Bill English is back. No, not the leader. The thoughtful, modern-conservative policy wonk.
Having mused on a career outside politics but not being of the age when cushy diplomatic posts or board appointments are bestowed, he has found redemption in education.
No, not his own. Others’. Though he has been educating himself in the process.
At one early ACT conference Rodney Hide and Richard Prebble were the after-dinner act. It was a laugh a minute, smart, intelligent and sharp, a great evening’s entertainment.
Hide, you will gather from that, has a great sense of humour, irrepressible like the rest of his personality, plus a skill at sound bites. He has huge energy. He has bravery, bravado and braggadocio.
Stand by for the Labour-Green government. It is just one of many possible combinations but it is distinctly possible. It is one with important implications for business.
The Greens’ impact is already visible in the outcome of the agreement after the 2002 election to cooperate on transport legislation. The Land Transport Management Act bears the marks in its extensive consultation requirements, accent on sustainability and demand management and exhortation to walk and cycle.
Next Monday will be the 20th anniversary of the night Sir Robert Muldoon called the snap election which changed this country. His slurring words that night spelt the end of his government and an era.
To view Muldoon now is to peer across one of the great divides in this country’s history, a gulf between the last British generation and the first truly local one.
Unions are about confrontation, carving holes in profits, right? Well, maybe not.
Some unionists have grasped that re-cutting the cake does not in the end lead to sustainable higher real wages. What does that is baking a bigger cake.
And that means forming common cause with enterprises to lift productivity and get more value-added from each employee.
Ian Templeton is the doyen of practising parliamentary journalists. He started in 1957, which far predates the 1966 arrival of the father of the House, Speaker Jonathan Hunt. But Templeton was not invited to the dinner last Monday evening to commemorate Parliament’s 150th anniversary.
Treating Templeton as inconsequential to its celebration — in fact, not inviting even the press gallery’s chair — speaks volumes for Parliament’s disconnection. Contrary to the pontifications of academics and public lawyers, the media here are not, at least in Parliament’s judgment, of constitutional value as links between people and rulers.
Will it work? Three years in the making, this is the government’s biggest throw of the policy and political dice, a massive redistribution in favour of some battlers.
Sounds like old Labour. The better-off and companies get no tax relief. The poor get a higher floor under their living standard and 300,000 families get help from the state.
If you didn’t yet know, the Budget should drive it home: give up on tax relief. Michael Cullen’s message is to tap into the burgeoning business assistance programme — and to lift productivity.
Cullen spent a whole page of his 15-page speech arguing that this country’s company tax was not out of line with OECD rates and less burdensome than Australia’s.
Colin James PREVIEWING the Budget for the NZ Herald for 27 May
Today’s Budget will be just prudent and no more. It is time for Labour to strut its social democratic stuff.
Hitherto Finance Minister Michael Cullen has been wary of too much spending because he has wanted to be confident the operating surpluses the Treasury has been projecting will materialise.
This is a taxing government. It is not rapacious but it has a bias towards more tax, not less. Thursday’s adjustment of tax on working families with children does not change that.
The long list of Michael Cullen’s rises in tax and government charges is now regularly recited by National and ACT MPs, with United Future chiming in in a minor key. At National’s southern regional conference in Queenstown on Saturday David Carter did just that, credibly also implying that more is to come. It went down a treat.