There are two elections going on, now we are into the official three-month runup. One is a National election. The other is a Labour election.
The National election is about whether the tailwind generated by John Key and Bill English’s in-command economic management holds through to November 26. (Any input from the rugby world cup is likely to be transitory, provided National holds its nerve if the All Blacks bomb.)
National party conference delegates at last got their teeth into something halfway through John Key’s speech: they whistled, hurrayed and clapped delight at close supervision of youngsters on benefits.
After a day and a-half of dutifully enthusing at ministers’ recitations of their good works, they could, briefly, be themselves, that is, true conservatives, believers in an ordered society and in punishment or correction of those who do not fit. Here those misfits are on expensive benefit rolls. In Britain they more expensively torch, loot and kill.
You can forgive Bill English a little schadenfreude this coming weekend as he walks the floor at the National party ‘s conference. He will be among friends basking in National’s high polling and Labour’s travails. It’s nine years on from 2002.
That election destroyed English’s leadership of National, just as this coming election menaces Phil Goff’s of Labour. Politics is unforgiving.
The government is making some interesting choices about what to get done before the election and what to leave till after: KiwiSaver cuts legislated within hours of the Budget; rescuing “vulnerable children” delayed to next year.
It is making some interesting choices about whom it attends to: yes, sir, to more gambling licences for longer for Sky City in exchange for a convention centre (gambling and conventions make profits); wait in line, to vulnerable children (they are a cost).
Labour-type parties aren’t doing well in our part of the world and in many of our sorts of countries. Is this conservative triumph or are bigger forces in play?
In Australia Labor lost unexpectedly in Victoria and in a heap in New South Wales, is in deep trouble in Queensland, South Australia and Tasmania and in opposition in Western Australia and the federal party is polling at wipeout levels. Here Labour has averaged around 32 per cent in recent polls.
Policy moves in mysterious ways. What seems outlandish one decade can become settled the next: abortion, legal homosexuality, civil unions, the whacking ban. Next the idea of investing in children and young people?
Test this against asset sales and a capital gains tax. Half a decade ago they were both assumed to be suicide notes by any government that did them.
Hey, there’s a choice. National will flog off energy companies. Labour will tax for-rent houses. Each is playing to its own. Which is riskier? Which party is on top of the politics?
In January when he as good as committed his government to sell down its stakes in the four energy companies and Air New Zealand, John Key focused on debt.
There two Rahui Katenes on Saturday. One told the Dominion Post (so it alleges) that the WAI262 report released that day was “very political, weak and missed the point”. The other, in an official press release late on Friday evening, called it a “lightning rod for a pathway to partnership which reflects the constitutional promises made in the Treaty” of Waitangi.
Julia Gillard strewed apples before our Parliament in February: permission to sell them (sometime) to her sacred tribe. John Key took with him to the Australian Parliament last week a key to the medicines chest: permission (soonish) to regulate for his sacred tribe.
But there is a bigger question and it is bigger for New Zealand than for Australia: where does the “family” (as Gillard and Key call it) go now? Just keep to itself in its little suburban house or join with others in the neighbourhood in an extended family? Will big-sister Australia do that anyway and leave little-sister New Zealand home alone?
The Te Tai Tokerau by-election this Saturday is the fourth this parliamentary term and for once it is not Labour that is under pressure. Instead, Labour has something to gain.
By contrast, Hone Harawira has something to prove — and much to risk.
Harawira was within his rights and also democratically right to call a by-election. An MP who scoots from, or is dumped by, the party under whose banner that MP come into Parliament has lost a large chunk of democratic legitimacy. A by-election restores that legitimacy.