The cabinet starts meeting again next week, with lots on its plate. One large item, which will not be specifically on the agenda but hovers over all the government does, is mandate.
Helen Clark has made a great virtue of doing what she promised at the election. There are good reasons in political theory and practice for that.
From a mountain top the detail on the lowlands is insignificant and you can see to the horizon on all sides. It is a place for grand thoughts, contemplation of the big picture.
The transcendent political question for 2001, as Helen Clark descends from the rarified atmosphere of Mount Aconcagua, is whether, amidst the lilliputian lowlands distractions, she can elevate the country’s policy focus to the horizon.
The first duties of a government, most would agree, are to keep the peace, keep the nation safe, keep its citizens safe and keep out pests and nasty new diseases.
So at least argued Simon Upton, now off to lusher intellectual pastures in Paris. As Minister of State Services in 1998, Mr Upton worried that years of squeezing the bureaucracy had put at risk those “core” capabilities.
As her anniversary in power approached, to my surprise several people volunteered to me that Helen Clark could become our greatest Prime Minister. They have been of the right and the left, of super-high and modest incomes.
They are wildly premature. But are they right? The marker of a long and successful reign, as top politicians of all sorts know, is that it is built on fusion between the ruler and the ruled.
A large part of politics is management. Last week’s defeats on the new health bill exposed a failure of government management.
The ingredients were a too tight timeframe, inadequate select committee chairing within that timeframe, inattention by Labour to its partners and unseemly tantrums by the Leader of the House, Michael Cullen.
United States Admiral Dennis Blair brought a subtler message last week than the one Helen Clark swatted away – one Ms Clark in a different guise might have run with.
Admiral Blair did not just say we should do more. That has become obvious from East Timor: having to scrape up reservists for that venture has uncovered a manpower hole in peacekeeping policy that has been known, but masked, for most of the past decade.
On Friday-Saturday, hard on the heels of hard talk from United States Admiral Dennis Blair, the National party will run a defence seminar featuring the Australian Senate foreign affairs, defence and trade committee chair Sandy McDonald, a critic of the Clark line.
This follows Bob Simcock’s child battering conference last month. Similar ventures in other topics are taking place out of the public gaze. National is moving to redevelop policy and doing it intelligently.
The mood turned in October. You could feel it. Nothing spectacular but a palpable drop in anger and gloom.
It showed last week in one poll in a better rating for the government. Whether it is the start of a long upswing, as happened for Jenny Shipley twice from around this time of the year, we will not know for months. But it comes just in time to rescue this coming weekend’s Labour conference from untoward introspection.
Paul Swain told a hoary joke about speechwriting. Helen Clark was 20 minutes late and spoke woodenly. They seemed symbolic of missing, not catching, the jet to the wonder economy they were extolling at Mr Swain’s e-summit last week.
Actually Mr Swain’s ancient joke – the fired speechwriter’s final speech notes for a bullying minister list on page 1 an ambitious set of points the minister will make in the speech, then on page 2 say only “now you’re on your own, you bastard” – backhandedly underlined the e-economy’s unpredictability.
There is a paradox at the heart of the government’s business policy. Council of Trade Unions economist Peter Conway fingered it on this page on Friday.
“There is a good argument for a quantum leap in economic development expenditure,” Mr Conway wrote, “but such notions have to compete with superannuation pre-funding as well as the spending pressures because of the huge social deficit that has developed over the past two decades.”