The Burdon philosophy

Press, 13 March 1986, Page 21

The Burdon philosophy

The middle-of-the-road philosophic path articulated by Mr Burdon seeks to avoid unbridled pragmatism on the one hand and ethical purity on the other. “Clinical, aesthetic, and antiseptic approaches to the very complex issues of social and economic change are bound to fail,” he says. “But pragmatic interventionism day by day and issue by issue is also quite inappropriate. Any doctrinaire approach must, by definition, fall because whatever merits it might be seen to have in the end it has to deal with human beings.” Mr Burdon denies being regulatory, pragmatic, centralist, or interventionist — labels used within the National Party to describe those questioning the so-called “philosophical purity” now being promoted. He sees the role of the National Party being to look at the individual and not to the State. It is the function of the State to provide mechanisms to help people help themselves. He rejects a doctrinaire “more market” approach because it abandons the true responsibilities of the State to its citizens.

His National Party would seek to establish and maintain a society in which individuals can live in dignity and develop in their own ways, subject to the rights of others. The State should

only intervene to achieve equity, wherever such intevention can be shown clearly to be necessary. It would he both noninterventionist and non-judgmen-tal.

The State should provide adequate social services to help those who cannot help themselves, being both visionary yet practical, and seeking to rectify injustice and unfairness. “I want the National Party to have policies and attitudes aimed at residents of big cities — to deal with the subtle and not so subtle differences between the concerns of metropolitan and provincial people,” Mr Burdon says. “This can be done best by helping people to help themselves. It is not the function of the State to apportion blame or to ladle out rewards to its citizens. Its function is to serve the interests of all its citizens, whether considered deserving or not.

“The concept of a social welfare State in New Zealand has been used as a blanket, to put on top of everything and impose uniformity,” he says. “Instead, the social welfare State should be used as a blanket underneath everyone to catch those who cannot survive without help.” This is a post-Rogernomics society — to replace a regime

that is “too glib and too simplistic” to cope with the complicated and inter-related problems of urban life. He sees Rogernomics as a social as well as an economic policy. “We are not all born equal and we do not all have equal luck in our lives,” Mr Burdon says, “so any Darwinian political theory about the survival of the fittest and the devil taking the hindmost has no social validity.” Thus society has a responsibility to help people help themselves. It does not have a responsibility to blame and punish for personal failure, by withholding help. That demeans the digity of the individual. Upholding individual dignity has to be the first principle of any political party. Having said that, though, Mr Burdon is opposed to universality of benefits, as being both morally wrong and financially unsustainable. Benefits need to be targeted to those who need them and not to clumsily identified sectors of society.

“Because social welfare is a utopian ideal, it has become a concept now immune from criticism,” he says. “So it has become fossilised, its mechanisms have become set in concrete, and it has not been able to adapt or show the flexibility required of it.”

The city voters need a National Party that gives, and is seen to give, encouragement to a free market and the private sector. It is increasingly clear that the ills flowing from interventionism in the past cannot simply be cured by non-interven-tionism now.

Mr Burdon cites examples of what this economic and industrial middle-of-the-road approach would mean:—

® Governments should not subsidise or protect industry. To that extent, he endorses the “more market” approach. © Governments should take the lead in breaking the strangehold and over-privileged positions of unions whose class-concious ideas and antagonisms are rooted firmly in the nineteenth century. It would achieve this by restoring voluntary unionism and promoting enterprise and industry awards in place of the present system of national awards. It would do this through reason, if possible, but entrenched attitudes have to be overcome so legislation may be needed if other methods fail.

© Governments have a function to ensure the education system is work-related, and to oversee a continual process of change to achieve this into the future. © Governments have a function

to promote new technology, aggressively. This includes rationalising declining industries, such as promoting automation in the case of the meat industry.

“A National Party that moves in these directions will be well placed to recapture the disenchanted urban vote from Labour, and it needs to do this if it is to reclaim the lost city seats and win an election,” he concludes.