A nation is built for people who cannot yet vote – Jonathan Ayling
Today, 257 years ago, James Cook arrived at Tūranganui-a-Kiwa near Gisborne and members of the Endeavour crew stepped ashore. His arrival was one of the decisive moments in the making of modern New Zealand. Sustained European contact and settlement followed, eventually giving rise to the nation we share today.
In his new book, Captain Cook and the Unsettled Afterlives of Empire, historian Tony Ballantyne considers this event and traces the different ways Cook has been remembered. While always a significant figure, he has played very different roles at different times in our history: first an imperial hero and explorer, later an inspiring national figure, more recently a colonising villain.
The argument over Cook is partly an argument about us, too. It leads us to questions like: what do we make of our inheritance? What sort of nation do we think we belong to? How does that shape the future we are pursuing?
It was questions like these I had in mind while watching Tuesday night’s TVNZ Leaders’ Debate. I was particularly interested in one of the final segments, on nation-building. It is an abstract concept few of us spend much time thinking about. But the debate exposed one of the tensions in the way we think about our future as a nation, and how we will build it.
Much of political debate is about immediate results, understandably. Moderator Jack Tame repeatedly returned to questions of immediate delivery. When will Kiwis start to feel the economy working for them? What will make the biggest difference to healthcare before next winter?
Of course, Governments have to deal with the problems in front of them. But they also reveal the horizon against which most politics is judged, next winter or the next Budget, when many of the most important decisions a government makes will not pay their full dividends for decades.
Good government has to hold two clocks in its head at once: the problems of next winter and the needs of the next generation. If we are serious about nation-building, about carefully stewarding what we have inherited and leaving it better for the next generation, politics must not be reduced to short-term sugar hits.
To be fair, there were longer-term proposals from both sides, including medical training and investment incentives. But I wanted a clearer account of how those choices would shape the country our children inherit. The difficulty is that many of the decisions most likely to shape that future produce their returns on a timetable our politics is poorly designed to reward.
Luxon’s best line in the debate came when Tame asked what New Zealand could be best in the world at. His answer was simple: education.
But a 5-year-old taught to read properly today may not enter the workforce for another 15 years. Improving mathematics or science teaching across the country will take years to show its full effect in productivity, incomes and technological capability. Equally, failing to maintain standards and prioritise the basics incurs costs against the future.
Economic reform works much the same way. Infrastructure and better investment settings take years to bear their full fruit in higher productivity and incomes. Yet our politics naturally rewards the opposite. Voters are right to demand prompt results, but nation-building often requires governments to make investments whose greatest beneficiaries cannot yet vote. Future New Zealanders do not get a say in this election. Children cannot reward good decisions at the ballot box, and people not yet born cannot punish bad ones.
So real leadership requires keeping their interests in view anyway.
Sometimes that means accepting costs now for benefits that arrive years later. It also means resisting the temptation to neglect what already works simply because maintaining an inheritance is less exciting than announcing something new. But nation-building is not only about when the returns arrive, it is also about understanding what we are trying to pass on.
We often treat nation-building as though it means roads, houses and hospitals. But these are products of a nation that first has institutions people trust, families and communities strong enough to raise the next generation, and some sense that citizens with very different backgrounds nevertheless belong to the same political community. That is why the arguments over Cook remain relevant, and the prospect of growing division is so troubling. What does it mean for the nation we inhabit that it emerged from the meeting of different peoples, through extraordinary achievement and co-operation, but also violence, conflict and injustice?
We do not need to agree about every part of our past, but eventually there has to be an “us”. That common identity matters because nation-building inevitably asks one generation to make sacrifices for another. Without some sense of a shared inheritance, it becomes much harder to ask people to bear costs today for a future they may never see.
That is the broader challenge hidden inside the word nation-building. It is not simply about fixing the health system before next winter, or getting another road built before the next election. Over the long term, what are we preserving, what are we improving, and what are we choosing to hand on?
Leaders should be judged not only by what they fix before next winter, but by what they will leave standing for the next generation.
Jonathan Ayling is a strategy consultant and professional director. He is the former chief executive of the Free Speech Union (NZ), an Act Party supporter and donor, and has worked as a ministerial staffer and senior Parliamentary adviser in both Government and Opposition.
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