MPs are slowly getting the hang of managing MMP. Another couple of Parliaments and they may be there.
What has held them up — those in the two old parties at least — is that they have been responding to the incentives of the old system. In making her unspoken but nevertheless unmistakable bid for a majority, Clark displayed that mentality.
Who owns the under-30s vote? Nandor Tanczos, say the Greens. This icon of Greenery is anti-establishment, modern, different and attractive.
But will the Greens own these people when they get to be 40-somethings, then 50-somethings, when they are the establishment of the future? Only if they offer them something more than Nandor’s youth, something that resonates deep down.
This is the stability election. Or so Helen Clark would like you to think. You are supposed to give her a majority to restore stability after the Alliance stuffed up and the Greens went ape.
Hang on a minute. According to the theorists who gave you the wonderful German MMP system, it was supposed to give you wonderful German stability.
Ask business leaders what bunch has had the most influence on this government and there would be a chorus of “the unions”.
Just look at the rash of pro-union laws, from the Employment Relations Act to the renationalisation of accident compensation, with more to come.
Yet only a little over 20% of the workforce is unionised. Three times that number tell pollsters they approve Helen Clark’s administration so they must feel she is responding to their needs as well as those of unions.
It will be a self-satisfied Michael Cullen presenting his third Budget on May 23. And with some cause: he has won a major argument.
Bill English has fallen into line on what is “prudent” debt. His fiscal policy, like Cullen’s, is now predicated on net debt of around today’s level, about 20 per cent of GDP. That ends the 1990s Bill Birch drive for ever-lower government debt.
Sometime this month Pete Hodgson will flesh out his Kyoto protocol strategy with some policy — not least, on who will get emissions credits and how they will be traded. That will stir another round of futile business resistance to him ratifying Kyoto.
Hodgson will argue, once again, that of all developed countries New Zealand, dependent on climate-sensitive exports, has most to lose from unabated climate change. Industry will argue that investment will dry up and some companies scarper if they have to pay for Kyoto and competitors in other non-Kyoto countries do not.
Can this government put it together with business? Surely last month’s outrage over the new local government and holidays laws put the kibosh on any such radical thoughts. But something has been going on in the underbrush.
The list of the government’s uncompromising policy positions is long: higher tax, renationalised ACC, a heap of workplace legislation with more to come, Kyoto, energy conservation, the native tree logging ban, the Resource Management Act (RMA), waste minimisation, more marine reserves, tighter takeover and competition rules, increased local councils’ powers and on and on.
OK, so Helen Clark’s heading for a second term in November. But with the Alliance split and the Greens stamping their feet, what sort of government will she have?
Come to think of it, what sort of government would Bill English have if he pulled off a win?
The answer is in one sense the same for both: coalition partners or supporters on their flanks that pull them away from the centre, without the balancing mechanism of centre parties common in European systems.
The government gets ever more deeply involved in the economy. No longer can this be classified as a “correction”, as Helen Clark used to say. The “rebalancing” formula she now uses looks increasingly like what happens on a seesaw, not on scales.
It’s all music to the Alliance and the Greens who want the government far more involved yet in commercial affairs.
Back in the bad old Bolger days, the big boys of international pharmaceuticals heavied a hayseed Health Minister on the government’s impudent purchasing practices. They even enlisted the United States Ambassador.
All they got was a polite hearing.
Around the same time a young minister was repeatedly white-anted by a dissenting associate minister to whom he was harnessed in coalition. He told his Prime Minister either the tormentor went or he did. The Prime Minister said it might be he who went and not the associate. He stood his ground and won.