One of Australia’s latte set’s favourite parlour games this year has been to speculate on John Howard losing his seat in the upcoming election: his electorate seat, that is, not just his Prime Minister’s seat in Parliament.
Psephologists say the demographics of his Bennelong seat on Sydney’s North Shore have been changing in Labor’s favour, thanks to immigration and boundary changes, making it marginal.
Back in the 1980s political theorists talked up “subsidiarity” — a clumsy French word depicting a future of government decision-making and action moved from central governments closer to where people lived and worked.
A Canadian coined an even worse word: glocalisation. The world was becoming more globally connected and interdependent but at the same time also more local: Kelloggs side by side with farmers markets tell the story.
Colin James on local government for Management Magazine September 2007
Most of what a local council does is out of sight or out of mind: up in the hills, down in the dumps or under the roads which are under the wheels. So when councils raise charges their unseeing captive consumers get upset.
As a result, over the next month a lot of grumpy people, especially grumpy business managers and owners, will vote for candidates they hope will rein back council spending and, with that, rates. These same people will also moan loudly if the out-of-sight bits — the infrastructure — are not up to scratch.
We used to talk about “managing” the economy, as if it was a project. Then we talked about the economy as organic, self-regulating and free as the breeze. But managed or free, the economy is a core focus of government — and critical to its electoral health.
In 1999 the economy was picking up after a low patch — but too late to offset the Shipley government’s third-term blues.
John Key will be lionised at the National party conference early next month. Don Brash picked the party off the floor. Key had it bouncing off the ceiling in the autumn.
Not since 1990 has the party felt so good about itself and so sure power is its for the taking. But it has work to do before it is ready to govern — not least in honing management at the top.
After the 2005 election Helen Clark swiftly stitched a deal with Winston Peters, the man who had spurned her in 1996. It kept her in office but it was like swallowing a dead rat, colleagues said privately.
John Key and Bill English have been working out how to swallow dead rats and telling their activists to prepare for it.
When is spending an investment? When it builds up capital stock and generates a return. Can the government think that way?
It can in the narrow sense of how the super fund is managed and to a small extent in financing infrastructure. But what about the “social” services which eat up the great bulk of its budget?
It’s Anzac month, time to honour the war dead and bother about Australia.
So Winston Peters will drop in on the fourth Australia New Zealand Leadership Forum in Sydney on the Sunday and Monday of Anzac week and head off on the Tuesday to Gallipoli for Anzac Day.
Peters has yet to impress Australian hard-heads. After his annual talks with Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer on 26 February there was some rolling of eyes at his handling of one of the most important men in the government of this country’s most important foreign partner.
Seat-of-the-pants entrepreneurs and by-the-rules professionals run very different businesses. Entrepreneurs can get it spectacularly right. And horribly wrong. It’s the same in government.
In small business the entrepreneur gets rich or goes bust. In large businesses the entrepreneur adds shareholder value or erodes it. In government the entrepreneur can do great good or great harm to large numbers.
The next few months will define John Key as opposition leader. Is he a pretty face, a marketing toy? Or does he point to a different way to think about the economy and the country? Or is he offering different management?
The politics of the 1980s and 1990s were the politics of competing ideas. “Efficiency” was the dominant driver of the 1984-92 reforms. Efficiency is at the core of the classical economics of the Chicago school of economic theory on which the reforms were based.