The weeping and wailing is deafening. And the self-flagellation - it's worse than a plenary session on pain at a sado-masochists' convention: we're headed down the tubes. The world economy is coming to get us and there's no way out.
Hordes have hit the panic button, abandoned ship, and escaped to a better life in Australia. The price of food is rising so fast soon we won't be able to say "cheese'' and smile, let alone eat it. Worse still, the criminal underclass is burgeoning. It's a wonder anyone can sleep at night.
Seriously, there are more than a few challenges facing the nation, but is it really roll-over-and-surrender time? In election year we might be led to expect a few constructive answers. But unlike the politicians and those who goad them on, I don't believe the rearguard action of personal tax cuts is going to solve that much.
Yes, a few extra bucks in the pocket each week will be very nice thank you, and it might momentarily stimulate the economy, but in the longer term?
It's hardly original but my "big idea'' would be education. Education to advance our economic literacy, technological facility and entrepreneurial capital; education to address and circumvent the many social issues that challenge us; and cultural education through which to instill a sense of belonging, shared enterprise and self-respect the lack of which surely is at the heart of many of the ills that beset us.
Economically, we are in something of a bind hardly alone but a bind nonetheless. The boom in world dairy prices has shielded us from the reality that our productivity has not progressed much in the last decade. We have relied on the same old, same old commodities.
Unfortunately, but predictably, other countries have been getting in on the act and fast, in South America, and in Asia where the future of the world economy lies. Eventually, with access to cheaper labour, they will overtake us. We will have little to show for it beyond depleted water tables and polluted waterways.
On Monday, a report from the Child Poverty Action Group claimed that 180,000 children in this country live in poverty. These figures require serious interrogation, not least in terms of the state entitlements of such people, but they are at least indicative of scale.
Not unrelated is the crime rate, and despite the large drop in unemployment over the last few years, the existence of a stubborn minority of recalcitrant, not to say recidivist state-dependent individuals.
We need to foster respect for and participation in education - almost as a civic duty. We need to be nimble and flexible and all-embracing in our learning patterns. We do well at the upper end of the scale compared to like-countries, but we also routinely exhibit a long, innumerate, barely literate, socially maladjusted tail. And sometimes the tail appears to be wagging the dog.
How do we approach this? In the first instance through our teachers. Yes, of course, much is and should be learnt in the family environment, but in those homes of the disadvantaged, the single-parented, and third generation beneficiaries, sometimes the influence has to come from outside through common standards and expectations.
We must value our teachers more than ever and promote a culture that elevates learning above all else. We must learn to think our way into a profitable future - through innovation, entrepreneurship, socially and environmentally responsible initiatives, through patterns of knowledge and learning in science and technology, in languages, in arts and culture, all of which mark us out as a highly-educated, motivated, mobile, self-confident society.
From this will flow productivity, smart-business, intellectual capital, social cohesion and cultural enrichment. But we must work on it and be prepared to lead, not least in the cultural arena.
Former Labour cabinet minister John Tamihere has recently presented a few sobering statistics concerning Maori: in 20 years' time one worker in five will be Maori, he says, and on current trends more than half of them will be illiterate.
And let's not even get into over-representation in our prisons, and the unemployment figures.
These are the statistics of a minority culture, large sectors of which have lost their sense of identity and self-respect. Individual responsibility must play its dominant role. But it is more than possible that self-respect stems from the respect accorded by the dominant culture in which the minority exists. In this arena we should do better.
Compulsory Te Reo in schools - alongside Japanese and Mandarin - mightn't be a bad start.
Simon Cunliffe is the assistant editor at the Otago Daily Times.
