Steven Joyce’s well foreshadowed reshuffle last Thursday of tax thresholds, rebates and allowances tells us there is unfinished business from the Ruth Richardson era.
That business is not yet more deregulation and trimming of the state nor another “mother of all budgets”, Richardson’s 1991 attempt to drive Sir Roger Douglas’s revolution to new heights, or depths, depending on your perspective.
The usual stream of pre-budget dish-outs has this year swelled to a torrent. What’s up? An election.
In 2011 and 2014 Bill English asserted a virtue of not doing “election-year” budgets — not buying your votes with your cash, which he said Labour tried to do in 2008 en route to defeat.
It’s election time in big bits of Europe and nearing election time here. Is there an Emmanuel Macron lurking in our shadows?
Macron went from outsider to President of France in nine months and built from scratch around him a new movement, En Marche. Gareth Morgan formed a new outsider party last year but still has very little opinion poll traction.
The “Jacinda effect” appears to have wisped away. Here and there in the Labour party one can hear glum whispers of three more “long years” in opposition.
Likewise from “coalition” partner, the Greens — who, by the way, got far more in election donations in 2014 than Labour.
Colin James’s Otago Daily Times column for 2 May 2017
The budget is three weeks away. Money is being sprayed around. It’s election year.
Last week’s spray was the infrastructure spend, up a bit from the December Treasury update, half of the increase due to the Kaikoura earthquake.
Steven Joyce presented that as investment for the future. Labour’s Grant Robertson said it was catchup with the immigration flood.
John Clarke was an Australian. In death he was celebrated here as if he was one of us. This country is tiny. We have to live outside our shores as well as within.
Clarke was New Zealand-bred as a satirist and, some say, philosopher. But he went to Australia in 1977 and stayed there. New Zealand was too small. He became an Australian.
What is the link between social media and Easter? Don’t we live in a secular society now? Isn’t Easter just a paid holiday from work?
The answer is that six months from now will come the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s famous, and fabled, nailing of “theses” to a church door which sparked a revolution — via the still newish medium of printing.
Steven Joyce will by now have set the main parameters for his first budget on May 25. He will likely have ballparked the big spending and tax and rebate items.
Likewise capital and building allocations, including for regional development — for, say, South Auckland, where Te Papa has proposed a major branch museum in Manukau.
There no facts, only events. That’s the advice some years back from a Victoria University history academic who has published several event-filled books.
The point is simple. As time passes after an event the “facts” become less clear. Different “facts” and perspectives emerge as documents come to light, memories adjust or some speak out who hadn’t at the time or just because as time passes historians interpret events with new hindsights.
Is Bill English slipping behind the play? A 1990s cabinet colleague, Simon Upton, last Tuesday in effect said he is.
Upton was in Wellington to deliver the 2017 Organisation for Economic Development (OECD) review of our environmental performance.
Twenty years back English, a very-up-and-coming MP, used to say that for his generation the argument over the drastic economic deregulation in 1984-92 was irrelevant. A less regulated economy and smaller government was the way, the light and the truth.