In the middle of October 2011, an election hoarding appeared above a suburban wall in a rich Christchurch suburb. Beside the inevitable Relaxed Leader it announced “The Plan. 2. More exports. More real jobs”. This was getting specific. At first there had been only the promise of a better future. Which is an OK thing. Now we knew that a better future entailed having a real job, which could be making products to sell overseas. Can’t argue with that either. But just which jobs are not real? From the original Rogernomes we’ve become accustomed to the dogma that an unreal job is a “deadweight” job in the public service. More unreal jobs linger on in industries with some union protection of wages and health and safety conditions or in professions with some protection over standards. There aren’t many of either type left. So was National promising anything specific?

One indication can be found in a Productivity Commission, set up in 2010 in an apparently bland announcement from Bill English, Finance Minister, and Rodney Hide, in his role as a Minister looking at “regulatory reform”. The Commission was part of the National-led Government’s coalition agreement with Hide’s ACT Party. In the last Government any such manoeuvre prompted another question: When National and ACT appeared as mates, did it mean that the junior partners were being offered scraps to keep them happy or was ACT the vanguard of a revolution that would be unleashed in a second term?

If you then checked the Commission’s Website you’d soon be lulled into the former opinion. There we can read that the “essence” of productivity is about “getting the most benefit from what we have to work with.... For countries, improving productivity is about creating more from available resources – such as from raw materials, labour, skills, capital equipment, land, intellectual property, managerial capability, and financial capital. By generating more value through, for example, improved skills, innovation and adoption of better technologies, an economy can perform better. Put another way, lifting productivity has to do with how smartly people combine different resources to produce goods and services others wish to purchase. With the right choices, higher production, higher value and higher incomes can be achieved for every hour worked”.

The Commission points out that “improving productivity is not about working longer or harder. Nor is it about sacrificing environmental standards in the pursuit of higher incomes or faster economic growth. New Zealanders already work longer hours than people in most other Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, and consistently indicate that protecting and improving environmental and community attributes is important”. You’d start skipping in no time. The Commission has set out a textbook definition. By working smarter, productive people and productive countries get to be wealthier and have more time to enjoy life. Policies aimed at improving productivity boil down to those which encourage technological innovation, and better education and infrastructure. That’s what all OECD governments talk about. Again, no problem.

Who Are The Commissioners?

But then doubt arises. The purpose of the Report is stated to be a search for efficiency in the import and export of products. This is defined as “adapting regulations and procedures to attain the lowest costs in the face of international competition”. The paragraph continues: “The Commission’s view is that ... overall wellbeing is best served by promoting the economic efficiency of the logistics supply chain for New Zealand importers and exporters...”. Government inquiries and commissions are traditionally set up to justify and prepare the way for what the politicians want to do, so judges or commissioners are picked because Cabinets know they’ll get the answers they seek. From his perspective, Hide picked three of the safest pairs of hands. Geoff Lewis has been principal adviser to Treasury since 2005. Murray Sherwin, from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT), previously worked at the Reserve Bank, the World Bank*, and, most recently, headed the now defunct Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Commission. Graham Scott is a consultant on how to enact neo-liberal policies. When the 1984-90 Lange government did its thing, he was Secretary – Chief Executive Officer - of Treasury advising Roger Douglas (were these jobs - public service jobs - real?). *For more on MFAT, and its relationships with financial institutions, see my review elsewhere in this issue of Nicky Hager’s “Other People’s Wars”. See also my review of “At The Turning Point” by Margaret Pope.

The choice of Commissioners suggests the real agenda. Ostensibly the subject is how to transport freight, but the experts are neo-liberal theorists. The suspicion of bias is reinforced when it is considered that another topic of the Commission is housing, where questions were slanted towards the interests of developers, who, in a typical submission, called for an end to zoning rules intended to stop urban sprawl, the claim being that this would make houses cheaper. Builders would expect to put up more suburbs over more farmland and make more money more easily. That’s OK for them, but for everyone else the social and environmental costs of unplanned ribbon development have been high. This includes financial costs. Compact towns are serviced more cheaply, but, as with roads, the people who make the money aren’t the people who pay.

