It’s the Queen’s official birthday today — a quaint tradition, like much of the monarchy. Her actual birthday is on April 21.
John Key is in sync. He quaintly revived the tradition of knights and dames. A fresh crop is just out.
But don’t let this medievalism distract you. Key is a constitutional reformer. It just happens that the Queen, while a target for republicans, is irrelevant to his brand of reform.
The Greens go to their midterm conference this weekend still on the fringe of the parliamentary system and never having had the influence on a government Rodney Hide has had with far fewer votes.
Three years ago climate change was running their way, Jeanette Fitzsimons was government “spokesperson” on energy efficiency, which yielded some dedicated spending, and Sue Bradford and Sue Kedgley got bills through the House.
Is the budget fair? The National party says emphatically it is. The Labour party says emphatically it is not. How can they both be so sure? Because inequality is not what inequality was.
Individuals on higher incomes get much more each from Bill English’s tax cuts than individuals on lower incomes. That’s not fair, says Labour.
Welcome to the Key-English tax world. The changes are the biggest since 1986 and bigger than analysts expected. But Bill English himself told the media they will change incentives “at the margin”.
This is the tension at the heart of the budget. Will New Zealanders give up their decade and a-half’s love affair with debt and houses and instead channel most of their tax savings into actual savings and actual productive investment?
John Key plausibly excuses the lack of strategic impetus in Bill English’s first budget last year on the grounds that he had to fight the recession. Now Key claims to be plugging the huge hole English left in that budget: innovation.
Key has discovered the economic commonplace that it is innovation, not bulk, that durably drives up real incomes.
This is John Key’s big month. The budget on Thursday week is the pivot of his government’s first term, a major test of his “ambition for New Zealand”. But what is his ambition?
His government is busy. The flow of legislative and regulatory changes designed to make doing business easier and more profitable and enhance sectoral opportunities has momentum. National parks are to be prospected and explored.
Trust is a vital commodity in politics. This is not trust as honesty. It is trust that the politician will act effectively and, broadly, in voters’ interests. Losing that trust loses office. A report this morning highlights a rising trust issue for politicians.
Phil Heatley showed us what political trust is. He spent small sums of taxpayers’ money on personal items. It was a lapse of personal probity and a bad look. But Key affirmed his trust that Heatley can do the job by reinstating him as soon as he had an excuse. Key calculated Heatley’s peccadilloes will not count against National in the next election.
Anzac Day has just passed, a reminder of a shared military disaster etched in two national memories. How much more will we share 40 years hence?
We will share many relatives. We will likely share more of each other’s economies as politicians work towards a single economic market (SEM). And then we might need a share of Australia’s fiscal loot.
Making policy is seldom pure. It is mostly the intersection of ideas, interests and votes, with ministers as players and umpires. It is a game for the strong and articulate.
Take “drivers of crime”. A year ago Simon Power, essentially a liberal, having spent the 2008-09 summer whipping up bills to whip criminals, summoned a high-profile conference on the “drivers”. But in December he was still whipping, conceding ACT a three-strikes bill and passing it on to prisons boss Judith Collins.
Just as policy wonks and scientists were settling in last Wednesday to plot how to ramp up research into agriculture greenhouse gas emissions and as business was yet again pushing John Key to delay the emissions trading scheme, Tokyo announced one.
New Zealand’s ETS is due to come into effect on July 1 for all sectors but agriculture, delayed to 2015, and forestry, in since January 2008. Delay now would need rushed legislation.