What will Don Brash’s 2025 taskforce say next year and the year after and the year after and the year after?
Most likely it will say that, short-term fluctuations aside, the wage gap between New Zealand and Australia is not getting smaller and that the government is dragging its feet on the taskforce’s recommended reforms.
One thing is uncertain in life: taxes. You can never be sure what the government will do to you next year.
Where the cabinet goes on tax will say a lot: how strategic it is, how adventurous, how well it can pick its way through intellectual complexity, how prepared it is to face down vested interests and how good it is at selling reform.
It’s useful to know who your friends are. Rodney Hide is a devoted friend of this “very, very good government”. He called Nick Smith’s emissions trading bill “atrocious policy” resulting from “atrocious process”.
Then a luminary John Key counted as a friend on education policy joined three others to question his (actually Bill English’s) cornerstone education policy — standards.
Labour and National agree on free trade. But they don’t agree on emissions trading. Now Labour has called an end to a 20-year agreement on inflation targeting. What does that mean?
Nothing immediately — and nothing for at least two years, more likely five and possibly eight while Labour enjoys opposition.
Once upon a time farmers had great leverage within and over the National party. This past week or two the iwi leadership group has had more. Its lever is the Maori party’s votes Nick Smith needs for his revised emissions trading scheme (ETS).
Farmers got intensity-based status in the ETS with no cap. But they have not got out of the ETS, as farmers in Australia have from that country’s, through the Liberal-National opposition.
John Key, annoyed by Hone Harawira, has bid us focus on “real” issues. Either he hasn’t figured there is a real issue in the Harawira fracas or he is being disingenuous.
The real issue is not that Harawira skived off to Paris on a taxpayer-paid trip to Europe. We benefit if he comes back richer in his European heritage.
It’s been a month for H’s in hot water. First Rodney Hide for perk-bingeing actions not fitting perk-busting principles. Then the man with two H’s, Hone Harawira.
Harawira got into hot water, initially, for making cultural use of a trip to Europe: a day in Paris connecting with his heritage.
Most of the argument about climate change, apart from whether it is really happening or whether humans are causing it, is about how to stop or slow it. But there is another costly game in the interminable global negotiations: who pays the bill for adapting to the changes we are told are coming.
If the United Nations scientists are right, the world will have no choice but to adapt to different and variable weather, sea level rises and other impacts.
Rodney Hide has stumbled into the H world: say one thing, do another, about perks. Then in Christchurch on Wednesday there was H for hubris as he disparaged “do-nothing” John Key. In Hide’s actual work as a minister, however, the H stands for high-aiming.
His aim: to revolutionise the way law is made. His mechanism: a new law, plus new procedures, to parallel the transparency Ruth Richardson’s Fiscal Responsibility Act injected into government budgeting.
John Key’s government will be one next weekend. What will it be like at four or nine?
Will it get to four? Most likely. Key is popular, his opposition will take time to regroup fully, the economy looks likely to muddle through and, barring egregious errors, the cabinet is not likely to have made too many enemies.