Expect to be assailed day-in-day-out in the election campaign with “social investment”. It reverberated through the National party’s conference. Ministers can’t get enough of the sound of it.
Even Steven Joyce, as hard-nosed a capitalist as you will find in the cabinet, spread “investment” through his commentary on the budget’s “social” bits.
Here’s an imaginary bill Labour and National could usefully join forces to pass after the election: tighter gun laws to stop people shooting themselves in the foot.
Bill English’s metastasising response to new evidence of questionable behaviour by junior, soon-to-be-gone MP Todd Barclay gave his conference delegates at the weekend cause to get a bit “paranoid”, as he puts it, about the coming election.
Three months out from the election the numbers are going National’s way. But are they going the right way for the longer term? How numbers are used is critical to good government, new research says.
The big-number economy story is that gross domestic product (GDP) was still rolling along up to March and in this quarter, too, indicators say, even if not rollicking at last year’s pace.
Rex Tillerson was here last Tuesday, days after the New York Attorney-General filed an action against the firm he headed.
The court document alleged ExxonMobil, of which Tillerson was chief executive before becoming Donald Trump’s foreign minister, used two sets of “proxy” numbers in its greenhouse gas accounting, one for investors and one for internal use.
Queen’s Birthday Weekend is over and new knights and dames quiver with pleasure and honour. The quaint endures even in the digital age.
Opinion polls tell us the republic is some way off. William, Kate, George and Charlotte keep us swooning.
But constitutions evolve. We live in a republic in all but form. When here, the Queen exercises formal head-of-state functions by courtesy of New Zealand law.
Steven Joyce’s well foreshadowed reshuffle last Thursday of tax thresholds, rebates and allowances tells us there is unfinished business from the Ruth Richardson era.
That business is not yet more deregulation and trimming of the state nor another “mother of all budgets”, Richardson’s 1991 attempt to drive Sir Roger Douglas’s revolution to new heights, or depths, depending on your perspective.
The usual stream of pre-budget dish-outs has this year swelled to a torrent. What’s up? An election.
In 2011 and 2014 Bill English asserted a virtue of not doing “election-year” budgets — not buying your votes with your cash, which he said Labour tried to do in 2008 en route to defeat.
It’s election time in big bits of Europe and nearing election time here. Is there an Emmanuel Macron lurking in our shadows?
Macron went from outsider to President of France in nine months and built from scratch around him a new movement, En Marche. Gareth Morgan formed a new outsider party last year but still has very little opinion poll traction.
The “Jacinda effect” appears to have wisped away. Here and there in the Labour party one can hear glum whispers of three more “long years” in opposition.
Likewise from “coalition” partner, the Greens — who, by the way, got far more in election donations in 2014 than Labour.
Colin James’s Otago Daily Times column for 2 May 2017
The budget is three weeks away. Money is being sprayed around. It’s election year.
Last week’s spray was the infrastructure spend, up a bit from the December Treasury update, half of the increase due to the Kaikoura earthquake.
Steven Joyce presented that as investment for the future. Labour’s Grant Robertson said it was catchup with the immigration flood.