New Zealanders are an interesting bunch. We're often described as easy going and resourceful and are generally comfortable seeing ourselves the same way, coupling Barry Crump's sardonic "she'll be right mate" with a propensity to solve complex problems using number eight fencing wire. After a century and a half of optimistic ingenuity it's about time for a review. Sadly mate, it appears that she won't always be right.

Here's my unpalatable thesis. Many problems are made intractable, or at least considerably more difficult to resolve, because of these very attributes in our national character.

I say this without fear because New Zealanders prefer to let others have their say: we like to live and let live, and experience has taught us we can probably come up with a clever fix later if the outcome's less than optimal. But do these apparently positive characteristics make us less willing to make hard decisions? Let's think about that.

Consider alcohol. Not wanting to be seen as a nation of wowsers, we've progressively deregulated supply, lowering the age at which alcohol can be purchased, selling it in supermarkets, effectively letting bars stay open as late as they wish and promoting drinking with pervasive advertising and high profile sponsorship. This hasn't made us sophisticates: rather it's fostered a culture of binge-drinking and immoderate consumption. The bill for our acquiesence to the alcohol industry is expressed in compounding health costs, productivity losses and social disfunction - disorders for which our famed ingenuity has failed to devise a cure.

Or consider our attitude to savings. Our record as a country suggests we're willing to sacrifice fiscal responsibility to the whim of the moment, prepared to borrow to maintain levels of consumption beyond our income. The inevitable consequence of our resulting indebtedness is loss of assets and infrastructure when the time comes to pay yesterday's bills. Worse, we lose the freedom to chart our own destiny, as our creditors demand a say in how we manage our country and plan our future. And for all our "can do" qualities, we've yet to turn this around.

Or ... well, consider the impacts of large scale dairy-farming, management of diabetes and obesity, our approach to carbon emissions ... there's no shortage of evidence for our laissez-faire world view, or for our abiding faith in our own ability to produce rabbits from some future hat.

What's my point?

These aspects of our national character aren't innately bad. And in part they may be a reflection of our comparative youth as a country: perhaps in another century or two we'll take a longer view. But my point is that some of these issues won't wait. Alongside "accommodating" and "resourceful", we need to pin "prudent", "farsighted" and "timely". Otherwise New Zealand faces an increasingly constrained future. She'll be tight, mate.

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