Back to transport “productivity”. Having set up the answer - we need to grant all power to exporters and trucking and shipping companies - the first of 85 pages of leading questions leads off with: “Are there important issues that may be overlooked as a result of adopting an economic efficiency perspective for this inquiry?” The answer is No. “From the perspective of an importer or exporter, the key issue is the costs of the total supply chain. Logistics ... is the process of efficiently moving goods from their point of production to their point of consumption.... Logistics management aims to meet consumer requirements at minimum cost”. That’s it. This crude goal doesn’t sound at all like the textbook.

The first obvious recommendation will be an even greater emphasis on road transport, which the Commission and the exporting lobbyists favour as the main way to get as many pigs as possible to market as soon as possible. This means dangerous roads. Over a five year period 61,000 trucks were ticketed, 27,000 of them for carrying too much (National Radio, 12/8/11, Checkpoint). For the independent truckies, paid by volume and time, the need for fast and overloaded trays is permanent, but for all except him and the owner of the factory whose product he’s carrying that’s not productive.

“Too Many Ports”

When the Commission lets it be known that there are, in its words, three “inter-related shortcomings” in the way ports presently operate, we get to the point. The problems are that there are “too many ports” in New Zealand; that shipping lines “play off individual ports against each other in order to extract a large profit share”, and that the Commerce Act “might also prevent mergers”. This is worse than misleading. There might well be too many ports in NZ, but that’s not because of the Commerce Act, the Local Government Act or the Resource Management Act - other legislation that the National government wanted to change.

Despite having no evidence for its supposedly economic demand, here, because it’s political, the Commission waxes eloquent: “The Local Government Act (LGA) requires that local authorities balance multiple objectives (e.g. social and environmental as well as financial) in all their decision-making. This means, among other things, that the business performance of specific assets cannot be prioritised over other objectives. There is therefore a risk that local authority ownership under these LGA provisions will sometimes lead to decisions that are not conducive to long-term efficient operation of ports, either individually or viewed as a system. Interviews [”interviews”, sic, that’s all]... detected little evidence of a preparedness to subjugate regional interests to a perceived national interest by accepting a lesser role for the regional port”.

It’s true that the present competition between local authorities is inefficient, but this does not occur because they are publicly owned. It has occurred because the Commerce Act sets up a competitive model, inappropriate for natural monopolies like ports, which are then not allowed to cooperate. In other words, the neo-liberal fix circa 2011 is to abolish the neo-liberal fix circa 1986. The absurdity of competition between natural monopolies was played out in 2006 when Lyttelton Port, owned primarily by Canterbury and Christchurch City Councils, wanted to give itself over to a port transnational based in Hong Kong, so that it could resist the foreign shipping oligopoly (which, from the start of our maritime history successive governments have never challenged). And the Christchurch City Council (CCC) wanted to spite Port Chalmers, which they blamed for their failure to sell off Lyttelton. Ports began competing to be the one big enough to take large ships by dredging deeper channels - even though they knew that, at most, only one such deep water port would likely be in business. That part wasn’t the fault of councils. That was Rogernomics at work.

Present regulation already mandates port companies to seek a narrowly “commercial” outcome. This in turn is interpreted as a need to pursue immediate quarterly returns rather than long-term objectives. Publicly owned ports are required to operate at arm’s length from the politicians, just as they would were the owners private. In the case of Christchurch, the Lyttelton Port Company (LPC) has consistently defied the wishes of residents, yet when submissions were being made whether its Council - the former Banks Peninsula District Council - should join the Christchurch City Council (which it did in 2006), LPC told CCC commissioners that it was their responsibility to ignore any environmental or social issues that the residents of Lyttelton might have. Lyttelton was there for the port. The town was in the way. Had it been owned by a listed corporation, the need for smooth branding would have induced less overt contempt.

