Investment was back in the news last week on two counts. But more by implication than design.
“Investment” has a ring of substance and responsibility. Spending is of the moment.
Was the budget decision to junk the $1000 kickstart for KiwiSaver an investment decision — assessing the return on the investment to be too low — or a spending decision — saving money to help Bill English to a better fiscal balance?
Third-term-itis is an insidious virus. The latest symptom is Michael Woodhouse’s worms/minigolf/curtain-hanging list of dangerous workplaces. The virus can detach from commonsense those it afflicts.
Woodhouse is actually a sensible fellow with a background in practical business management.
But he needed Peter Dunne’s vote for the exemptions in his workplace safety bill required by constituencies such as farmers, constituencies the cabinet must keep onside to get a fourth term. That required exemptions to the exemptions.
As global economic events get bumpier, Bill English is getting fonder of economic “resilience”. But that requires more resilient strategic policymaking.
Top of mind in the economy is the dairy crash.
John Key airily said early this year that what went down last year would go up this year. Instead it has plunged more. Now some economists talk of “recession” — qualified by “possible”, true, but a word nowhere to be heard six months ago.
Almost all laws are intended to change behaviour. What if behaviour doesn’t change or changes only a bit or in a way the lawmakers didn’t intend?
Government agencies are required to implement laws as they are. They tick off “outputs” ministers contract them to do. But increasingly the focus is turning to “outcomes” — actual measured change.
Labour and the Greens, added together, have edged past National in opinion polls. And they have edged a little nearer each other.
First: Greens co-leader James Shaw scrubs up presentably to the sorts of people who usually think Greens are sandal-wearing ether-dwellers.
Second: Labour has pushed its trade positioning Greenwards. Labour still backs free trade in goods and services, which the Greens don’t. But it has turned much warier of the regulatory dimensions of modern “trade” agreements.
Minister of Local Government Paula Bennett often sounds like the minister against local government. Too much of this might play into Winston Peters’ hands.
Bennett’s favourite phrase for councils has been “loopy rules”. A group under MP Jacqui Dean hunting them out has received 2000 submissions.
John Key will be celebrated this coming weekend. The National party owes him. In the corners and corridors of its conference, though, there will be some pondering. Things are not humming so well now.
This is not a curtain call. The party still rides high in polls and Key’s personal rating, though down a bit, is multiples that of his rivals in other parties.
Colin James’s Otago Daily Times column for 14 July 2015
It’s flag-waving time: Tim Groser off to Europe to wave our climate change flag; Greece waving the socialist flag; and the last chance to wave your own flag at John Key.
Flag design submissions close on Thursday. Only 679 people have gone to public meetings. But online visits have topped 700,000 and around 6000 designs have been submitted. The distinctive koru is second after the Southern Cross and ahead of Key’s unimaginative fern.
Bill English told Australians last month his style was “incremental radicalism”. Is this an oxymoron?
First, some history. English was a new young MP in 1991 when Ruth Richardson plunged National into turmoil with her radical “mother of all budgets”.
He watched in dismay from the back benches as National’s vote plunged 13 percentage points in 1993 and as people seized the chance to vote against nine years of Labour and National radicalism by choosing MMP.
It’s the big end of politics that matters to people. It is the small end of politics that is usually engaging. So with the past fortnight.
At the small end have been Colin Craig and David Smol. At the big end have been Greece and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) — not to mention the serial Saudi sheep shenanigans.