Did Helen Clark “win”? Yes and no. Even assuming she forms a government, she has some serious rethinking ahead.
She “won” by coming first in the vote on election night by a big enough margin to be sure (failing some new astonishment in the numbers) to have more votes than National in the final count.
After the binge election comes the economic slowdown. That will test the government’s mettle — and its fiscal solidity.
Whether it is eventually Helen Clark or Don Brash who forms a government — and the odds are it will be Clark — the easy life of high consumer spending, high profits and high tax revenue is over for now. It is time for discpline.
The star of the campaign has been John Key. The flop has been Winston Peters. The winner has been the election itself — interest high as it has not been in a long time.
And it has been the battle of the big fellas, evenly matched and both strong as we haven’t seen since 1981. The small parties are there and relevant to coalition-building but not the force of previous MMP elections.
The Economist magazine, shrine of deregulation and low, preferably flat, taxes is not usually Michael Cullen’s bible. But last week he grasped at its endorsement of his KiwiSaver to score a point off John Key.
Key, usually on the Economist’s side of the argument, promises to scrap KiwiSaver, Cullen’s tax-based toe-in-the-water attempt to lift individual saving in this grasshopper society. He has not yet offered an alternative.
The choice is simple: tax cuts or not; Treaty of Waitangi rollback or not; a fresh but unprepared face or not.
The “not” is a third term for Helen Clark. The alternatives are the Don Brash experience.
There are other dimensions. If you are especially bothered about energy over-use, bottom trawling, the biosphere, clean rivers, climate change, international capitalism, fat and sugar in food and the poor, your choice is automatic. So, too, if you are Maori and proud of it and angry about the foreshore — though every party vote you give that party is a vote denied to Labour in its battle with Brash.
Final in a series of five
No sooner has a party got on top than it has to work out how to stay on top. That requires constant replenishment. A durable government needs a strategic cabinetmaker.
Contrast two episodes from history.
By 1949 the first Labour government was in the last of its 14 years in office. It’s top six ministers had all been there since 1935. Prime Minister Peter Fraser could not bring himself to fire old comrades. It was a visibly tired and hidebound government.
Don Brash is 25 years behind the times and 25 years ahead of the times on “race”. How can he be both? Because these are revolutionary times.
Twenty-five years ago we were still securely British and the Treaty of Waitangi was a worm-eaten relic. Maori were honorary whites and those who refused that status and battled the Crown for return or retention of land were “radicals”.
Fourth in a series A farm girl leads the left party. A socialist preacher’s son leads the right party. We are truly the Antipodes.
There was a rule: farmers vote National. Helen Clark’s parents were National, her father a minor office-holder.
Clark went off to boarding school in Auckland, as brainy rural offspring did, even girls, then to university, where she got social democracy — bad enough to join the Labour party, stand for Parliament on the home patch in 1975 and become an MP in 1981.
Don Brash’s quaint, or disingenuous, comment on being courteous towards a belligerent Helen Clark was not just gender politics. It took us into a branch of one of the deep contexts of this election, our very liberal society.
The branch Brash touched on is civility. In our sorts of societies the rules by which we rub along have frayed, or seem to have. Deference, respect and courtesy seem to have vanished into “me”-centred consumerism.
Do you buy on brand or price? Are you what you wear and eat and groove to? Do you have to have the latest electronic techno-twist?
This is the modern language of politics. Parties now bother about brand and hire marketers.
Take leaders. David Lange was a brand, judging by this month’s public celebration of myth: anti-nuclear and stand-up-for-ourselves. Winston Peters is a brand: challenge, controversy, maverick, outspokenness. Don Brash came into politics as a brand: monetary disciplinarian. Peter Dunne became, briefly, a brand: commonsense.