Ports like that don’t need to be told to override people but, in law, public authorities are still required to secure economic, social, cultural and environmental outcomes. That bugged Hide and his hit squad. Yet even according to the Commissioners’ own analysis, much of NZ’s export trade is in bulk commodities, like logs and used cars, which are not dependent on time in transport, or in coal, which will always travel by rail. New Zealander of the Year Sir Paul Callaghan has been reminding policy makers of the conventional capitalist view of productivity. As though, with the present Commission in mind as the template of what not to do, he noted that “[W]e talk about catching up with Australia, but think that means more mining, dairying or tourism. However, hi-tech is where it is at. It is the only way New Zealand can be rich again, while still having the environment we love” (see also Paul Callaghan’s speech, “Sustainable Economic Growth For New Zealand: An optimistic myth-busting approach”, 20/4/11, http://sciblogs.co.nz/a-measure-of-science/2011/04/20/sir-paul-callaghan-on-sustainable-economic-growth/).

The same old primary industries that sustained the economy in its colonial years meant that the country operated at the whim of foreign bankers and consumers. Wool, meat and butter were once our only choice and, in comparative terms, they made us rich. But to bet all on more cows, as is the current mania, is a gamble. What if the market slumps? What happens when we run out of land or water? Even now, during a boom, the extractive industries earn a lot less than do enterprises based on knowledge and innovation. Tourism, the other flavour of the times, brings in even less. For workers on the farm or the restaurant or the motel, wages are always going to be low.

No Sign Of NZ Becoming Knowledge Economy

“‘Israel”, says Callaghan, “invests 4.3% of its gross domestic product (GDP) in research and development (R&D), the US 2.5%. The OECD average is 2.1% and Australia - getting by on its mining - is low at 1.6%. But New Zealand is right at the banana republic level of 1%”. Yet in the same week that the campaigning National Party declared itself in favour of “real jobs” so we could catch-up-Australia the Government cut its research grant to the University of Canterbury to $2.9 million over three years, down from $7 million in 2009 (Press, 19/10/11). Scientists and computer technicians are to join the “unreal” deadweights

When Bill English and Rodney Hide announced their project in March 2010, English linked the need for a review of productivity to concurrent Government reviews of the Resource Management Act and the Local Government Act. According to English the idea is to get “consistent policy” and fix a “lop-sided and under-performing economy”. This would have played well to the gallery of National’s core supporters, who like nothing more than the slashing of red tape, but English was also keen to amend the Building Act, and that is already leaky enough to have allowed all the rotting roofs and walls - as erected by “productive” contractors.

The economy might be under-performing and “lopsided”, but that’s because it continues its historic trend of a mindless exporting of raw materials at the expense of what might create more wealth - a diversified economy with the value-added, job-creating stuff that we hear about but never see. These more remunerative jobs, which will genuinely compete in that global marketplace, will encourage firms to be more efficient. Becoming a knowledge economy is the way to be at once richer and more productive.

Like Sherwin, Graham Scott has spoken of productivity in conventional terms. For any economist it’s basic. But a speech Scott gave to the New Zealand Institute for Economic Research (NZIER) in 2008, nominally to do with productivity, reads as a sort of Sermon on the Mount to a flock who have forgotten the timeless truths of classical economics. Scott’s premise was that Helen Clark’s “Government and Leftists generally begin with ... a rejection of the economic method and its archetypal solutions. This is partly a matter of ethical disapproval of behaviour that economists are dispassionate about”. These two sentences reveal the ideological blindness that has misinformed the elites for a generation. Scott - and his audience - takes it as axiomatic that the NZ Labour Party is “Leftist”, and that “Leftists” approach policy from an “ethical” perspective. Economists - that is neo-liberals like Scott - have no emotional biases. They alone can discern an objective reality. In Scott’s world there is a Left approach and an economists’ approach. There is, you’ll note, no Rightist deviationism, the Right being right.

