If all goes to plan Pita Sharples will have a new trophy to take to the Maori party’s annual meeting on Saturday: a constitutional review. It’s been a long time coming.
Hone Harawira last week put it this way: “The Maori Party will lead a constitutional review with a view to ensuring the Treaty of Waitangi is at the centre of that discussion and, hopefully, becomes a central plank in a Treaty-based constitution.”
Most of politics is problem. Can it be opportunity instead? That was a challenge to Labour at its conference at the weekend. It is National’s challenge as ministers start to make their bids for next year’s budget.
The local elections were a flicker of both problem and opportunity. For Labour, opportunity: Len Brown, Celia Wade-Brown and a better “left” showing than Labour dared hope for — but councils spend 3 per cent of GDP and local elections mostly reflect local factors. For National, problem — but John Key’s poll results, while a bit down, are still stellar.
There is a tactical reason and a strategic reason why Labour will keep hope alive at its conference this coming weekend. The tactical reason is John Key. The strategic reason is its backroom work.
Now and then Key miscues. There are gaps in his knowledge of politics, of this nation and of what being Prime Minister entails.
While Bill English was busy telling you last week how, thanks to him, you are much better off this month, Simon Power was busy honing a bit of the constitution and busybody lawyers were busy telling us English, Power and Co are constitutional truants.
Cutting corners on constitutional niceties is an occasional characteristic of John Key’s cabinet. Example: Associate Minister of Local Government John Carter chaired the parliamentary committee on Auckland legislation in breach of a convention that backbenchers must chair committees.
On Friday prices go up. Well, they go up all the time. But this time the government is raising them — with your best interests at heart. Maybe.
You will find that, all other things being equal, the price of something in this country will be 4.5 per cent more than in Australia, where GST is 10 per cent. Add this to the 30 per cent or more difference in the gross wage or salary you could get in Australia and ask yourself why you haven’t skipped westward.
Three strikes and you’re in. That was how Rodney Hide billed ACT’s three strikes prison policy. We now know the “in” referred to Parliament and the “you” was David Garrett. It worked a treat.
Hide recruited Garrett’s hard law and order line to build ACT’s vote. Two seats became five. But Garrett did not act out ACT’s open, transparent politician line and neither did Hide. Add Hide’s gallivanting last year and Heather Roy’s dumping last month and is that three strikes?
The big quake was in 2003. There was an after-tremor last week but nothing broke. But lying under the silt is another faultline, ready to facture.
This is not about Canterbury. Last week’s column had to be filed before Saturday’s massive shock. Nothing can be added that hasn’t been said. Wellington dwellers have been reminded how precarious their perch is and have seen the huge cost in money, assets and personal wellbeing.
You might call it socialism with New Zealand characteristics: lashings of taxpayer money to lucky or shrewd depositors in shoebox South Canterbury Finance who have been creaming high interest, coupled with respite for “underwater” farmers who made bad purchases and businesses which made bad debt decisions.
The “recovery” has gone patchy. Not surprising, after the biggest financial crash in 70 years, perhaps of all time. But what are we supposedly “recovering” to? That question will dog economic policymakers for some years ahead.
It has been obvious for at least 18 months — arguably five years or more — that we are not going back to business-as-usual. There will still be economic growth but it will be qualitatively different from the 1990s and 2000s.
Big parties have radical fringes. Small parties have fundamentalists and realists.
Deep greens left the Green party while it was inside the leftist Alliance. The Alliance split when its fundamentalists rejected Jim Anderton’s compromises with Helen Clark. Now ACT is in the same grinder.
The dividing lines are not black and white and are as much by personality as principle. Rodney Hide is expansive, bouncy, rummages through ideas and leans to the realist side. Heather Roy is gritty, less intellectually supple and leans to the fundamentalist side.