Murky waters

Forget core voter issues, this year is all about saving ourselves from the elements, and it won't be cheap.

- DANYL MCLAUCHLAN

Bread-andbutter issues were supposed to be the meat and potatoes of this year's election. When Chris Hipkins took over as prime minister in late January, he promised to "focus on what's in front of New Zealanders right now", citing the traditional political battlegrounds of housing, education, healthcare, and cost of living. But for most of February, we focused on the rain, which was not only in front of us but above us, and below us, and all around us. There were torrential downpours, oceans of mud and mountains of logging debris flooding the rivers, sweeping away bridges and roads. Instead of bread and butter, our politicians are wrestling with the primal forces of nature: the forests, the weather, the very air.

The lightning from the storms illuminated a bleak reality: that the infrastructure New Zealand relies on to deliver bread, butter and everything else in our supermarkets, as well as generate the economic wealth to pay for it all, is eroding, and we lack the capacity to rebuild it. In a series of recent reports, Treasury and the New Zealand Infrastructure Commission/Te Waihanga estimated the nation needs $90 billion to fix our water systems, as well as another $120 billion for additional infrastructure and 115,000 new homes to address our housing crisis. And that was before Cyclone Gabrielle.

Even if we can somehow find the money - the Greens are calling for a windfall profit tax, while National is demanding no new taxes at all - the country lacks the workforce. We already have a shortfall of more than 100,000 workers in the construction sector.