Last week, Labour announced its flagship education policy for the election. If it wins in November, it will introduce a new statutory authority, called the Independent Council for Curriculum and Assessment (ICCA). The New Zealand Principals' Federation first proposed the idea in August.  

The ICCA would oversee future development of school curricula and national assessment systems. Labour’s education spokesperson Ginny Andersen said, “educational professionals should be determining what children learn and how they learn, not the minister of education.”

Andersen’s push to get politics out of education sounds reasonable. Teachers and principals are exhausted by what must feel like constant change in lockstep with political tides.

No sooner have schools adapted to a new initiative, it would seem, than it is abolished or replaced. New Zealand’s three-year electoral cycle does not help.

If it is not the curriculum that is changing, it is the qualifications system, or initiatives like National Standards. That scheme was introduced by the Key government, poorly implemented, and then terminated by the Ardern government.

The proposed ICCA might seem a sensible way to bring the cycle of change to an end. It would comprise experts and make decisions based on evidence. Some questions about curriculum design can be addressed with evidence. Others have more to do with values.

That makes a curriculum an inherently political document. Setting up the ICCA would not change that.

How localised should the New Zealand curriculum be? How deeply should mātauranga Māori be embedded? What balance should be struck between New Zealand history and world history?

Voters should have a say on questions like these. New Zealand’s public schools do not belong to experts, nor to teachers or principals. They belong to the families of the young people they educate.

Elected ministers, not experts or education practitioners, represent families. If ministers cannot influence curriculum content, voters cannot either.

Then there is the question of how experts would be appointed to the Council. If ministers were responsible for appointments, the group would itself be political. Even if appointments were made by the Ministry of Education, ministers would exert substantial influence.

Labour would face temptation to stack the Council with its ideological fellow travellers from the teachers’ unions and the Aotearoa Educators’ Collective. If it succumbed to that temptation, the political wheel would roll on.

Then, an early casualty of the next National-led government would be the ICCA itself.

This election, the standout issue is the cost of living.

It’s all the focus groups want to talk about.

Petrol, food, insurance, electricity, rates. The cost of everything has gone up and something must be done.

Looking back to 1990, everything was cheaper. Something has clearly gone wrong.

The party that can do the most to bring down the price-of-life should therefore win on November 7^th.

NZ First would buy back the BNZ and break up the gentailers. National wants more supermarket competition. The Greens want a government-owned supermarket and will make university fees free. Labour will make GP visits free, cap the price of public transport and make it illegal for big companies to charge too much.

These ideas all sound good to focus groups. But how do they compare to policy in a country that has truly tackled the cost of living?

Which country has done the most to tackle costly life and what can we all learn from it?

There is no clear number one, but, by some measures, the answer is Nigeria.

A haircut can cost NZ$3, a night's accommodation NZ$20 and lunch can be picked up for NZ$2.

So how can we achieve Nigeria’s cost of living?

Nigeria has privately owned supermarkets, banks and hairdressers, so perhaps public ownership may not be the secret. GP visits are not yet free.

There are, however, other policies worth investigating.

Nigeria's minimum wage is about 50 New Zealand cents an hour, much lower than ours. Nigerian employment law provides considerably fewer protections for workers. The rules that regulate the environment and housing are a far cry from New Zealand’s RMA.

A sufficiently determined government could find opportunities to tackle the cost of living by copying some of these policies.

There is just one awkward data point for this international benchmark.

More than 40 percent of Nigerians live below the World Bank's extreme-poverty line. New Zealand's GDP per person is about 45 times Nigeria's.

Having very low prices does not necessarily make things affordable.

This creates a problem for our cost-of-living strategy. A NZ$3 haircut is not cheap if you earn 50 cents an hour.

There is another way to make things more affordable, of course. We could become more productive and earn more.

Unfortunately, "productivity crisis" hasn’t yet shown up in the focus groups.

So, for now, back to the supermarkets.