I find myself writing about the next generation for the second issue in a row. It’s been a regular theme here and in my weekly EDM editorials, with the country grappling with social issues such as rising youth crime and ram raids and the industry grappling with an ageing workforce and lack of youngsters following in their tyre tracks. It’s clear that these are problems that must be resolved.

At Transporting New Zealand’s The Road Ahead conference in September, economist Cameron Bagrie revealed the eye-opening state of the country and its economy and what we need to pay attention to if we are to safeguard the future. We have a summary in the first of multiple conference reports on page 102, but here I’d like to address a specific point that raised my eyebrows as he spoke. He wasted no time bringing it up and returned to it numerous times in his almost hour-long presentation.

“What would you look at today that will give you the best benchmark of where New Zealand will be 30 years down the track?” he asked the delegates. “Education. Currently, in New Zealand, 60% of kids regularly attend school. Of Maori/Pasifika kids, 45% regularly attend school. Surely the most important investment we must make over the next five years in regard to New Zealand’s economic future has to start with the education system and the kids,” he commented.

“I’d argue the three best things we need to be doing for New Zealand is getting the education system right, getting the health system right and getting the infrastructure right. We need to beat the drum on those things.” I doubt many would disagree with Cameron on that. Regardless of political persuasion, those are among the basics for promoting the future of any society. It also sometimes seems that those in the highest seats continually struggle to get the basics right and keep them tracking. We’ve seen it with the roads; decades of underinvestment blamed on administrations gone by, and a perpetual game of catch-up competing with vanity projects and ideological fancy. We’ve seen it with public health, which was truly exposed by the extreme measures taken to prevent a system teetering on a knife edge from being overwhelmed by a virus that jumped on the world out of nowhere.

And now, within education. About half of all kids not bothering to attend class regularly should be cause for alarm at the highest level. As it is, anyone who’s recently hired school-leavers will tell you; overall, they’re not well enough equipped to cope with the working world – where cotton wool and participation trophies don’t exist.

Or, as Cameron put it: “The worst kids can be today is in a state of deferred achievement – no one fails. And then we wonder why their first knock out of school blows them apart.”

One of the delegates, a concerned mother, asked Cameron what he thought fixing education looked like. “Start by getting the kids to turn up, and then focus on achieving once they’re in class,” was his immediate response.

“Fixing the education system is, unfortunately, going to involve one big battle with teachers and the Ministry of Education. Someone needs to take that fight on; it doesn’t look like anyone’s got the political nous or desire to do that at the moment. I don’t think we’re taking enough risk with how we manage kids, and that doesn’t build resilience. Knocks taken when you’re young tend to be small, and that builds resilience for the big knocks.”

I’m no teacher, economist, or politician, but I’ve come from a country – South Africa – where the public education system has been mismanaged to the point of worthlessness. The thought of New Zealand receiving the kind of knock that could come from this is possibly the most frightening I’ve had all year.