Hawaii’s World

By A.A. Smyser

Thursday, March 19, 1998

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Setting goals
for a troubled Hawaii

ON Election Day 1994, before the votes were counted, I wrote that whoever was elected governor that night would face the four toughest years since statehood. I'm now amending that to say that the next four years may be just as tough.

How a community in trouble pulls itself back together is far from an exact science.

Clearly, though, it will help to have common goals and priorities strong enough to entail some willingness to sacrifice to achieve them.

When the storm finally clears we will want to see:

The aloha spirit maintained.

Our beautiful environment still protected.

Improving opportunities for those at the bottom of the economic ladder as well as for those at the top.

A ladder that still has a strong middle class.

Our visitor plant uncheapened and still stressing quality over numbers.

Hundreds of smaller industries growing up beside the big visitor industry. It takes 400 $25 million businesses to equal the $10 billion visitor industry.

For the clearing to come we will need economic stimulus of the kind suggested by Governor Cayetano's Economic Revitalization Task Force. But we will need more.

We will have to frankly agree that government is too big and government unions are too powerful in calling shots that ought to be left to managers. Government unions do this now through pressure on the Legislature, where they are just about the strongest lobbying force, and through contracts that allow them to restrict freedom to manage.

Contracts have recently been renewed without this meddlesomeness being corrected. The bumping rights that frustrate cutbacks are an example. Unionized principals are another.

One of our very big liabilities is our public education system. Governor Waihee's 1994 promise to be No. 1 in America still rings hollow. We are closer to No. 50. Despite wonderful bright spots we aren't doing the job overall of fitting our kids for a challenging global society.

Most of today's complaints are those of 10 and 20 years ago. We make gestures but they get mired in bureaucracy. We need a fresh wind to blow through our education system or we will stay mired in a society that is becoming more of a world backwater with every passing day.

Preserving our aloha spirit means we will have to address Hawaiian sovereignty issues in a way that is seen fair by almost all. Activists have pretty well won community agreement that Hawaiians need to restore their culture, have a land base to practice it, and be helped to lift themselves up from depressing crime, health and social welfare statistics.

The Hawaiian sovereignty forces oftentimes seem to be the most vital political forces in Hawaii, weakened, however, by their inability so far to coalesce behind common leaders. Stridency was helpful in the wake-up period. A shift to more moderate leadership may be most successful in the years ahead.

This is an outsider talking, I may be reminded, but dealing with the 80 percent of our residents who are non-Hawaiian is one of the Hawaiian leadership challenges for winning state and congressional concurrence in needed changes.

We have a real chance to muck it up in our next few crisis years.

We can change the old romantic image of Blue Hawaii to Junk Hawaii.

We can reduce our tourist plant to boarded-up hotels and a boarded-up convention center.

We can watch unemployment climb past 10 percent to 15 or 20 while the middle class grows slimmer, the poor poorer and the rich richer.

We can set ethnic group against ethnic group.

We can destroy the prestige of our quite-good University of Hawaii and allow public education to languish.

Somehow under some leader or leaders we have to pull together to see this won't happen.