Bill English is about to get another reminder from the Treasury of the challenges ahead if the country is to stay fiscally prudent. And with it will come a prod to start thinking long-term about big decisions some government will have to make sometime.
The reminder will come in the Treasury’s second 40-year fiscal projection. This first was in 2006.
Circling in parts of the Labour party in the past couple of months has been a new book, The Spirit Level. Delegates cited it at the conference last weekend. It might become a sort of guidebook for the next Labour ministry.
The reason is in the subtitle: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. More accurately, the “more equal” might have been written “less unequal”.
While the Labour party in Rotorua was plotting a republic in a decade or so, back at the shop Rodney Hide has been getting on with constitutional change in the here and now.
Most obviously that change is coming in the new super-Auckland, with enhanced powers for its mayor. Auckland will be a bit like a state government. When the mayor of a third of the population speaks, a Prime Minister will have to listen.
Don’t look for despondency at the Labour party’s conference this coming weekend. This is not a party in mourning. It is a party sensing opportunity.
In part that is due to the influx of 14 able, mostly younger, MPs, in part due to the clean leadership changeover straight after the election, matched by a quick transition at the top of the party outside Parliament, and in part due to the Mt Albert by-election success.
Nine long years. That is how an opposition party sees a three-term government. Nine years of impotence.
Labour endured it from 1990 to 1999, National from 1999 to 2008 and Labour right now might be staring at another turn. That gives its conference in Rotorua next weekend poignancy: how to quickly make a credible government-in-waiting.
John Key was going to be science minister but diverted down a cycleway to tourism. He is now retracing his steps.
Innovation is a central driver of productivity growth. But it was not one of Bill English’s four “areas” of “initiatives to lift productivity” in his budget in May. Overall spending on science went down.
National and Labour agree on foreign policy enough for it to be called bipartisan, after decades of difference. A big exception is climate change.
At Environmental Defence Society boss Gary Taylor’s climate change conference in Melbourne on Tuesday Labour’s Charles Chauvel intervened from the floor to state “in public what I have told you in private” that Labour was ready to agree a bipartisan stance on the emissions trading scheme (ETS) with some provisos, notably that changes do not “gut” the scheme.
The knee-jerkers are out in force, fighting tax changes. They are premature.
Bill English’s “working group” of academic economists, lawyers, accountants and businesspeople is still to get to its core question. Even then it is unlikely to canvas all possibilities.
English set up the group in May. He challenged it to redesign the tax system from the ground up and from the inside out.
The crunch paragraph in the ministerial health review group’s report is on page 8: it recommends another review in three years.
The group says that “working within the current legislative framework allows much earlier action” to meet the challenges. But it “runs the risk of not going far enough fast enough”. So, review the review.
It’s not a good look, National Australia Bank’s manoeuvre to skim hundreds of millions of dollars off the New Zealand taxpayer.
Regardless of the eventual Supreme Court decision years into the future, after the tax lawyers have drunk their fill from this brimming trough, the billions the Australian banks have denied the tax system, legally or not, are not the mark of good citizenship of this country.