So economists who offer alternatives to neo-liberalism, those, that is, who might not endorse the policies that gave us the global financial meltdown, aren’t economists at all. They’re ethical whingers (read “tree huggers” and “welfare mothers”. They’re special interest lobbyists, out for themselves (members of trade unions and professional bodies). As a lone seeker of archetypal truth, Scott reveals the way. Whether this attitude is best seen as arrogant or as deluded is a matter of opinion. What can’t be disputed is that its take on productivity will be hypocritical.

Scott was the CEO of Treasury from 1986 to 1993 during the Rogernomic assault and has since peddled his expertise here, there and everywhere. He was a key part of the Lange administration and no-one has credibly advanced the view that any Government since then, including the last Labour one, has changed course. Because Treasury made sure that their reforms would remove policy from popular influence, those with a different vision of the country’s possibilities get no traction. That much we all know. But Scott pretends to misunderstand matters. Clark, he told his willing audience of insiders, misled by “utopians and Marxists”, was throwing it all away. She wouldn’t let the neo-liberals have a look in:

“This ideology also emerges in demonising some forms of policy change so that they are off limits and adult conversation about them is impossible. Examples are toll roads and privatisation or even nationalisation. Where is the debate in these areas?” Where indeed? The man has chutzpah. Scott makes it clear that his bitterness is prompted by the unpopularity of his prejudices. He’s in no doubt that neo-liberalism would never get an electoral mandate. In his phrasing, “the tension in democracy between efficiency and equity and between citizens’ rights and market freedoms is permanent”. in other words, if a Government enacts neo-liberal dogma it’ll force inequality, and if the “market” rules, citizens won’t. His real beef against the last Labour government is then revealed. Clark wasn’t clever about hiding from New Zealanders the truth of what the effect of Treasury’s advice would be. Scott’s complaint was that her Government lacked the “political skill to “manage” us so that we wouldn’t realise our democracy was being stolen.

Keep The Public Ignorant

In the end, whether the subject is a “free trade” deal or a “productivity” policy, the public have to be kept ignorant because they’re stupid. They’re not into archetypal economics. In the case of deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA), where Washington calls the shots, the secrecy is explicitly mandated. If, with the economics of freight transport, any facts are elusive it’s less the result of secrecy than a lack of evidence. New Zealanders might not know how to measure the efficiency of freight transport, but such are the variables involved it’s unlikely that anyone overseas has a handle on it either. Sherwin is keen to assert that “international evidence suggests a 10% reduction in transport costs could lead to a 1-2% increase in trade, or about $1.25 billion worth of extra imports and exports each year. Reducing transport times for both imports and exports by one day would yield an estimated $670 million benefit every year” (Esther Goh, Idealog, quoting Sherwin, 13/7/11). The big and precise numbers are unconvincing.

In his Commissioner’s report Sherwin is more careful, remarking that “it is difficult to be precise” about whether freight transport is in fact presently inefficient, managing only to say that “one estimate” suggests, that “measuring is difficult” and that there is “a lack of information”. As we’ve read, he mentions “interviews” as a source of evidence, without letting on who was interviewing whom. The Report is more a series of nudges and winks than a serious document. It doesn’t even try to be objective.

When it comes to speeding up the trucks hurtling along the nation’s roads, it’s not easy to see how they could be more “productive” than they are already. If the boys don’t let the facts get in the way of a good theory it’s because there aren’t any facts. As the lobbyists are happy to admit, Federated Farmers, for instance, perhaps the pressure group most likely to gain a sympathetic hearing, is content to repeat the Commissioners’ own general assertions. The farmers tick off the answers. If there’s been a decrease in port productivity - an assertion that keeps popping up from the usual suspects, but never with elaboration or analysis - it has to be because they’re owned by local authorities, and they don’t want to do anything to speed up. “The reason for this lack of appetite”, suggests Federated Farmers, “is likely to be political rather than economic”. Never mind that the brief continues: “There is a paucity of comparative data on port performance, but Federated Farmers’ understanding (from what Bill English told us?) is that port productivity did flatten during the 2000s”.

