Last year’s Budget was the one to win the 1999 election. This year’s bypasses the 2002 election in the cause of long-range “economic transformation”. But it is trying to do it on the cheap and without using all the available tools.
Michael Cullen wants a high economic ranking — the top half of the OECE in per capita GDP — so the country can return to a high social justice ranking.
Tomorrow’s Budget comes almost exactly at the midpoint in this government’s (first?) term. And, just as last year’s, it comes in a bad patch for the government.
The roll call is lengthening: the community card mistake, declining economic confidence, the secret deal with John Yelash, a poll majority against dumping air combat capability and, in a reprise of May 2000, a standoff over parental leave between Helen Clark and the Alliance�s Laila Harr�.
Now you know the cost of Helen Clark’s occasional penchant for playing the person instead of the ball. You pay $55,000 for her calling John Yelash a “convicted murderer” when he was convicted only of manslaughter.
I say “occasional penchant” because it has not yet become a trademark as it did for Sir Robert Muldoon, the last Prime Minister to use personal attack as a weapon with the steeliness Clark wields it.
“I’m only a little bit pregnant,” Michael Cullen protested (in effect) last Thursday. It’s an age-old cry and we can all titter about it. But it is not a laughing matter.
I refer to his breach of his self-imposed limit on new spending in the three fiscal years to 2002-03 from $5.9 billion to $6.17 billion.
What do Sir John Marshall, Sir Robert Muldoon and David Lange have in common as Prime Ministers? Answer: their administrations neglected their core vote.
Sir John was Prime Minister for 10 months at the end of the 1960-72 National government. A quintessential believer in the maxim, “politics is the art of the possible” (which then meant “what the centre will buy”), Sir John used to tell Nationalists agitating for policies more closely attuned to the party’s stated right-of-centre principles that voters wanting such policies had nowhere else to go but National.
It’s Anzac Day, a day to reflect on the nation-shaping event we shared with Australia at Gallipoli, We might also reflect on the disappearing “NZ” in Anzac.
This is centenary year of Australia’s federation of its six colonies, now states. An illuminating description of that century has been running on the ABC television, written by Paul Kelly, doyen of Australian political commentators.
Christine Rankin was the small beer. The pre-Easter manoeuvre that wrote her out of the government’s script marks two very big policy changes.
One is the reversal of a central principle of the 1988 state sector reforms.
The second is the flagging of a “social equivalent of the Treasury”, testing all policy against social criteria the way the Treasury does against fiscal and economic criteria.
It takes a strong Prime Minister to make a strong coalition government. It takes a constructive Deputy Prime Minister to glue it.
Only with brave imagination could one two years ago foresee Jim Anderton in this role. But in that role he is — in three ways.
First is his visible subordination to Helen Clark. This is Labour’s government and predominantly Labour’s rhetoric.
Helen Clark flies off today into a crisis. She is heading for China which has been warring with words with the United States. But that is not the crisis.
The crisis is in Japan, where she goes first, to drum up trade. Japan is rich but adrift, its banks tottering dangerously under bad loans. If they cannot be rescued, that might trigger a very nasty chain of events, compounding the slide in American share and managed funds prices and turning American consumers’ nervousness into fear, so driving the whole world into recession.
A few years ago the Business Roundtable toured through the country a no-nonsense nun, Connie Driscoll, who rescues Chicago women in strife and turns their lives around.
Sister Driscoll’s enterprise demonstrates a simple truth of which the roundtable has reminded us persistently and valuably: that people with imagination and passion, operating independently, can move mountains that defy all the state’s earthmoving machinery. This applies in the economy, health care, education – and social welfare.