Maurice Williamson has a habit of chanting “roads” in rousing speeches to National party faithful and promising all of the petrol taxes to building them. Now Michael Cullen has (sort of) joined him.
A quietly triumphant Cullen declared that over the next five years he will spend $300 million more than the total of fuel taxes — and this coming year even more for a raft of special projects.
The government wants you to think of tomorrow’s Budget as the “investment Budget”. That’s right: spending is investment.
This is not ideology so much as it is language. Labour ministers woke up two years back to the need to sharpen the brand. And language is a big part of brand.
Need an ad break in the long-running Labour show? Some commentary a month ago suggested just that. Then, since modern media attention spans are short, there was the Labour recovery-of-nerve cameo.
Last week it was another episode in the Don-Brash-dead-and-buried series after a badly bungled press conference and photographs of him walking the plank. Brash’s Jim Bolger-brought-up chief of staff, Wayne Eagleson, should have managed better.
It is a sport to snort at Gerry Brownlee. He is a bit Billy Bunterish. He got well snorted at when he called for a constitutional debate a week or so back. Wrongly.
Brownlee went off-key with an injudicious comment that sounded as if National might back off from abolishing the Maori seats. The news media pounced, Don Brash demurred, the policy stayed, the Maori party got angry — and the deeper point got lost in the melee.
Stand by for an overhaul of seriously old property law. The government is at last moving on a 1994 report of the Law Commission — thanks to last year’s hairline election result and the irrepressible Sir Geoffrey Palmer.
Politicians of all stripes have two large pigeonholes — one to stuff with reports they can’t find the time to action and one for hiding reports they are too scared to action.
The economy — so far — is refusing to lie down to order for a National win in 2008.
Of course, there are plenty of economic numbers to give Don Brash, Bill English and John Key reason to think that households will start to hurt later this year and thus that the polls will shift their way and build a lead too long for Helen Clark, Michael Cullen and Phil Goff to claw back.
Is John Key a radical? Sometimes he sounds as if he is. But radicalism is not a recipe for a long spell in government. So the John Key you mostly get is non-threateningly middle-ground.
This dual political personality will be on show today at the National party’s northern regional conference.
With the troops over coffee and muffins Key will be the extraordinary ordinary man, star attraction but also easygoing and superapproachable — the magic elixir of major party political leadership.
If today you are tempted to celebrate war, scan Alan Marriott’s little book, Mud Beneath My Boots.
This matter-of-fact account of life and death at the front in the first world war by an rank-and-file participant reminds that for at least the past 150 years war has been a rotten experience for all but a few (notably Adolf Hitler) of those condemned to do the fighting.
A book review for the NZ Herald Perspectives book page 21 April 2006
Political Leadership in New Zealand
Edited by Raymond Miller and Michael Mintrom
Auckland University Press, 262pp, ISBN 1-86940-358-4
[This is the full version. The Herald published a severely truncated version.]
Do you agree that “political leaders are created, maintained and brought down by the media”? Or do you think you might have a say? And that intrinsic abilities and values might be ingredients, too?
In 1999 at Seattle anti-globalists began to proclaim imminent counter-revolution as the World Trade Organisation trade liberalisation talks collapsed.
In 2003 at Cancun their triumphalism waxed when the G20 (“group of 20”) less-developed nations stymied cynical big-economy manoeuvrings.
Books were written, by John Ralston Saul among others, pronouncing globalisation dead and nationalism resurgent.