Don Brash: For how much longer will our kids stick around?

In a great many ways, New Zealand is an enormously attractive country to live in. We have a temperate climate, largely free of extremes of either heat or cold. We have magnificent mountains, and beautiful and uncrowded beaches. We produce enough food to feed ourselves many times over. In a water-short world, we have more fresh water, per person, than all but two countries in the world. We have abundant open spaces, with just five million people spread across an area larger than the United Kingdom. We have a robust democracy, with never the slightest suggestion that either the armed forces or a mob might try to overturn an election result.

But abstracting altogether from the immediate issues relating to the pandemic and the health and economic consequences of that, there are four major issues which threaten our future – five if we include climate change, but I don’t propose to discuss that given that nothing we do in New Zealand will have any measurable effect on the global climate. All of the other four issues are within our own ability to resolve if only we have the political will to do so.