Parliament is back in business with National in charge to a degree not seen since first-past-the-post “parliamentary dictatorship” days — thanks to three successful gerrymanders and one failed one.
Two of the successful gerrymanders were National’s contrivances to get its loyalists to vote David Seymour and Peter Dunne in in electorate seats. ACT and Dunne could once get there without help but not on September 20.
The day after the election John Key said child poverty was his third-term priority target. Next day Bill English laid down the law to public sector chiefs about using a targeted “investment approach” to ease this political discomfort.
Investment, by contrast with spending, implies a dividend. That tougher way of thinking could, if boldly applied, significantly reframe policy decision-making — not just about “poverty” but across public policy out to the environment.
Labour has learnt — or should have learnt — that a new leader is not an automatic transit pass to the political uplands. But some leaders are uplands inhabitants whether or not their party is. How come?
Labour’s poll average was 32.5 per cent when David Shearer resigned. It peaked at 36.4 per cent after the leadership contest. It slid to 25.1 per cent in the election.
Labour leadership aspirant Grant Robertson told a blunt truism to Kathryn Ryan on Radio New Zealand the Monday after the election. “Politics has to be about more than elections,” he said. “It has to about being part of the communities we live in.”
The National party is part of the communities its many members live in. The Labour party (mostly) is not.
Government is always a balancing act. For this term the balance is between an urge in the National party for business-friendly action and staying in touch with the wider public.
It doesn’t matter for that balancing act whether National keeps its 61 seats in the final count or loses one. Young David Seymour, ACT’s third Epsom MP, will back deregulations and other business-friendly policies, such as the stalled redraw of the Resource Management Act to put the economy on a par with the environment and yet more labour market flexibility.
John Key got his best result: a majority on his own or with young David Seymour if National’s vote drops on the special votes as much as the half per cent it dropped in 2011. He didn’t need the Conservatives to keep him safe from Winston Peters.
In fact the Conservatives helped him by boosting the “wasted vote”, with Internet Mana and others, to 6.4 per cent. So Key needed only 46.8 per cent to break even and another 0.8 per cent for 61 seats.
John Key pulled the election date forward. He said it was to avoid clashes with likely global leaders’ visits after the G20 meeting in Australia in November. But clouds were looming too.
One was John Banks’ conviction, widely expected. By shutting Parliament in July, not October, Key avoided needing the Maori party for a majority for too long. September 20 also was sure to predate any significant effect on households of rising interest rates.
Who came down from the mountain last week carrying tablets of stone from which he read a fiscal sermon? Russel Norman. What’s going on here?
Norman’s sermon was to John Key and Bill English. It abominated election lollies of the income tax cut variety. Lollies, we know, are bad for our health. Income tax-cut lollies, Norman intoned, are bad for the nation’s fiscal health.
[Prepared for the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment]
A. The big picture
1. The geo-economic and geopolitical balance is changing rapidly. This is well known and has been rapidly and deeply altering the location of production and work. But it is changing the world in more than trade and economics.
China, India and other “emerging-economy” nations are demanding a bigger role in the rules, conduct and leading positions of international forums and organisations; the rules may change in ways that are suboptimal for New Zealand.
Associated with that, those countries will assert different forms of government and political organisation as the match for, or an improvement on, liberal democracy – China is demonstrating that in its resistance to real elections in Hong Kong;
Likewise they will assert different forms of economic organisation as the match for, or an improvement on, liberal-market-capitalism.
More new science and other innovation (one example: surgical and other healthcare procedures) will come from researchers in China, India and elsewhere.
That is, after half a millennium in which the “west” (western Europe and north America) has dominated the generation of ideas through new science and on how best to organise society, politics and the economy, that dominance is being, and will continue to be, challenged, modified and perhaps overturned.
The risk to New Zealand, which, being very small, needs a rules-based international order, is of an inappropriate or hostile set of rules or no agreed rules at all. It is not clear there an opportunity.
Whatever the result on September 20, John Key will start the next term with diminished personal authority. Our democracy’s health is also diminished.
Key’s inch-by-inch retreat to the point where his imagined leftwing conspiracy turned into a rightwing one and he had to sack — sorry, accept the resignation of — Judith Collins has reflected a trading-floor culture, not the disciplined executive management required of a modern prime minister.