That would be when the Leftist utopians were in Government. Bingo. The coincidence established, it’s enough to pick a few vague tendencies and suppose they have a causal relationship. So we’re told that in the last, Clark decade, “there was a trend of diminishing private sector investment in port companies (most evident in the removal of Ports of Auckland from the Stock Exchange and reversion to 100% local authority ownership). As a result, port companies seem prepared to concede a lower level of performance (and ultimately returns on their investments) because the politicians are more concerned about preserving industrial harmony” - that is, letting lazy trade unionists - who aren’t to be found among the independent owners hurtling into ports - frustrate efficiency.

“This view”, the farmers predictably note, “is shared by NZIER (of course) which has stated that ‘local authority ownership has militated against the rationalisation of port activities in New Zealand and the introduction of experienced international operators into the management of ports’. It is perhaps no coincidence that New Zealand’s best performing port (Port of Tauranga) is also the port with the highest proportion of private ownership”. No, lads, it is a coincidence. So again, the rhetoric dives into bathos as the brief admits that “however, without more and better data on port performance across a range of productivity measures it is difficult to answer this question definitively”.

They should have stopped there, but no, they just have to assert that “partial privatisation should dilute the influence of parochialism and other political considerations and help make ports more commercially focused, while retaining majority local and public ownership”. The Commissioners won’t like this concession to moderation. They’re angling for total foreign ownership. At least that won’t be parochial. Sometimes factual matters intrude, as when Federated Farmers complain that “rail is not generating enough revenue to cover its costs and is heavily reliant on the taxpayer for capital grants and operating subsidies. While there may be a case for some Government investment in rail infrastructure (at least in the short-term), rail services should operate without the need for operating subsidies. Policies and funding decisions that favour rail over road, especially those imposing costs or restrictions on road transport, should be avoided. It is important that road transport remains a highly competitive and cost-effective industry’”.

Facts Don’t Support Attack On Rail:

“In order to compete with road freight, there has been downward pressure on prices for rail. The average rate charged by Tranz Rail fell from 12.5c/ntkm in 1993 to 10c/ntkm in 2000 – a nominal fall of 20% (ntkm=net tonne per kilometre. Ed.). At the same time, TranzRail was required to generate rate of return on infrastructure to investors. The total cost analysis shows that rail freight users pay on average 82% of the costs they impose on society compared with trucks which pay on average only 56% of their costs....

“These initial findings suggest however, that if the prices paid by commercial vehicles to use the roading network were raised to cover more of the costs they generate, this could support a shift of suitable traffic to rail which, in turn, would be likely to increase the overall financial viability of rail. The alternative to such a policy, given the Government’s stated intention to retain the rail network, is long term and continuing subsidies to the rail network” (“Surface Transport Costs and Charges Study”, New Zealand Ministry of Transport, 2005, cited by PG Laird, University of Woollongong).

Despite its need to promote the trucking industry, the Report notes that rail is “a cheaper alternative to local freight..., particularly for long distance bulk goods and imports and exports from the major ports” and that coastal shipping doesn’t get the subsidies enjoyed by road transport. Coastal shipping is “better environmentally”, (but this won’t matter). All parts of the analyses of transport are confused, contradictory or false. If rail is cheaper, it is more productive, and there would be less reason to promote roads. Yet no further mention is made of rail in the 85 pages of questions, perhaps because the existing practice of putting a load of coal onto a train and delivering it to a port is not something that can be easily made more “productive”.

We all know that in the real world efficiencies are based on improved technology and few New Zealanders will be unaware of how this applies to our trade. Once containers came about in the 1970’s, an average eight days stay at the wharf for traded goods was reduced to three days. At first containers were used only for some high-end products, but soon they were used for bulk cargo as well. Wharfside jobs, a frequent focus of industrial conflict, disappeared, at once cutting costs and union influence. The faster and now more predictable arrival times meant that trucks and trains could be confidently booked in advance, so fewer warehouses were needed as “just-in-time” transport ushered in the modern global economy. For NZ, exporting raw commodities, containerisation (along with refrigeration in the 19th Century, which enabled our meat and butter exports) has been perhaps the single biggest development in our economic history. So why does the Productivity Commission make no mention of it - or of anything technological? Why does it limit itself to implying that all will be well with the economy if only trucks were allowed to drive faster? It’s because the document is not about productivity. It’s about politics.

