Margaret Thatcher once famously said she intended to “go on and on and on”. She didn’t. Before the voters could throw her out, her party did. Having renewed their leadership, the Conservatives went on to win a fourth term.
Helen Clark is seven years into the job and she wants a fourth term badly. Can she get it without renewal? And if with renewal, how is that to be done?
Why do state and federal governments in Australia keep getting re-elected? Because it is hard to beat a government when the economy is going well.
The economy isn’t everything. Labour nearly lost in 2005 here amidst a rip-roaring boom at household level. Its drift from the centre on Maori and moral policy got National into the race. Then National offered a very big tax bribe as an additional dividend for households from the economic boom.
The Labour party holds its 90th birthday conference this month. What a difference 90 years makes.
In 1916 Labour was a party of grand ambition to change the world. It stood outside and against the establishment. Its greatest leader-to-be, Peter Fraser, was about to be thrown in jail for opposing an imperialist war. It wanted radical change in the ownership and organisation of the economy and equality in society.
To greenish liberals not of a Green or Labour stripe, National was too un-green in 2005. That cost National votes at the margin. It has to fix that for 2008.
National’s race issue was similar — too hardline for its liberals. As they did on the environment, most appear to have held their nose and voted National anyway — but some, the party post-election survey found, did not.
This time next year we may well be getting used to power cuts. That could be critical to Labour’s 2008 election chances.
The politics of electricity are the politics of rights. People have long since assumed a right to electricity on the basis of need akin to the claim to food.
So governments get no kudos if the lights, heaters and hot water stay on. But they get the blame for interruptions.
If you are National and not impatient, things have been going nicely for your party as you go to the seventieth anniversary conference this month. Your party is on track to government in 2008.
Of course, nothing in politics is automatic. Labour has plenty of fight left in it and is resourceful. So don’t yet rule out a fourth term for Helen Clark. But the signs have been accumulating this year that this is a farewell term.
Underneath the high diplomacy of prime ministers and presidents and the detailed diplomacy of the professionals lies “track 2”. It is a growing dimension of our outreach.
Track 2 is high-level people-to-people diplomacy: academics, business leaders, heads of institutions ranging from culture to economics, plus usually a media figure or two.
Better the devil you know than one you don’t. Twist that a bit and you get: certainty is (mostly) better than uncertainty.
Apply that to policy affecting business. Businesses can’t plan in a policy vacuum or flux. They don’t know what they might be up for.
Consequently, many in business wish the two big parties would form a grand coalition. Change would then be evolutionary and businesses would not have to bother so much about Wellington.
After the binge comes the hangover. Next month’s Budget is a case in point.
The 2005 election was a throwback to 1970s-style spend-it-all campaigning. National spent up to the eyeballs in tax cuts, Labour in tax relief via Working for Familes, interest rate relief via student loans and swags of money for hip operations and much, much else.
Big ideas are dangerous, especially in politics. Those who promote them are almost always demoted by the voters.
The exception is in revolutionary times, such as the 1980s. But even then the voters eventually took revenge. They crashed revolutionary Labour from 48 to 28 per cent between 1987 and 1996 and National, which continued the revolution, from 48 to 21 per cent between 1990 and 2002.