In her recent address to the Auckland Business Chamber titled "Growth is the Answer", New Zealand Finance Minister Nicola Willis acknowledges low-growth projections, imploring businesspeople to lean in on the government’s growth agenda. However, this fails to grasp the essence of entrepreneurship, which is rooted in autonomy. Entrepreneurs are never in business to work for the government’s goals.
Rather than asking people to take personal risks to prop up an outdated economic system that has driven environmental degradation and inequality, the Finance Minister should address the structural issues that perpetuate this system, that make it difficult for enterprises to thrive at a sustainable right size without having to pursue meaningless growth, selling more stuff, merely to serve onerous debt and rapacious venture capital.
We must address our communal vulnerability and exposure to the failure of the growth-dependent economy as we enter a potentially sustained era of limited growth. There’s always the option of changing the system. An alternative proposition is a sufficiency-dependent, socio-ecologically regenerative economic system, as advocated by a wide variety of scholars and activists in the post growth movement.
Defending and pleading for growth instead, as Willis has done, signifies that the breakdown or replacement of the system is a threat to this government’s vision. It is fascinating that a government acting so rapidly to smash rules is not willing to take even a feather duster to the corners of its own belief system. Willis’s advocacy for social investment is a strong value but her reluctance to explore other ways to achieve social outcomes highlights the limits of her ideology. Social investment is both her anchor and her Achilles heel as it undermines her ability to deliver on the very things she claims to care about.
The Finance Minister’s speech reflects a blinkered view of economic prosperity and fails to address the underlying flaws of our growth-dependent economic system. It is time for all parties across the spectrum to develop a robust post growth strategy and to take advantage of the opportunities that radical change provides for designing globally and locally equitable and sustainable outcomes into an alternative system. The 21st century could be a great time to be alive. Bold visionary leaders are needed to navigate us to that future. Growth is no longer an answer.
Image by Giu Vicente on Unsplash
Heliocene 