In Our Democracy, It’s Dollars Not Votes That Count

In what we are pleased to call a democracy, we count votes – one per citizen – on polling day, but on every other day we count only dollars; and when it comes to dollars, the more you have, the more political influence you wield.

Very few of us seem to realise how thoroughly the power of the purse has colonised and subordinated our supposed rights as citizens to an equal voice as to how we should be governed. Our government (and the present government especially), once elected, pays little further attention to ordinary citizens and makes its decisions according to what might serve the interests of the wealthy.

The rationale for this approach is presumably the long-discredited “trickle down” theory of economic wellbeing – that if the rich are encouraged to become richer, we will all be better off by virtue of the crumbs we might enjoy from the rich man’s table.

But the belief that wellbeing is to be measured purely in dollar terms takes us much further than that, and now penetrates almost every aspect of our national life. An obvious example is a trend that has begun to really gather pace over recent years – treating universities and other institutions of tertiary education, not as repositories of learning, mainsprings of new knowledge and the facilitators of a wiser and more far-seeing society, but simply as agents of economic development.

If an institution’s graduates cannot be shown to be immediately of value to the process of making a buck, it will be marked down and its future funding threatened. Little value is given to a more educated society for its own sake; the only purpose of education, it seems, is to promote a higher GDP.

Considerable effort is devoted to “educating” the public to accept that the only worthwhile goals are those with a dollar value. The search for profit, we are told, is the only motivation that will produce a higher level of effort and achievement. We see instances of this thinking wherever we look.

Selling off (or privatising) public assets? Who worries about levels of public service for society as a whole when better-off members of the public can be introduced to the joys of making some unearned income on the stock market?

The “free trade” deal with the US? Who cares about maintaining some element of control over our own destiny as a nation if some of us can trade that away for increased profits?

Instances of this kind abound, even at a very detailed level. I came across a further example the other day. This country welcomes immigration as a stimulus to growth, but we have also learned to value its benefits in helping to develop a society with a richer texture and a wider cultural base.

Commendably, our government set up a few years ago, under the aegis of Immigration New Zealand, a support service for immigrants to help them to settle and adapt to their new country. The service, known as Settlement Support, has done excellent work and has eased the path for countless new migrants so that they can enjoy greater success and can make a worthwhile contribution to our national life.

Until now, the service has provided face-to-face help to any migrant who cares to ask for it. The help largely takes the form of information on where to go for advice on a whole range of matters, and is of value both to the migrants themselves and to employers who might contemplate employing them. Customer satisfaction (at 91% for migrants and 83% for service providers and employers) is at a high level.

But someone has decided that the service is too “unfocused”. The inevitable consultant’s report has been commissioned and it has duly served the purpose of those who commissioned it.

It seems that too many migrants of low economic value are availing themselves of the service. What is needed, the consultants recommend, is a service that focuses on the 12% of “high priority” immigrants; the employers of such people are also to be priority customers. There will be a second category of medium-priority customers (20% of the total) who might one day become “high priority”. It is these categories who will receive a high level of support and attention.

At the bottom of the heap are the 58% of “low priority” customers. Under the new “Proactive Customer Management Model”, they will no longer have a face-to-face service. They will not be encouraged to seek help; they will have to make do with a web-based service.

These migrants, whose low economic value apparently makes them undeserving of real help, must overcome their unfamiliarity with the language, their lack of resources to allow them to access the internet, and their sense of confusion about the society in which they find themselves, to negotiate their own way through the maze of agencies and sources of help and advice that might be of use to them.

Immigrants of “low economic value” might be seen as of little consequence; but are they not just a sub-category of those ordinary home-grown citizens of whom our government makes the same judgment?

Bryan Gould

19 October 2013