why the policies they won elections on just never seem to be implemented in full, or in a way that makes peoples lives better.

They have often told me there was a wall of objections, frustrations and an enervating status quo bias inside ministries working in tandem with well-connected industry groups that made things much more difficult than they expected. The common reason they’re given when told to ‘talk to the hand’ is the policy would not allow the Government to return to a Budget surplus fast enough to keep debt down around a ‘fiscally prudent’ level of 20-30% of GDP, and that Government should aim to be no bigger than 30% of GDP.

This rigorously enforced (by Treasury) set of financial guidelines has actually been the bi-partisan consensus for the last 30 years. It led to sinking lids being put on Education, Health, Welfare, Infrastructure and Housing investment and spending whenever possible, and has bred a culture of avoiding ongoing spending commitments that would lift the size of Government beyond 30% of GDP. Even the Greens agreed to this ‘fiscal responsibility framework’ before the 2017 election.

Yet it’s never really been explained to either voters or to MPs and ministers themselves. They eventually learn it through a process of countless cabinet committee meetings, Treasury-advice-laden cabinet papers and the remorseless financial logic of everything, everything always having to serve the ‘Fiscal North Star’ of returning to surplus.

Meanwhile, politicians and voters still believe all of the things they want can be achieved with the Government keeping public debt low, limiting itself to less than 30% of GDP and not taxing capital gains on residential land.

In the end, politicians make the promises and don’t deliver.

There’s a discussion of these conundrums and more in the discussion above.

Many thanks to Natalia.

Ngā Mihi Nui.

Bernard

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