Speech to Primary Resources Forum, 26 June 2002
So let me start with peasants. The peasants I have in mind are Michael Cullen’s. Well, not his exactly. They are the ones the Asian tigers pulled out from behind water buffalos to build electronic boxes. The ex-peasants’ productivity lifted dramatically and so did their economies’ economic growth rates.
Jim Anderton is right: our national anthem is a dirge and Pokare sounds heaps better. Air New Zealand understood its powerful nationalistic appeal when it made it its ad theme song.
Anderton sang Pokare when launching his third new party on Saturday, to make a point about the uniqueness of this country’s cultural mix. It is not a theme I have heard much of before from him.
If there is one thing that will bring Helen Clark down eventually it is hubris.
The Oxford Dictionary defines hubris as presumption, pride, excessive self-confidence. In simple parlance it means: too big for one’s boots.
Calling a snap election — and let’s be clear, that is what this election is — is an act of the Sovereign. Under our archaic constitution the monarch decides when to dissolve Parliament and so when you vote.
The teachers have a point: education is underfunded and good teachers are underpaid. But they are not supposed to be making this point before the government gets re-elected.
The government is frozen in the headlights while it shuffles towards election day. After the headlights, however, comes the big red bus.
The Greens want to genetically modify Parliament. That’s why there’s so much fuss about them.
They want to transplant an ecology gene into our two-legged wallet-and-welfare body politic.
The Greens acknowledge that traditional selective breeding of new generations of members of the old “grey” parties has had an effect. Labour is ratifying the Kyoto protocol and doing a raft of green things.
Ask business leaders what bunch has had the most influence on this government and there would be a chorus of “the unions”.
Just look at the rash of pro-union laws, from the Employment Relations Act to the renationalisation of accident compensation, with more to come.
Yet only a little over 20% of the workforce is unionised. Three times that number tell pollsters they approve Helen Clark’s administration so they must feel she is responding to their needs as well as those of unions.
The Greens are now a single-issue party. That is how they painted themselves last week and how their opponents will paint them in the election.
Actually, they are not a single-issue party. Over the 30 years since they exploded on to the electoral scene as the Values party, forcing a hurried lurch into environmentalism by the then thoroughly smokestack Labour party, they have broadened their reach.
The politics of the Budget are easy: promises of more of the same to come will win general electoral accolades. The economics are not so easy.
The Labour party congress last weekend displayed a party at the height of its powers, with a deeper and broader membership and reach into the public.
Labour is in part reaping a windfall from luck — rain and high prices for farmers have strengthened household balance sheets. But it is also reaping rewards from middle New Zealand for softening the pro-market policies of the 1990s. The public likes the moderate leftwards repositioning. Labour is likely to have more seats — perhaps even a majority — in the next Parliament.
The government’s health and education services are underfunded. That is what the next three fiscal years are about.
They are underfunded because the economy hasn’t been growing fast enough. So the next three economic policy years are primarily about getting the growth rate up.
And that means, Michael Cullen said — firmly divorcing himself from Laila Harre’s Alliance — squeezing social spending generally. “We are determined to keep money back for economic transformation,” he told journalists in the pre-Budget “lockup”, even while notching up sound, “conservative” surpluses now and for the future. In the Budget speech he said: “Our capacity to lift the sustainable growth rate will not be assisted by excessive growth in expenditure which squeezes out opportunities for contributing to economic development.”
Summing up the Skill NZ “New Directions” conference, 21-22 May 2002
Colin James’s summing up of first day of Skill New Zealand “New Directions” conference
I am the outsider here.
That is in part because I am a journalist, the “rapporteur” who is supposed to reflect back to you something of what you have been musing on — though I suspect through a distorting mirror. I am an outsider also because I am profoundly uneducated about education. These two days are a learning experience for me.