Bill English, a Southlander, is fomenting aggro between the provinces and Auckland. This is an interesting tactic.
Of course, more people live outside Auckland than in it. And the JAFA syndrome is alive and well. But an aspiring Prime Minister usually seeks to unite, not divide.
And an aspiring Prime Minister seeks especially not to make Auckland a target. When tax-scourge John Banks is on the side of higher taxes, one ought to register that something is up.
Can this government put it together with business? Surely last month’s outrage over the new local government and holidays laws put the kibosh on any such radical thoughts. But something has been going on in the underbrush.
The list of the government’s uncompromising policy positions is long: higher tax, renationalised ACC, a heap of workplace legislation with more to come, Kyoto, energy conservation, the native tree logging ban, the Resource Management Act (RMA), waste minimisation, more marine reserves, tighter takeover and competition rules, increased local councils’ powers and on and on.
Pity the proletariat, the teeming masses with nothing to lose but their chains. They are losing their champions.
However the drama plays out in the Alliance now, the party’s hard-left council ideologues holding aloft the revolutionary standard are in real danger of oblivion.
It is now close to irrevocable that Jim Anderton will head a different group, perhaps constituted around the disgruntled Democrats, into the election and into the next Parliament. This move may come by end-April and may end “staunch” Laila Harr�’s cabinet career.
The Queen will come amongst us on Friday. This is a signal event.
OK, she’s not making a special visit to cheer up her loyal subjects. She’s en route to Australia to preside at the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting.
But she is our head of state and commands all due respect. It’s not often she trips out this far from her British fastness.
A spectre stalks Bill English: the National sympathiser who votes Labour to block out the Greens.
This sort of talk has been around for the best part of a year. It quietened after Jenny Shipley was dumped in October. But it revived when English and his party disappeared during the summer.
The line goes like this. Labour looks odds-on for a second term. The Green peril is on the rise. So vote Labour to give the Labour-Alliance coalition a majority and leave no levers in Green hands.
Now we have the government’s manifesto for a second term. That manifesto is: “Eat your cake and grow it, too.”
The innovation strategy announced to Parliament yesterday rejects any suggestion that hard choices are needed between social and environmental spending and economic policy if growth targets are to be met. All three will proceed in parallel.
Embedded in Prime Minister Helen Clark’s annual statement to Parliament on February 12 fleshing out her ambition to “transform” the economy will be lashings of private sector thinking.
This itself represents a transformation — of government-business relations. Two years ago ministers scandalised business with policies friendly to their core supporters but hostile to business. After the smoke cleared from that battlefield the government and some in business began gingerly to explore paths across no-man’s-land.
The Treaty of Waitangi was supposed, its British signatory famously said, to make one people of two. Today it signifies two cultures, not one.
And the unified power system imposed by the British assumption of government which the treaty legitimised no longer goes unchallenged.
That is biculturalism. Get it right and the future looks promising. Get it wrong and we risk a mini-Palestine.
OK, so Helen Clark’s heading for a second term in November. But with the Alliance split and the Greens stamping their feet, what sort of government will she have?
Come to think of it, what sort of government would Bill English have if he pulled off a win?
The answer is in one sense the same for both: coalition partners or supporters on their flanks that pull them away from the centre, without the balancing mechanism of centre parties common in European systems.
This non-nation will struggle through — or simply ignore, except as a holiday — its notional national day next Wednesday.
Twenty-nine years ago a nationalist Prime Minister, Norman Kirk, who made February 6 the national day, said the Treaty of Waitangi gave two peoples “the gift of opportunity”.