© Anne Else; 30 September 1999

We are living in times beyond parody. This week a marketing guru brightly told Wayne Mowatt that on-the-ball retailers should now be asking themselves: "What are the aspects of Christmas that will stimulate interest, awareness and enthusiasm among the consuming public?" He signed off with the pious hope that Christmas would be "a joyous time for every consumer and business in New Zealand".

But the current mood is about as far from joyous as a developed and (as yet) relatively peaceful economy can get. Much to the apparent surprise of virtually every economic forecaster, even the limited segment of the economy they measure has turned out to be not only not growing, but actually shrinking.

This is not what was meant to happen, is it? After all, everything has been done by the book. Taxes have been flattened and interest rates driven down, unions have been decimated and workers forced to be flexible. Manufacturing has had the inefficiencies squeezed out of it by the rapid abolition of tariffs, and farmers are about to be made to give up their quaintly antiquated notions of co-operative ownership, spreading both risks and returns. The state has been driven to divest itself of almost everything that could possibly put a buck into private hands, to such effect that $126 billion of overseas capital is now returning healthy profits to its owners. Meanwhile the necessity of self-reliance has been forcibly brought home to almost every group who used to look to the state for financial support in the form of a benefit. (Admittedly, the big one - national superannuation - is still a maddening thorn in the flesh of the market apostles, but they're working on it.) In other words, all the fundamentals are sound. So why isn't it working?

Dirty, understaffed hospitals, sky-rocketing student debt, the almost complete disappearance of any public face for general government services (we will soon be the only country in the world which has a Post Office but no post offices), an increasingly remote and inaccessible bureaucracy putting up a Great Wall of press-button menus between itself and its "clients" - these are just a small sample of the symptoms of public decay which ordinary citizens (including the vast majority of employers and business owners) must struggle with every day. No forecaster with even one foot on the ground of reality could even begin to believe that confidence and growth could come out of such a climate.

Yet in a curious way, the forecasts were spot on. The truth is, of course, that the policies are working, exactly as intended. Two forms of growth are taking place at great speed. Both relatively and absolutely, despite the absence of conventionally measured growth, the rich are getting a great deal richer. Much of their gains have come, in one way or another, from the public purse. Meanwhile the rest of society is getting demonstrably poorer - not only as individuals, but through the rapidly declining quantity and quality of public goods and services, and the increasing cost of privatised essentials. As a result, social ills are growing by the day. In a ghoulish sort of way, it is fascinating to observe the speed at which the social fabric has frayed apart.

No more telling illustration could be found of what we have come to than the tale of the state lotteries commission. Here is an organisation whose existence is justified solely by the amount of money it hands over to various kinds of worthwhile community activities. Yet its head earns $485,000 a year, more than most people could hope to earn even in their ten best years. Meanwhile the commission sets an upper limit of $35,000 a year on salaries in the non-profit groups it funds. I could not find one media report which had gone to the trouble of finding out what other state gambling organisations spend on running costs, as a proportion of total income, to see how "ours" measures up. Judging by the published figures, the ratio here seems to be about five-sixths expenses to one-sixth distributed funds. (Still, at least Lotto outlets do not, as the Sky Tower reportedly does, provide a free bus for South Auckland residents on benefit day - though this may be an urban legend.) This does not seem to be very good value for money - especially when people actually paying are disproportionately those least able to afford it, and the true costs include a great deal of personal misery and social breakdown.

But according to Wayne Mowatt's marketing guru, value for money is not what people now look for when they spend. Instead, carefully guided by a marketing industry which spent $12 million last year on peddling ice cream alone, they look for branding and ambience. So when WINZ spends up large on managing its potplants instead of its "clients", it is right up there with McDonald's. Both fail to provide the people they call their customers with decent bread, let alone roses. But they keep the marketing industry going, and that's what matters. Have a joyously consuming Labour Day.

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