The Labour party is now four years in opposition and two years away from its next bid. Its conference mid-month will be a measure of its transition.
Labour has to do four things: rethink policy; modernise its organisation; demonstrate it is a lead-government-party-in-waiting; and demonstrate it is assembling a government-in-waiting.
Graeme Wheeler is comfortably orthodox. Comforting to the cabinet, that is, but not to exporters — nor to the red-green-black trio of opposition parties.
The new Reserve Bank governor was clear in his first speech on Friday that his core role is to contain inflation, aiming at 2 per cent a year, perhaps a bit high in a deflationary global environment but lower than his predecessors’ record of mostly 2-3 per cent.
Yesterday was Labour Day — a day symbolic of a deep divide in our politics.
Folklore traces it back to Samuel Parnell’s demand in 1840 for an eight-hour working day. The first Labour Day was in 1890, actually a year of defeat for the union movement. It was Mondayised in 1899.
The Labour party owes its name to the wage labourers, skilled and unskilled, it was formed to represent. Unions channelled that support into the party organisation and Parliament.
Australian Treasurer Wayne Swan is contorting himself and fiscal numbers to get his promised budget surplus this fiscal year as his economy slows. Here John Key and Bill English are less adamant about making good their muscular election and May budget promises of a 2014-15 surplus.
Key and English have an advantage over Swan.
The United States says Kim Dotcom purloins intellectual property (IP). Well, he does seem to filch the memories of some who come into his orbit. Perhaps they are stashed in a dungeon at his mansion.
John Banks had a massive memory loss. John Key has owned up to a memory fade about a briefing from the Government Communications Security Bureau, which had a collective memory fade. Detective Inspector Grant Wormald’s memory seemed to skip a beat in court.
We celebrated Guy Fawkes yesterday. We condemn Al Qaeda and other terrorists for their murderous bombing. And we deplore a mine company which didn’t keep its miners and contractors safe. How come the difference?
Perhaps it is that Fawkes was caught before he lit the fuse to blow up the English Parliament. In that vein we might welcome muslim terrorists’ diminished capacity to kill innocents as a result of United States President Barack Obama’s drones killing leading Muslim assassins and wreckers and his sanctioned assassination of Osama Bin Laden.
One sad outcome of the Dotcom affair is that a rogue who should not have got residency has been transformed into a national celebrity.
A second sad outcome is that factual reporting of the affair in serious news media abroad pictures us as what Americans used to call hillbillies. The Crown Law Office, police, Government Communications Security Bureau (a systemic failure, by the way, not human error) and too-little-engaged ministers have dirtied the country brand.
Forget asset sales. Forget fiscal consolidation. Forget cows and oil. When the Key government is assessed at its end, its importation into some social policy of an actuarial/investment technique might well be judged its most important policy initiative.
This month Social Development Minister Paula Bennett will issue a white paper on a topic to which that technique is particularly appropriate: “vulnerable children”, whose rescue is becoming a major public management and long-term economic issue.
Last Wednesday John Key invited Winston Peters to read the books that say nothing can be done about the high exchange rate. If Key were keener on reading than he has shown in the case of John Banks’ damning police report, he might find there are now also books challenging the orthodoxy he is wedded to.
Relax. We are not going to fold into Australia. The two countries’ Productivity Commissions have let their Prime Ministers off the hook of deciding on a step-change or not. Our independent foreign policy is not at risk on that score.
Julia Gillard and John Key requested the commissions to jointly explore policy initiatives to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the 1983 signing of CER, the closer economic relationship agreement. Essentially in their draft report issued today the commissions say: stay on the same track.