Six years ago the Labour party promised 95% of people would pay no more income tax. Some promise.
Labour’s ploy was to reassure the great majority of taxpayers, in the face of its promise to tax income over $60,000 (the “rich”) an additional 6, that it would not be an old-fashioned tax-and-spend government.
Fairness is a good word, is it not? A core value of this egalitarian society of ours? Maybe not.
The Labour party claims a political monopoly on fairness. That is what the party was set up to bring about, what it created the welfare state and passed workplace laws to deliver.
More recently Labour has added “opportunity” to get “fairness and opportunity”. How’s that for a mouthful?
This year is the halfway point in the 2000s decade. It is also a decider in the contest between the two big parties to be lead party for the next while.
National was the lead party in the 50 years to 1999. Though towards the end its grip was shaky, the odds in 2000 were it would reassert its grip. But Helen Clark’s Labour party has stolen a march.
What on earth is this “work-life balance” the bureaucrats are working on? Doesn’t it presume work to be the antithesis of life? Sounds like more Labour social engineering.
And how does such social engineering enhance productivity growth, now the government’s No 1 economic management priority? Telling people work is not life is hardly likely to spur effort and innovation to make the workplace more productive.
Go back 15 years. The Labour party was within a year of its second election in power. Five years later it was running third some of the time behind a party led by its self-exiled president, Jim Anderton.
Party conferences in that period were small and scratchy gatherings of the pathologically loyal. Some MPs, including one who is now a senior minister, contemplated life as a small, pure party slightly to the left of the centre, akin to the Socialist party in Italy.
Everyone has to vote in Australia, the law says, and the preference system drafts nearly all votes into the Liberal-National coalition’s bag or Labor’s, like outback merinos ready for docking or dipping.
Yet the government often still often does not get a majority. The Parliament has two chambers and in the upper House, the Senate, each state has 12 seats of which usually six are contested each general election under a semi-proportional system that virtually ensures small parties get seats.
Trust is not a word to be tossed around in politics. Voters say they don’t have much trust in politicians. But trust is at the core of the impending Australian election.
The issue is how much the Labour party’s new leader Mark Latham can be trusted — not whether he keeps promises but whether he has the experience and level-headedness to run the country. The incumbent Liberals will pound this hard.
Next month Don Brash is due to launch the third of his king hits, on welfare. Two more are to follow, on education and the economy. By the end he will have a sort of “credit card” of five slogans National will take to the 2005 election.
This is in the tradition of modern election campaigning: embed in the minds of winnable voters a few simple big ideas which trigger an emotional or sentimental response. Labour did it in 1999.
This month there will be much reminiscing on the 20th anniversary of the election of the fourth Labour government which turned this country inside out. But there is a 30th anniversary the National party might recall as it gathers for its conference on 9 July.
It was on that day in 1974 that Sir Robert Muldoon was elected National’s leader. It was a fateful appointment. The party is only now emerging from the after-effects.
Would a Don Brash government soothe business’s fevered brow? Answer: we can’t say for sure, yet.
Surely that’s preposterous. Brash is nearer mainstream ACT than mainstream National, so definitely business-friendly. He has personal authority. Surely, all will be well.
First, note National will not govern alone when next it wins office. It is also very unlikely to be governing alone with ACT. Any other partner will pull National towards the centre, though United Future is more business-friendly than New Zealand First.