Saturday Morning With Jack Tame

It’s one of the curious things about the structure of modern liberal democracies.  Whether its sharemarkets or political cycles or even media coverage, a lot of the big forces that shape our society are influenced by short-term incentives.   It gets us into all sorts of pickles. Take the Three Waters and the crisis with water infrastructure in New Zealand. The main reason we find ourselves with a vast infrastructure deficit is because for decades, heaps of local councils haven’t properly invested to maintain the pipes. Why didn’t they invest? Simple. Investment takes money and money means rates. And with woeful levels of engagement with local body elections, big rates increases and pledges to spend millions on water infrastructure that no one could see or appreciate weren’t exactly vote-winners. Councillors who wanted to be re-elected have been incentivised to defer spending for the future. Someone else’s problem. Predictably, of course, it snowballed. I think we risk the same thing with the aging p