When Hide announced his Commission he made much of the fact that Australia has its own version, giving the impression that it was routine stuff. Indeed, the Aussie statements on productivity as a concept, like Scott’s, sound soothingly dull. The Chairman, Gary Banks, warned that “governments need advice that is based on a broad understanding of the public interest. Otherwise the policy-making arena could become dominated by self-interested or ideologically based claims, and end up generating exclusively bad outcomes.... The reality is that, particularly in complex policy areas or where good evidence is not readily available, self-interested arguments can escape the scrutiny and checks they deserve”. This comes across as self-evident, but he could have been critiquing the leading questions that Hide and his Commissioners posed.

Banks develops his moderate theme, referring to a long-existing Australian view that policy was “required to take an economy-wide perspective; that is, that it must promote the interests of the community as a whole over that of any particular industry or group”. Compare that with the present NZ look at freight, which is asking how the moving of exports can be speeded up by an explicit sidelining of “the community as a whole”. Aussie “governments appoint and reappoint Commissioners with no political affiliations or connections, and some who might if anything have been seen to have been on the ‘other side’”. Scott says there is no other side. There are only archetypal economists holding back the threat of utopians and Marxists.

Councils Support Community Control

Banks says that “proposals for Commission inquiries do not emerge only from the Minister’s portfolio (Treasury). They can originate from community groups” (Gary Banks, Chairman, Productivity Commission, Australia). Scott says that equity - the ideals of community groups, politically incorrect parties and lay opinion; and efficiency - the agenda of neoliberal gurus - are mutually exclusive. In its pragmatic submission the Maritime Union of New Zealand’s General Secretary, Joe Fleetwood, steered the conversation back towards the sort of conservatism that Australia seems to advocate by pointing out that there’s more to a productive and advanced country than cowboy truckies, who won’t in any case be efficient:

“There is no point expecting productivity from casualised workers who are not properly trained and for whom there is no career path. But this is the approach used by many employers in the industry”. Neither will society at large be immune from the haste: “In the maritime industry, excessive competition has driven corner cutting on health and safety which has led to deaths and injuries, downwards pressure on wages and conditions resulting in casualisation, and a lack of national coordination in the port sector. “We are looking at the real world situation, not an economics textbook. We are the people who are out there being productive around the clock and we expect our voices to carry some weight”.

Were a view like this to emanate only from a trade union the Minister of Finance from Dipton might feel empowered to dismiss it, but it will be harder to do so when his local council submits the same argument. It doesn’t look as though the “interviews” were held with the country’s major owners and operators, one of which, Southland Regional Council, reminded Bill English that “ports and airports removed from community control lend themselves to ‘gate keeper’ or ‘highway robber’ roles in the economy. They provide the owner control of an essential monopoly with the power to tax the economy dependent on the services of the Port”.

The Council elaborates: “Much ‘economic efficiency’ in the narrow sense is actually a transfer of costs or a loss of economic opportunity onto a third party dependent on a service. The cost reduction provides a saving to the ‘efficient’ infrastructure provider but a cost to the infrastructure user. Some times it is cheaper to aggregate costs to minimise them through collective or public monopoly enterprise than it is to undertake them individually. Roads are a classic example... The community of Southland holds community ownership of these assets in very high regard. The strong ethic of community ownership recognises the significant indirect economic values that this Report fails to recognise. The port was built using community money ....The asset also needs to be administered in a way that maximises the whole of community benefit from the infrastructure”.

At the other end of the country a very different council was making the same point: “The governance arrangements of the Auckland Council and full ownership of POAL [Ports of Auckland] enables the two entities to coordinate and take strategic and investment decisions that will be of benefit to the whole region. This balance is the best way of achieving an efficient port which is well integrated with the city”. The Council ownership that Federated Farmers laments is the pre-condition for planning port movements and infrastructure so that public and private interests are not forced into conflict. Ports need to be publicly owned”.

