Next year's election must be fought over economic leadership and management. Too many problems are piling up, too much damage is being done, and too many opportunities are being squandered for complacency to rule.

But we'll get a vigorous debate and a change of direction only if voters understand what's at stake, business leaders are honest about their worries about National, and Labour chooses an economically literate leader.

Don't be fooled by current growth. It will peak at 2.7 per cent in the year ending next March, then fall to 2 per cent in 2015 and 1.1 per cent in 2016, the Reserve Bank forecasts.

Sunday Star-Times columnist Rod Oram.

This is not a cyclical downturn. Our overseas trading partners' growth will keep motoring along at about 3.5 per cent to 4 per cent a year.

It is a failure of economic strategy and execution by the current government. It is not delivering on its pledge to rebalance the economy - to shift it from short-term growth fuelled by debt and consumption to sustainable growth fuelled by investment and production.

Instead, most growth is coming from the rebuild of Christchurch, increases in household debt and consumption and the resumed housing boom.

Don't be fooled by the trade headlines either. Yes, our exports to China rose 26 per cent in the year ended June. But our total exports fell 2 per cent. We're selling fewer goods to fewer countries, and becoming very dependent on one.

And don't be fooled by business confidence at a 14-year high. The survey only asks businesses about their short-term prospects, which are indeed improving for the six months or so. Yet business investment remains very subdued, a sure sign they have little long-term confidence.

The government's Business Growth Agenda has some useful programmes. But it is not a strategy. It seeks to drive incremental growth in existing activities rather than shift the economy into more productive areas.

The strategic failure shows in the Reserve Bank's calculation of Potential Growth, the rate at which the economy can grow without causing inflation. The rate is bumping along at a miserable 1.5 per cent. The government is failing to shift the needle.

Ministers regularly reveal their incomprehension of where New Zealand's best opportunities lie. For example, Minster of Economic Development Steven Joyce cast doubt last week on the economic sense of Wellington Airport extending its runway.

Actually, it needs to so it can handle fully loaded non-stop flights to Asia, where all the city's best investment and tourism potential is. The cost will be less than one new wide-bodied aircraft and a lot less than Auckland's new convention centre.

Indeed the extension will cost less and deliver more benefits than some of the Roads of National Significance Joyce initiated as minister of transport. The data are damning. In 2006, 53 per cent of highway projects had a high benefit-cost ratio and 0 per cent had a low one. In 2010 only 3 per cent of this government's projects were high and 68 per cent were low.

Similarly, Minister for the Environment Amy Adams made some remarkable assertions about her Resource Management Act reforms in her commentary piece in these pages last week.

For example, she wrote: "I am also proposing to repeal a requirement to have regard to the maintenance and enhancement of the quality of the environment - not because it is unimportant but because this is what the very purpose of the act is about. Simply restating it in the principles section is not helpful."

Actually, the principles section is the absolute key to any act. It gives courts and practitioners clear guidance on Parliament's intentions for the act.

Removing the quality of the environment from the principles section of the RMA will radically change the act. It will substantially devalue 22 years of case history and make the RMA process more difficult and complicated for courts and partitioners to interpret.

The Law Society and the Resource Management Law Association submissions on the changes made that very clear.

Moreover, the minister wrote: "We can ill afford a regime that acts as a disincentive to sensible development and investment."

But the RMA serves us well. In the 22 years since it was enacted, it has helped hold the line on environmental damage while the country grew the volume of its economic activity by 75 per cent, its cows by 73 per cent and its human population by 28 per cent.

If the government guts the RMA, it will do little to spur economic development but it will accelerate environmental degradation. Yet, of all developed countries we are the most dependent on our natural environment for earning our living.

Such crashing inconsistencies are one of the defining features of this government. The more there are, the more the public will take note. At some point voter confidence will drain away.

Business support will remain higher, longer, because it is so partisan. In the US it is possible for a Democrat to be chair of Goldman Sachs and go on to be Secretary of the Treasury, as Bob Rubin did in the Clinton administration. In the UK good business policies can come from either side of the political divide and gain wide support from business; and the Financial Times can argue Labour should take over government from the Conservatives, as it did in 1992.

But in New Zealand business leaders are very reluctant to publicly criticise a National government, they are resistant to new and challenging economic ideas, and they are obstructive to Labour governments, as they were during their "winter of discontent", their big sulk after the Clark government took office in 1999.

Rather than disdain and dismissal as their default response to ideas from Labour and Greens, they should make the minimal effort to understand how effective some of these ideas are in other countries and how they might work here.

If they were true leaders, they would seek, support and act on the best ideas wherever they might lie in politics.

The right Labour leader would help bridge the damaging divide. Of the three candidates, only David Cunliffe, thanks to his business and political career, has the knowledge of the economy and business, and the ministerial track record required.