Who is that who has just popped up on the government’s right? Jim Anderton, promoting a 30 per cent company tax rate. Whatever next?
Two years ago once-protectionist Anderton embraced freer trade. He had observed the burgeoning of high-valued-added niche-market textile and clothing exporters who found tariffs, if anything, a constraint.
Winston Peters and John Tamihere have both been talked up as the first Maori Prime Minister and both will not be. That is not all they share.
Both are self-made politically, too idiosyncratic and prideful to fit comfortably into the parties that brought them into Parliament.
Both ooze charm and flash charisma, with personal constituencies beyond those of their parties. Peters reached out from National in the late 1980s to many in Labour’s core vote. Tamihere touches many in National’s core vote. They both have Maori and non-Maori followers.
Go back 15 years. The Labour party was within a year of its second election in power. Five years later it was running third some of the time behind a party led by its self-exiled president, Jim Anderton.
Party conferences in that period were small and scratchy gatherings of the pathologically loyal. Some MPs, including one who is now a senior minister, contemplated life as a small, pure party slightly to the left of the centre, akin to the Socialist party in Italy.
In the latest issue of the New York Review of Books there is a chart of polls of 34,000 people in 30 countries of opinion on the United States presidential election on November 2. Only three are coloured red for President George Bush.
For Bush are Poland, the Philippines and Nigeria. India and Thailand are evenly balanced. The rest are blue, most very blue, for John Kerry.
Colin James’s speech to United Nations Association, United Nations Day, 22 October 2004
When Gerardine Lynch asked me to speak to you, I replied: “Your request is a puzzle to me, since I have never been to the United Nations, know very little about it and am not knowledgeable about international affairs beyond what I scrabble together from time to time to write around domestic politics. I can’t think what I could say to a knowledgeable audience.”
If John Tamihere departs he will be a loss not just to the cabinet and the Labour party but to the nation — not for what he is but for something important he has represented.
Tamihere — flawed, volatile, passionate, angry, good fun, impulsive and modern — is at the cusp of a shift in Maori priorities which may not really start to show through for years yet.
Colin James’s speech to the Tax Conference, Christchurch, 15 October 2004
Tax is a three-letter word. Tax is the ultimate expletive-deleted. Tax fuels much passion. So you folk have a special place in our hearts. Whichever side of tax gathering you are on, you command our estimation and our love. You are right up there with dentists.
It’s good news and bad news from the Australian election: mostly good for Helen Clark and mostly bad for Don Brash.
John Howard’s resounding fourth term win on Saturday was a reflection in part of the advantage of incumbency when the economy feels buoyant at the household level. Which, if there are no big shocks, should be the case here when Clark faces voters next year.
The National party is trying to work out how to use welfare as a big hit in its bid to lead the next government. But is there really a big hit in there?
Don Brash favours lifetime limits on the unemployment benefit. The more worldly Katherine Rich, the social welfare spokesperson, is more flexible.
Rich and ACT’s Muriel Newman want to go the Wisconsin route: get beneficiaries into jobs. But to do that properly, Wisconsin found and both acknowledge, is not a cheap option, which is not good news for tax-cutters in both parties.
Everyone has to vote in Australia, the law says, and the preference system drafts nearly all votes into the Liberal-National coalition’s bag or Labor’s, like outback merinos ready for docking or dipping.
Yet the government often still often does not get a majority. The Parliament has two chambers and in the upper House, the Senate, each state has 12 seats of which usually six are contested each general election under a semi-proportional system that virtually ensures small parties get seats.