As the Southland Regional Council summed up the issue: “Efficiency isn’t the problem. It is the lack of strategic leadership and strategic investment that are the problem”. How to achieve this, given that a coherent national policy, controlled democratically, has been ruled out of order by the ideologues? Left with no alternative, the Hide-English view must be to hand the whole thing over to a foreign transnational. This is confirmed when we get to Question 55 and Question 56 on the questionnaire, the questions to which the previous 54 questions are mere prelude: “Are there potential efficiency gains from vertical integration?” and ditto re “vertical unbundling?”.

These vertical movements are not something that would be familiar to an unversed speaker of the English language. Translated from the neo-liberal vernacular, the questions might read: “Should we sell off the whole thing to rich foreigners?” In the jargon “vertical integration” means that the whole chain from production to consumption would be controlled by one entity. An obvious example, if only because it is familiar, is dairying. Think the convicted fraudster who wanted the Crafar farms. Vertical integration means that the cows in the Mackenzie Country’s unnaturally irrigated stockades would provide milk for consumers in Shanghai - or wherever - with one company running the show, freed from the restraints of New Zealand residents, as specified in the (current) LGA in its four outcomes. One outcome, economic, meaning profit for the owner, would remain. Social, environmental and cultural outcomes - the standard of living of New Zealanders - are to be expunged. They don’t count.

When combined with Government policies to negotiate “free trade” deals and privatise public assets, the result of vertical integration and vertical unbundling would almost certainly be that control of New Zealand’s goods transport, exports and imports would be passed to one private interest, almost certainly a foreign transnational. Questions 73 and 74 talk of “strategic planning that spans multiple ports, airports and other components of the logistics chain”. The champions of competition want one monopoly to run ports, trucks, trains - the lot. It’s a safe bet that the likely result would be the closing of regional ports, and a subsequent decline in provincial economies, increased heavy road traffic, expropriation of profits to unaccountable foreign interests, increased tension between local communities and commercial operators, increased economic insecurity for local working people, and a further social and economic imbalance between the Auckland region and the rest of the country as one of the bigger northern ports becomes a “hub”.

A Dishonest Ideological Document

The Report is an ideological document. It is dishonestly named. It is not about efficiency or productivity. Its purpose is to enable the sale of our ports to foreign interests. Scott’s archetypal model seeks to create a one-size-fits-all yoke. The shortcoming with this is that the world has rich countries and poor countries and one size doesn’t fit all. Imagine Germany, say, or Japan or the US adopting the NZ recommendations. Exactly. You can’t. The restrictive size is tailored for poor countries. A single prescription to do with “vertical integration” and “vertical unbundling”, imposed on all exporters and freighters, is not what sophisticated, complex economies deal with. It’s reminiscent of Special Economic Zones, which are set up in order to be vertical.

Wikipedia’s definition of a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) is that it is “a geographical region that has economic and other laws that are more free-market-oriented than a country's typical or national laws. ‘Nationwide’ laws may be suspended inside a special economic zone”. An SEZ is set up as an off-shore factory, immune from sovereign regulation, making cheap, profitable goods. An SEZ is what you get in desperate places which see no alternative to whoring themselves. That’s in essence, what the two Minsters, Hide and English, and the three Commissioners were offering overseas speculators. Vertical integration of freight, freed from local democratic control, can be considered alongside, say, privatised dairy farms and mines. One result would be a return to the sort of unsustainable monoculture we started off with in centuries past. New Zealand, from coal seam and paddock to wharf and runway, was being touted as one big First World SEZ.

Which brings us to an understanding of those real jobs. If you dig for coal on the Stockton Plateau or dam the Hurunui or Wairau Rivers to squeeze in a few more cows or vines, or if you drive a truck, you’re at real work. If you’re providing a public service, or if you’re a scientist, researching how to make us all more productive and healthier, or if you’re one of the few remaining Department of Conservation staffers trying to restore our ravaged ecosystems, then you’re not really in a job. But that’s something the swelling ranks of the unemployed already knew.