Last night I watched an election where the centre-right party won, but the very things that will ensure it remains in power — reform of the voting system and powerful coalition parties — failed. I can recall a time three elections ago when the same thing happened to the left: their reliable coalition partner (The Alliance) fell apart. The left now have four parties in parliament: the right one and two midgets: ACT and United Future.

This morning I read the blogs and the left is spinning that they are well placed to come back in 2014: the right are down to one monolith and they will get the people to see they are right. In a similar way, the right, who won, are despondent. They have control of the house for three years, but this is the highest ever percentage voted (48% for their party, which would be a landslide under First Past the Post) but don’t have coalition parties.

What I am thinking today is what is our duty, and it comes in two parts. One is to God, and the other to each other.

Amos 2:4-8
4Thus says the LORD: For three transgressions of Judah, and for four, I will not revoke the punishment; because they have rejected the law of the LORD, and have not kept his statutes,
but they have been led astray by the same lies after which their ancestors walked. 5So I will send a fire on Judah, and it shall devour the strongholds of Jerusalem.

Ideologies matter. We must not follow the errors of the past. The last century showed that unbridled capitalism unbalances a society, that a strong middle class stabilizes it (based around marriage and kids, with a living wage for the main earner), and that both fascism and soviet socialism fail as human and economic systems. More recently, we have be led astray by the doctrine of feminism, free love, and easy divorce: we are reaping two to three generations of children who are less stable, less trusting, and less able to form relationships because they have not seen this in the families they grew up in.

6Thus says the LORD: For three transgressions of Israel, and for four, I will not revoke the punishment; because they sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals — 7they who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth, and push the afflicted out of the way; father and son go in to the same girl, so that my holy name is profaned; 8they lay themselves down beside every altar on garments taken in pledge; and in the house of their God they drink wine bought with fines they imposed.

In the same manner, we are commanded as people and as a nation not to oppress the poor. The NZ compromise was a form of social safety net (which was originally bought in by Richard Seddon’s liberal party in the 1890s). This has morphed into a centrally run set of rules one requires a postgraduate degree to navigate through.

Individually we should care. We need to support the systems in place in our towns that act as a net: the food banks, the night shelters, the work training… but as individuals we cannot do more.

The state can. But the state is not good at sorting out circumstances. Moreover, the state, in most of the Western World apart from Australia and New Zealand, is bankrupt. You cannot support ten bureaucrats checking on the administration of one person’s dole. We need to simplify, tighten, and make local the means of social welfare.

The big challenge for any government, left or right, is to do this when the tax receipts (from VAT, company tax and income tax, which are the main sources of revenue in NZ for the gov’t( drop because wages deflate, businesses are losing money, and people are not buying.

Perhaps here we do need to look back to the last depression. The use of social banking, social networks (run by unions, friendly societies, churches, the rationalist society…) allow the prudent middle and working class people to have some security for these times. The use of charity — with lower taxes, the social pressure to be generous increases — helped provide for institutions that sheltered the indigent. However, in those days, the unionist worshiped in his chapel the same God and trusted to the same means of salvation that his boss worshipped in his cathedral. There was a shared sense of morality.

And here, Chris Trotter is correct. We have lost this.

The challenge we face, in this time of great difficulty, is to resurrect the human duty to care. For this cannot be legislated, no more than we can force an lion to not eat the lamb put into his cage.

An