A large part of politics is management. Last week’s defeats on the new health bill exposed a failure of government management.
The ingredients were a too tight timeframe, inadequate select committee chairing within that timeframe, inattention by Labour to its partners and unseemly tantrums by the Leader of the House, Michael Cullen.
“She’s learning on the job,” says a Helen Clark insider. And she is. Just as she developed greatly in opposition, she is continuing to grow as Prime Minister.
In a sense that is unremarkable, since there is no complete apprenticeship for the job. High-quality stewardship of line portfolios did not give Jenny Shipley the required general management skills. Nor does a period of understudy as leader of the Opposition, though it helps.
United States Admiral Dennis Blair brought a subtler message last week than the one Helen Clark swatted away – one Ms Clark in a different guise might have run with.
Admiral Blair did not just say we should do more. That has become obvious from East Timor: having to scrape up reservists for that venture has uncovered a manpower hole in peacekeeping policy that has been known, but masked, for most of the past decade.
Published in the Independent on 22 November 2000
Michael Cullen once said to me early in Helen Clark’s leadership of the Labour party that she would much rather be in a backroom debating policy than putting on makeup and classy dresses. Last week a Brunei newspaper gushed over Clark as a “fashion model”.
On Friday-Saturday, hard on the heels of hard talk from United States Admiral Dennis Blair, the National party will run a defence seminar featuring the Australian Senate foreign affairs, defence and trade committee chair Sandy McDonald, a critic of the Clark line.
This follows Bob Simcock’s child battering conference last month. Similar ventures in other topics are taking place out of the public gaze. National is moving to redevelop policy and doing it intelligently.
The mood turned in October. You could feel it. Nothing spectacular but a palpable drop in anger and gloom.
It showed last week in one poll in a better rating for the government. Whether it is the start of a long upswing, as happened for Jenny Shipley twice from around this time of the year, we will not know for months. But it comes just in time to rescue this coming weekend’s Labour conference from untoward introspection.
Paul Swain told a hoary joke about speechwriting. Helen Clark was 20 minutes late and spoke woodenly. They seemed symbolic of missing, not catching, the jet to the wonder economy they were extolling at Mr Swain’s e-summit last week.
Actually Mr Swain’s ancient joke – the fired speechwriter’s final speech notes for a bullying minister list on page 1 an ambitious set of points the minister will make in the speech, then on page 2 say only “now you’re on your own, you bastard” – backhandedly underlined the e-economy’s unpredictability.
How come Maori and Pacific islanders got to keep the “gaps” all to themselves? There are many huge gaps for the government to close.
Gap No 1 is between our lifestyle aspirations and the earning capacity and savings inclination of most of our population. For a long time we have lived on foreigners’ savings.
There is a paradox at the heart of the government’s business policy. Council of Trade Unions economist Peter Conway fingered it on this page on Friday.
“There is a good argument for a quantum leap in economic development expenditure,” Mr Conway wrote, “but such notions have to compete with superannuation pre-funding as well as the spending pressures because of the huge social deficit that has developed over the past two decades.”
Matt Robson’s media profile is a reasoned advocate of enlightened treatment of criminals.
This is not a fashionable cause, even with his Labour allies in the cabinet. Characteristically, however, Mr Robson courts not popularity but rightness as he sees it.
This is the man who in 1989 gave up almost certain Labour candidacy for a safe seat to follow his conscience into minority politics. That marks him as unusual in a place where the main chance is the main course.