One of the government’s biggest tests this term in its quest to establish a durable majority will be welfare.
In the 1999 Speech from the Throne Helen Clark aimed to “correct” what she felt were the excesses of 15 years of reforms by free-marketeers and reducers of the state.
Today’s Speech from the Throne is a more challenging exercise — or should be.
Bring back Jenny Shipley. Not to bounce Bill English; there is enough juice in that stew. To tell us about “the family”.
The most abiding picture I have from the 1999 campaign was of Shipley resting her head on husband Burton’s shoulder on a bus ride at the end of a day on the West Coast. It was not showy or tokenist or despairing. It was homely.
Here are some numbers United Future and Labour might usefully take on board.
Some 40 per cent of United Future and ACT voters told the post-election NZ Herald DigiPoll they found it difficult to work out whom to vote for. The average for all those questioned was 24 per cent.
That a quarter of all voters found it difficult to decide their vote casts interesting light on MMP. It is also a worry for National, which shed votes in the campaign, many probably to ACT and United Future. Around 36 per cent of voters for those two parties said they made up their mind on election day or the day before.
A small, slight figure scurries through the sunrise at the sprawling Queensland resort hotel, Mamiya 6×7 camera and gear in hand and over shoulder, seeking out images of a foreign country. He is Francis Fukuyama and he is also an accomplished cabinetmaker.
But he is better known for his construction of very big ideas and for his picture of a world at the “end of history” — not the end of events but the endpoint of the contest of ideas with the victory of liberal democracy and market capitalism, Europe’s great invention.
What happens in the National party, now that it is at 21 per cent?
First off, it would probably help to slaughter a sacrificial lamb — or mutton, as the case may be.
Michelle Boag was until the campaign a plus: an attraction for better candidates, a catalyst for renewal of electorate chairs, the party’s engineroom, and a sharpener of the organisation.
Three huge challenges face Helen Clark in this second term. They are challenges which dwarf her achievements in the first.
These past two and a-half years she has eased the pain of revolution. The 1990s are now definitely behind us. Even though it was the 1980s-90s policies that halted the economic slide, most people feel relieved.
It was an election in four quarters.
First quarter: Helen Clark is back in government, with flexible options and a 2.5 per cent rise in share of the vote from election night 1999. And Labour has a higher seat count: 52 against 49.
As she pointed out on Saturday, that rise puts Clark alongside Michael Joseph Savage in 1938 and David Lange in 1987.
Free trade agreements are safe. So is the lifting of the genetic modification moratorium if Labour wants it. Labour has support on its right.
Helen Clark got the next best thing to a majority on Saturday: a support party to balance off the Greens. The wonderchild of the election, Peter Dunne’s United Future will lend a slightly rightwards lean to her second administration.
Heaven’s above, it’s Peter Dunne. And where have the Greens biodegraded to? What ate Helen Clark’s majority? What is left of a 65-year tradition of right-of-centre conservatism?
This election campaign went Through the Looking Glass into Wonderland. A White Rabbit here. A Queen of Hearts there. Distorting mirrors everywhere. Lead actors shrinking and expanding before our eyes.
It hasn’t gone to plan. The point of having an election now instead of at the normal October-November time was to give Helen Clark an outright majority.
Not enough people have got the point. They have told pollsters they might vote for small parties, Laila Harre’s Alliance now included.
Clark might yet get her majority. It is touch and go. The positive speeches, lofty visions and authoritative poses she promised on Sunday might do the trick — though not if she upstages those messages with more telegenic putdowns, as she did on Sunday of Harre.