To watch John Key right now is to watch the bland leading the bland. No horses are to be frightened before the election. Is this the man to take us boldly to a brave new world?
Marketing political leaders is routine. Remember the astonishing makeover of Helen Clark in 1996, the hairdo, the lipstick, the designer clothes. Remember the goofy Don Brash in 2005 concocted by marketers trying to make a populist of a serious man of ideas.
On Thursday Helen Clark goes past Sir Robert Muldoon to become the fifth-longest-serving Prime Minister (and sixth-longest head of government). Muldoon’s legacy was division and decay. Hers is still in the making and a big test is just ahead.
Part of her legacy will be on show this weekend in a rare visit by a United States Secretary of State (foreign minister).
Winston Peters has a problem: he is a populist with a dwindling popular base.
He built his base on the disorientation aroused in older people by the radical reforms of the 1980s and early 1990s and the spike of Asian immigration in the mid-1990s.
He wrapped that disorientation into the name of the party he founded when thrown out of the cabinet and frozen out of the National party. “New Zealand First” telegraphed a message of resistance to foreign influence over the economy and the reshaping of society by importing people of different cultures.
Why did so many people back Muldoon-era minister Tony Friedlander’s striking truck drivers even though it is better for them that truck companies pay a bigger share of the cost of roads? Because the truckers were giving the fingers to the government.
Large numbers of people are now doing the same or would like to. They automatically blame the government, regardless of whether the object of their grump is the government’s fault. How else could National get away with its gross exaggeration of the increase in education administrators and obtuseness over regulation of hairdressers?
The first need for any community is to keep its members safe from hunger, privation and violence. Without safety, coherence and prosperity are at risk.
Hence the stuttering debate about families who do not nurture their children. The children lose opportunity, the community loses a contribution and, worse, may take on heavy costs later if the child turns destructive adult.
Helen Clark, beset by John Key, is watching John Howard to see how (and if) he sees off Kevin Rudd this year. But some places Howard goes she can’t.
Howard’s latest cocktail of morality and politics is gobsmacking: send in police and the army to take the booze off Northern Territory Aborigine adults to cut down sexual and violent abuse of kids, which he calls a “national emergency”. Rudd has backed him.
Early this month some bigwigs in the climate change world were here for World Environment Day functions and they oozed praise for this country’s leadership. If they were to come back next year would they still be so airily congratulatory?
New Zealand is indeed a leader judged by prime ministerial rhetoric. But rhetoric is not action. And Parliament is deeply divided over action.
Worried about the exodus? Well, Australia is, too. And get ready to worry some more. That was a strand of discussion at the annual Australia New Zealand Leadership Forum on Friday and Saturday.
The forum aims to underpin the government-to-government relationship by bringing together politicians, businesspeople, academics and commentators. Now in its fifth year, it nearly collapsed after Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd landed his summit to plot Australia’s future on the pre-set April date and then Australian co-chair James Strong was too distracted to organise his side.
Alan Bollard’s job is to tame inflation. Sounds simple. But he has to do that for an economy which is a pingpong ball on the waves of the world economic ocean.
Michael Cullen has much the same problem, as Bill English will have if he succeeds him. At most a government in a mini-economy can adjust policy settings to optimise our capacity to make the best of human and other resources, whatever the world throws at us, good and bad.
What do Facebook and yesterday’s official Queen’s Birthday have in common? They are windows into our constitution.
Start with the Queen, dignified cornerstone of the constitution, anchor for tradition and symbol of the limits of politicians’ proper exercise of power.
Australia will likely remove that cornerstone if the Rudd government lasts a while. That will trigger debate here. Mike Moore, who sat in on Australia’s 1998 constitutional convention (as I did), wants that debate under way now.