The next two weekends will contrast the strong and the weak. The weak will be Labour on July 5-6. The strong will be National this coming weekend.
National’s strategy this term was to generate “results”. And it has, including roads, welfare, hospital operations and school qualifications. Middle New Zealand may not recite the detail but probably gets some sense of a programme.
Opportunity or omen? John Key will meet United States President Barack Obama on June 20 United States time, 11 days after a seismic shock in Iraq — and, coincidentally, eight days before the 100th anniversary of Gavrilo Princip’s assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which triggered world war one (WW1).
In the big rich world money is ultra-cheap. Here the Reserve Bank kept its official cash rate (OCR) at an emergency low for three years until March. One result has been house price inflation which has been bothering Graeme Wheeler.
Wheeler will make his next pronouncement on Thursday. That comes after financial market players, taking notice of the dizzyingly high exchange rate, lowered their expectations of how far up he will take the OCR through to early 2016. Wheeler even tried to jawbone the dollar down a bit last month.
One thing Labour, the Greens and New Zealand First — and even the Internet Mana shack-up — can agree on is that too many can’t afford to buy a house right now. National agrees, too.
The four bigger parties also agree that a major factor is that supply is not matching demand. So why not a cross-party agreement on what to do?
If there is a “peace” party in Parliament, it is the Greens, even though Keith Locke has left politics. So it was logical Kennedy Graham questioned John Key last week on killing people with remote-control drones.
Graham asked Key if he would “instruct our intelligence agency to adopt a policy similar to that of its German counterpart, which rules out the possibility of shared information being directly used in a United States drone strike against one’s own citizens”.
Bill English’s sixth budget was an election-year budget in three respects.
First, it doled out some cash, mainly to take gloss off opposition parties’ election promises and medicate some itches. This doesn’t compare with Labour’s 2005 middle class welfare splash, including making student loans interest-free. But English did have an eye on September 20.
The big budget news is another step towards rescuing “vulnerable children”. It is still far short of last November’s cross-party Paul Hutchison parliamentary health committee report’s recommendations and is mostly cash spending. But it marks a shift of focus.
The Hutchison report’s challenge was to invest in children from early in the womb and in their first years. The government is still chary at interfering at those critical early stages. But the budget talks specifically of “2000 6-9-year-olds” who “have had the worst start in life” and “will cost taxpayers an estimated $750 million in prison costs alone” and a great deal more in welfare, health and other costs.
Bill English will declare a budget surplus on Thursday. David Parker will declare that to have been done by smoke and mirrors. Who is right? Does it matter long term?
There will be a bit of creative accounting and forecasting, a nudge here and there, a spending or ACC or state-owned enterprise dividend forecast adjustment to squeeze out a small operating surplus.
What is common to the Len Brown, Judith Collins and Maurice Williamson scandals? In each case a Chinese was a contributing source.
This is not cause for Sinophobia, which Williamson has grumped about in the past and again last week and which lurks just under the surface of our vaunted liberal multiculturalism.
Shane Jones’s going was in character: hubris, self-belief and oratory. All politicians need those HSO characteristics but real top-notchers have a leavening of counterbalancing HSOs: humility, self-deprecation (John Key is good at that) and output.
Jones could never have been leader. His machismo didn’t fit in a party still quaintly majority-fixated on identity politics. He had too much of the first HSOs and too little of the second HSOs.