There has been much grumping that Winston Peters and New Zealand First, with a 7.2% vote, decide who leads the government. That’s MMP.
These grumpers, who tend to be beneficiaries of the current economic paradigm, brush off the two democratic votes for the MMP system, in two referendums in 1992-93 and one in 2011.
To borrow the formula for English monarchs: the Maori party is dead; long live the Maori party. But who will the successor be?
That is the question Tariana Turia, Pita Sharples, Te Ururoa Flavell and Marama Fox leave behind them at their party’s tangi.
In Treaty of Waitangi terms that is both an article 2 and article 3 question.
While politicians dance their coalition gavotte, there is time to ponder big issues.
Election campaigns foreshorten policy horizons from causes to symptoms in pursuit of here-and-now votes.
But the looming 2020s are likely to continue the digital reshaping of our lives and require major policy adjustments in tax, regulation, economic management and social services, assistance and equity.
National operates on the principle that in politics there is only first place because that is where the power is. So assume Bill English is prepared to pay what it takes to get Winston Peters on board.
Peters meanwhile has adopted his habitual sphinx-like position. It may be some time before we know for sure the government makeup.
Here’s Labour’s tax slogan: “Let’s do this but not yet and maybe not at all.”
Last week Labour pushed the panic button — a week after Steven Joyce’s backfired panicky attempt to dig a big hole in Grant Robertson’s fiscal numbers.
Helped from the sidelines by Winston Peters demanding Labour come clean, Joyce’s “show us the numbers” tax assault forced a Labour retreat to safe ground. National might want Joyce as campaign chair next time after all.
In the back rooms, some public servants say, Steven Joyce can be a bully. This past week bully Joyce has been roaming in the open.
He even infected the usually (though not quite always) courteous Bill English. National turned into the nasty party.
Result: National looks discombobulated. Result: some voters sense National thinks it might lose. They look around.
There is one certainty in this election of upsets, diversions and sudden career endings: Parliament will be younger. The under-40s will swell in number. So will the lower-40s.
Already there are 11 under-40 MPs: four in Labour, including its leader, four in National, two Greens and one in ACT.
On parties’ recent polling averages up to late August that would double to at least 21 — more than one-sixth of Parliament.
A question hung over Bill English on stage on Sunday at his campaign launch: will he be in Parliament three years from now? He has been there 27years already.
If Jacinda Ardern is Prime Minister, he will surely not want to stew in opposition. Note in that light a TV1 poll published Sunday showing a massive party vote swing in Whangarei from 50%-18% National-Labour in 2014 to just 41%-37%.
The good news for Labour at its campaign launch on Sunday was Jacinda Ardern: sure-footed, traditional-and-modern and an overflow crowd ranging from fired-up to goggle-eyed.
For that crowd Ardern personified the change they want and sense but thought till three weeks ago was beyond the horizon.
She asserted Labour tradition, invoking Michael Joseph Savage, Peter Fraser, Norman Kirk, David Lange and Helen Clark (in the audience supporting her former staffer).
Economies don’t work quite the way they used to. Will Labour convincingly address that at its official campaign launch on Sunday?
A clue to this change is in differing messages from Steven Joyce, Finance Minister and National campaign chair, and Graeme Wheeler, soon-to-depart Reserve Bank governor.