The hard test for the government in next month’s budget is whether it can look past fiscal consolidation to the future.
Bill English restated his Presbyterian message to public servants last Tuesday. They packed the Beehive Banquet Hall, a phalanx of chief executives, luminaries, not-so-luminaries and unionists from the Public Service Association, to hear him tell them they have 10 years ahead of constraint and pressure to do “more with less”.
The big news last week was not Darren Hughes’s dalliance. It was the passing of the Marine and Coastal Area (Takutai Moana) Bill. Hughes is ephemeral. The indigenous rights push has a way to go yet. Iwi are here to stay.
The big buzz around Hughes last week was how ephemeral Phil Goff is. The real 2011 worry for Labour is whether its vote goes down or up on November 26 and whether changing to someone — anyone — else makes it less likely to go down or at least likely to go down by less. That anyone else has to be prepared to be expendable if the result is still bad.
This week Auckland takes the outline of its new plan public. What’s that to Otago? Quite a lot.
Having shoved Auckland together, the government in Wellington now has to work out what to do with it. Auckland’s future is not just Auckland’s. It is New Zealand’s.
That is, Auckland’s future is Otago’s.
This week Rodney Hide is due to table his Regulatory Standards Bill. His deputy, John Boscawen, is nearing the end of a far-reaching review of consumer law. These are important measures and ACT has the portfolios.
Hide’s bill will aim to legislate more rigour in lawmaking. National leans in that direction but does not want to be as prescriptive as ACT wants. The bill will go to a select committee for hearings but will not be passed this year, though there is a good chance a milder version will pass next year.
A big hole opened up in John Key’s cabinet last week. It is a hole he will not fill readily. The hole will be dug by Simon Power (41, going on 55) when he leaves Parliament at the election after only one term as a minister. Key was “stunned”. Bill English loses a political and personal friend.
The contrast between John Key the yet-to-become-statesman and John Key the one-of-us team-leader is striking. We saw both in two weeks.
Last week I said Key’s jokes and platitudes were inappropriate at the first address to Parliament by an outsider. I said Julia Gillard (she of the grating accent) demonstrated a much better sense of occasion. I said Key could do with a speechwriter and coach.
Someone should tell Julia Gillard that the real links between our two countries are not killing and blood on “sacred ground”. Someone should get John Key a speechwriter and a coach in delivery.
Gillard’s otherwise uplifting speech misrepresented history with sentimentality about “young men in trenches”. The shared history actually started with men, women and children in ships pursuing hope in new colonies. And after the trenches of the first world war our two countries drew apart. In the second world war Australia deeply resented that New Zealand left most troops in Europe when the Japanese were in the neighbourhood. The two countries still have divergent perspectives on security and the region.
Julia Gillard drops in tomorrow for two days. It will be much more show than substance but there is substance in the show.
The show will centre on Prime Minister Gillard’s speech to Parliament, a first for a foreign notable, though Australia’s Parliament once hosted the United States and Chinese Presidents in close succession. MPs will experience first-hand Gillard’s grating heavy Oz-speak accent.
The elite go to the Governor-General’s garden party on Waitangi Day. For a sense of New Zealand Porirua’s Festival of the Elements is more instructive.
The weather elements on Sunday were a buffeting wind and drizzle. The city’s elements were a wide range of events, in Te Rauparaha Park, the next door arena, a nearby stadium and the excellent Pataka museum.
Is the cabinet going green? You might think so when Finance Minister Bill English drops into the National party’s Bluegreens ginger group conference to make the announcement that there is to be a green growth advisory group.
Does that mean Environment Minister Nick Smith, who first proposed this group a year ago, has slipped sandals on the dour Southlander? And look whose name was with English’s and Smith’s on the press release? Dig-it-all-up-quick Gerry Brownlee, Economic Development Minister.