Mind the gap, they say on London tube station platforms. It is a good rule for watching politics, too.
There is always a gap between words and actions, in time and in substance. How big the gaps are can decide a government’s lifespan.
Some gaps are intentional, or at least convenient. Politicians can use a dislocation between rhetoric and reality to channel public opinion.
Friday is Australia Day. Why bother about that? Because Australia is part of us and what Australia does has great importance for us.
Australia is part of our history and culture. British interests were administered from New South Wales before the Treaty of Waitangi and New Zealand was at the federation talks. We share a great deal in language, institutions and British heritage. We share people. We down tools with Australians to watch the Melbourne Cup, as if it was ours (and it often is).
Modern mainstream politics is “values” politics. That leaves much room for manoeuvre. Choose your value and choose your policy to match. The focus is on outcomes.
“Values” enabled Tony Blair and his “new” Labour party to adjust, or just junk, many fixed “old” Labour ideas in Britain and occupy the centre.
Picture John Key the kid: restless, not keen on lessons but sharp at them when focused.
How do we know this? From his inaugural Jenny Shipley lecture in December.
“Lectures,” he said, “have never been my strong suit� When I was a student at Canterbury University � if I thought a lecture would be deathly boring I went off to play squash instead. There were many deathly boring lectures.”
Where can Labour go that National cannot? Up on to the “sustainability” uplands, Labour reckons, and stake out heritage and identity there. Just the ticket for Waitangi week, when we wonder who we are.
John Key last week served up a summer smorgasbord: red meat for the hardliners (confiscate the Maori seats), some “Kiwi way” mashed spuds, a spicy curry of government failure (Corrections) and a nouvelle cuisine mix-and-match raided from Labour’s larder (fix the underclass, whence Key can claim he came).
Shock, horror, houses are unaffordable. Not as unaffordable as Australia but enough to de-gloss the supposed “Kiwi dream”.
This amounts to a newly sharpened division in our society: the have-house category is shrinking and the have-not-house category is growing.
This is no surprise. The income and wealth range (technically measured by the Gini coefficient) has lengthened significantly since the 1980s reforms. The best off have got relatively much better off.
If you have a parole system there will be mistakes. Psychology is an inexact art and humans are inexact practitioners even of exact arts.
So when someone on parole does wrong, the real questions are the design of the parameters and processes for granting parole and the care (or not) with which authorities have conformed to them.
How come Michael Cullen, who looks like the sainted Michael Joseph Savage, 1930s benefactor of the disadvantaged, is called Grinch and Scrooge? What got into his political DNA?
Cullen has spent massively on the very things Savage and his first Labour government cabinet made everybody’s birthright: education, healthcare, affordable rental housing and sustenance in adversity and old age.
If 2006 was Helen Clark’s annus horribilis, why did she end it so chipper? What does she know that we don’t?
What we know is that Phillip Field’s waywardness and her use of parliamentary funds for her 2005 election pledge card damaged her and her government.
What we know is that John Key freshens and moderates the face of the National party just when her government is ageing.
Numbers. Lots of numbers. That is one of business’s central needs from Helen Clark and Michael Cullen when they get back to the Beehive. Too much uncertainty is bad for business.
Why numbers? Because what ministers decide can change the operating environment. Government strategies, frameworks, plans and legislation have to be quantified into threats, taxes, costs, windfalls and opportunities if a business plan is to be complete.