Who does the cabinet think is the most important visitor this week? Indonesian President Wahid, who is on the skids? Or Sir Tony Atkinson?
Sir Tony Who? What’s he got that warranted a meeting with the full cabinet on Monday afternoon, dinner with selected senior ministers on Monday night, a meeting with the Labour caucus yesterday morning — and star turn at a day-long seminar on Friday, at which Helen Clark will deliver “a vision for social democracy in New Zealand”?
What’s going on? The government should be losing ground in the polls but over the past month it has gained.
The health sector is in uproar and the government’s response is to gag (it is a gag, whatever weasel words Annette King envelopes it in) the hospital chief executives who can’t make ends meet because costs, in-part government-imposed, exceed government-supplied revenue.
A year ago a disastrous series of misapprehensions was in train which eventually scythed the top off Local Government New Zealand (LGNZ), the local bodies’ umbrella organisation.
It was all about how the Prime Minister came to be double-booked for the local government conference in July and for one of her sacred holiday breaks. Innocent and guilty alike sizzled in the conflagration.
A day with the Greens is bracing, lashings of icy air, apocalypse and utopia.
The Greens, like many small parties before them — for example, the Social Crediters, now submerged in the Alliance — have the luxury of certainty of their analysis and prescription.
Unlike the Social Crediters, however, they can draw comfort and reinforcement from recent history’s march, now quickening with global warming, towards their thinking.
It is a fact of life that brazenness is an ingredient of durable governments. This one is already showing signs it has got the hang of that.
A year ago Prime Minister Helen Clark seemed to be firmly putting parental leave off the agenda for this parliamentary term.
The Alliance, low in the polls, was pushing parental leave as one of several ploys to get public traction. But business was in a frenzy over taxes, ACC and the Employment Relations Bill and parental leave talk ran counter to Clark’s need to lower the temperature on the business front.
Bill English is not a great self-trumpeter. He’s more believable in a low key. Trumpets make noisy politics. His strength is in the subtleties of strategic policy.
Largely unnoticed amid the big brass Budget fanfares, English has been tinkling out a melody of National economic policy renewal.
On Budget night leader Jenny Shipley banged on about the low-paid. That’s defensible — just — as an attempt to wedge the government away from its core vote and English dutifully hums along.
Last year’s Budget was the one to win the 1999 election. This year’s bypasses the 2002 election in the cause of long-range “economic transformation”. But it is trying to do it on the cheap and without using all the available tools.
Michael Cullen wants a high economic ranking — the top half of the OECE in per capita GDP — so the country can return to a high social justice ranking.
Tomorrow’s Budget comes almost exactly at the midpoint in this government’s (first?) term. And, just as last year’s, it comes in a bad patch for the government.
The roll call is lengthening: the community card mistake, declining economic confidence, the secret deal with John Yelash, a poll majority against dumping air combat capability and, in a reprise of May 2000, a standoff over parental leave between Helen Clark and the Alliance�s Laila Harr�.
Random thought, 18 May 2001
It is part of the political folklore in the Alliance and other places that Labour and the Alliance scrap over some of the same votes. Thus when one goes up, some of that is won at the other’s expense.
And intuitively, this folklore seems to hold merit.
Moreover, in the mid-1990s it did seem from the polls that Labour’s recovery leading up to the 1996 election was at least partly at the Alliance’s expense.
Now you know the cost of Helen Clark’s occasional penchant for playing the person instead of the ball. You pay $55,000 for her calling John Yelash a “convicted murderer” when he was convicted only of manslaughter.
I say “occasional penchant” because it has not yet become a trademark as it did for Sir Robert Muldoon, the last Prime Minister to use personal attack as a weapon with the steeliness Clark wields it.