Rescuing the New Zealand Economy: What went wrong and how we can fix it.

• Author: Hawke, Gary

RESCUING THE NEW ZEALAND ECONOMY: What went wrong and how we can fix it

Author: Bryan Gould

Published by: Craig Potton Publishing, Nelson, 2008, 144pp, $29.99.

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One of the big challenges facing the field of public policy is to achieve appropriate recognition of expert knowledge while preserving democratic participation in decision-making. Many issues that are presented as needing a choice among different perspectives really require distinction between the spheres within which each is relevant.

War is too important to be left to the generals. However, when state agencies build roads, they sensibly employ engineering expertise and utilize expert knowledge. Governments use all the tools of modern information and communication technology to pursue social and economic objectives that are vastly more ambitious than could be conceived in earlier times. We already contemplate fine customisation of social services, and it seems very likely that advances in genetic knowledge will soon permit health and education services that are much more discriminating than anything which can be contemplated now. It will also be controversial. What some will see as 'technical' information subject to expert knowledge, others will see as ethical issues that are appropriately determined by 'the community'. (Existing precedents suggest we will also see those with expert knowledge seeking to evade responsibility by calling for 'community debate' while really seeking the endorsement of public opinion.)

Issues that are regarded as 'technical' are often unfamiliar, and the mere passage of time is sufficient to bring them more within the field of lay opinion. But we do not need to look into the future to see that economic and social policy also involves expert knowledge. In the course of a career with the British Foreign Office, as a law don, an MP in the United Kingdom, and Vice-Chancellor at Waikato University, it would have been possible for Bryan Gould to acquire some economic knowledge to add to whatever elementary economics was included in his New Zealand law degree, but we have no evidence that he did so.

As a university teacher I always sought to find the positive in any response to student work. I felt no such imperative for communications on university management. I usually approach reviews in the same spirit as student work, but what is the status of a work by a former vice-chancellor? It is at least sufficiently ambiguous for me to revisit...