Election campaigns are an opportunity to help us decide what kind of country we want to live in. Instead, they increasingly resemble a marketplace of disconnected promises: a tax cut here, a road there, a pledge to punish someone, promises to make life cheaper, safer or easier.

Each proposal is designed to capture attention. Few of these one-liners are connected to the larger physical account of where we are heading.

This is understandable. Political parties must win votes before they can implement policies.

Under our electoral system, minor parties can hold the balance of power, while major parties compete to assemble the coalition needed to govern.

But a country cannot be governed successfully through such political improvisation. The problems confronting us are not isolated, and cannot be solved by a collection of unrelated incentives, punishments and promises.

The cost-of-living crisis, pressure on public services, housing unaffordability, insecure work, poverty, crime and social dislocation are not separate misfortunes. They are connected consequences of a deeper predicament.

That predicament has two central features.

First, the material and energy flows on which our economy depends are steadily becoming more constrained, expensive or unreliable.

Second, our economic system remains committed to increasing material consumption and economic throughput, even when the physical systems supporting that growth are being depleted and damaged.

Together they are causing a downward spiral. As energy, land, infrastructure and other resources become more expensive, the cost of producing and transporting goods rises.

Household incomes are squeezed. Businesses face narrower margins and greater uncertainty. Governments struggle to fund public services.

Employment becomes less secure, and more people experience the anxiety and deprivation that can feed social division, addiction and crime.

At the same time, the pursuit of continued material expansion intensifies pollution and environmental destruction.

Climate disruption is altering rainfall, increasing flood risk, damaging infrastructure and undermining the reliability of the land and oceans on which our prosperity depends.

The environmental costs are not external to the economy. They are eventually returned to us as insurance losses, damaged homes, disrupted supply chains, higher food prices and public bills that someone must pay.

So, we need to ask a more prescient question: how can we break this cycle of damaging, over-production and consumption when its widely coerced and still allow people to live secure and fulfilling lives?

The answer is to strengthen the things we share.

Reliable public healthcare, education, housing, transport, energy, water and social support reduce the amount of private income people need in order to live decently. Security does not have to be purchased individually by those who can afford it.

The remarkably insightful formula offered by economist Jason Hickel provides the blueprint: “If growth is a substitute for equality, equality is a substitute for growth.”

A more equal society, supported by strong public services, is less dependent on perpetual economic expansion to maintain social stability.

Research by Prof Julia Steinberger similarly identifies public services as central to living well within ecological limits.

They can improve equality and resilience while reducing the pressure to consume for status and security. They allow people to share the benefits of infrastructure rather than forcing every household to acquire private substitutes: a second car because public transport is inadequate, costly heating because housing is poorly insulated, private healthcare because the public system is inaccessible, or ever-higher wages simply to remain secure.

Tax is sharing, so the funding can come from making it fairer. Wealth needed for essential services cannot be allowed to continue to accumulate in the hands of a few who also contribute disproportionately to the emissions overshoot.

Nor can environmental limits be treated as obstacles to be bypast whenever they interfere with short-term commercial interests.

Some polices take us in the opposite direction. Replacing the Resource Management Act with laws centred on property rights, excluding agriculture from the Emissions Trading Scheme, halving the 2050 methane target, reversing both transport decarbonisation policies and subsidised public transport, restoring offshore oil exploration, limiting Significant Natural Areas, prioritising commercial use in conservation land, preventing councils considering carbon emissions in consenting decisions, slashing climate adaptation spending and the public service may each be presented as practical or business-friendly measures.

But taken together, they represent something more consequential: a retreat from the difficult task of adapting our economy to the material truth we face.

As the consequences of the economic growth linked to climate change appear with increasing frequency worldwide, it is utterly baffling policies that worsen the trends and further expose us could be possibly be considered in anyone’s interest.

Recent events here have shown clearly that farming operations are among the first to be disrupted by climate change. So, you would think all rural landowners would be pleading with government to double down on emission reduction, not minimise it.

So, despite the current push for smaller government and private interest, this is an impassioned appeal to all our future political leaders to be bold and caring enough to make cross-party, long-term commitments to the principle of strong public provisioning.

That is because it’s the only political direction with any hope of a seamless shift to a remotely sustainable future. It’s when our essential needs are met that we can start to redevelop our relationships and take greater responsibility for our own welfare.

Dare we hope it also proves the catalyst for the structural shift essential now to a more compassionate, generous and socially-orientated New Zealand: one in which public services are the foundation for communities to access and share the essentials of life, manage their physical demand, reduce inequality, and protect the natural world, while simultaneously preparing for the changes already on our doorstep.

  • Dugald MacTavish is a retired hydrologist of Moeraki.