This is how MMP works: the government seeks out supporters for legislation and, if necessary, adjusts the legislation to secure support. The Foreshore and Seabed Bill is a prime example.
If the Labour party had a majority, as in the old days, it could ram through whatever it decided, subject to its desire to keep the Maori seats and its need to hold the non-Maori middle ground.
There is a skill governments attract: pitching a case just the right way to download some taxpayer money.
Governments don’t set out to foster the skill but it happens under all of them. Fill a bucket with money and schemers suss the criteria and build a case to fit — all by the book.
We’ve seen examples of that in the past couple of weeks: a hip-hip study, a personal degree, Maori and Pacific island lesbians’ and gays’ access to sport and culture — all in the name of social entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurial, all right, but not very social.
A couple of weeks ago Bruce Hawker dropped in for a chat with the Prime Minister’s advisers.
Hawker is an Australian political and public affairs consultant. He devised a strategy for the Bob Carr government in New South Wales to counter the inroads One Nation was making on race grounds into the Labour vote in the suburbs: tell those voters Labour was aware they had concerns, wanted to hear them and would address them. Carr got the suburban “wedge” back.
This last weekend was an anniversary of an event of high drama. Another looms, of a minor, but still important, event. Both have overtones not expected at the time.
The first was of the invasion of Iraq by United States President George Bush�s and British Prime Minister Tony Blair�s “coalition of the willing”. The coalition had overwhelming firepower so of course it won.
Let’s dispose of a red herring. A Maori party would not have won the foreshore/seabed battle for iwi and hapu.
Why not? It would have much more loudly represented tribal Maori views than Labour’s Maori MPs. Wouldn’t that have been a good thing?
Yes, as a vent. But a Labour-led government freed of the need to balance Maori interests against majority interests and deprived of the Maori vote would probably have bulldozed through much less friendly legislation.
They seek it here. They seek it there. They seek it everywhere. The constitution, that is. And just when they think they have got it in their sights, they find they are tripping over the Treaty of Waitangi.
The constitution has the hallmarks of a mythical spirit. It lurks in corners of libraries and the recesses of lawyers’ minds, for the most part out of sight as a silent behavioural guide but, when it emerges, a signal of crisis.
At the heart of the wrangle between Labour and National over the Treaty of Waitangi are “group rights”.
National is uncomfortable with group rights. It is the party of individualism. Labour embraces group rights. It was born of a belief that for workers to force concessions from bosses they had to act as a unitary body, with no scope for individuals to act differently — as the song says, “solidarity forever”.
ACT’s campaign slogan in 1996 was: “Values. Not politics.” It could have been made for Don Brash. Which spells trouble for ACT.
Had ACT loyally implemented its slogan, it might be going into its conference this weekend in Christchurch upbeat. Instead, having succumbed too often to populism, it comes off a month of plummeting polls, a write-in poll asking members if it should throw in the towel and merge with National and Rodney Hide coy about not challenging for leader.
On March 23 an official study into the quality of university research is due to be published. It may well not make reassuring reading.
Research is at the core of the government’s growth policy (though its spending is still below the OECD average, let alone compensating for the miserly private effort).
One poll does not a government make. But it can make a contest. National is back in the frame.
That gives us back the German model of two countervailing major parties, which is the logic of MMP, given our political history. The Scandinavian model of a dominant government and a fragmented opposition is losing lustre.