Here’s a challenge for policymakers of the 2010s: to not just balance economic growth and environmental maintenance but make them a single, unified ambition.
Against that, Winston Peters is a transitory excitement. His distinction is to have been twice ejected from a ministry and once suspended. That is not the record of a selfless hero. That is the record of a self-regarding misfit.
The short-term economic message is that the economy has begun to point less steeply down. The long-term message is: water.
The slowing of the economic decline presages recovery next year, provided the international economy doesn’t tank. That should somewhat lighten households’ gloom about their financial prospects.
Here’s a democratic promise John Key could make: that if Prime Minister he will promote a fixed term for Parliament. Republican Helen Clark has clung to the vestige of monarchical power that allows her in effect to set the election date.
This is your election she has been playing with. It doesn’t improve her democratic record that, as Gerry Brownlee pointed out, in July she appointed swags of Labour lags to state-owned enterprise, Crown entity and other boards while she still could.
John Key did broach the “p” (for privatisation) idea at the National party’s conference. Twice in fact. And there was no uproar.
On one count people of Key’s 47 years (as of last Saturday) and younger might sensibly have got into far more of a lather than did Labour politicians and, eventually, National politicians over what senior MPs were scurrilously recorded to have said over drinks — a lather that said more about National’s devotion to marketing dictates than about its “secret” agenda.
Here’s an idea from Winston Peters: when you are in a hole dig faster and heave dirt around.
The idea is to cover so much outside the hole with dirt that the casual observer might lose sight of the hole. You might then be able at some future point to climb out unnoticed.
So Peters has attacked the bearers of inconvenient news. He has offered no explanations for the apparent inconsistencies in his various statements and actions over the years and between his and others’ statements on big-business contributions to various trusts with leads back to him or his party.
To watch John Key right now is to watch the bland leading the bland. No horses are to be frightened before the election. Is this the man to take us boldly to a brave new world?
Marketing political leaders is routine. Remember the astonishing makeover of Helen Clark in 1996, the hairdo, the lipstick, the designer clothes. Remember the goofy Don Brash in 2005 concocted by marketers trying to make a populist of a serious man of ideas.
On Thursday Helen Clark goes past Sir Robert Muldoon to become the fifth-longest-serving Prime Minister (and sixth-longest head of government). Muldoon’s legacy was division and decay. Hers is still in the making and a big test is just ahead.
Part of her legacy will be on show this weekend in a rare visit by a United States Secretary of State (foreign minister).
Winston Peters has a problem: he is a populist with a dwindling popular base.
He built his base on the disorientation aroused in older people by the radical reforms of the 1980s and early 1990s and the spike of Asian immigration in the mid-1990s.
He wrapped that disorientation into the name of the party he founded when thrown out of the cabinet and frozen out of the National party. “New Zealand First” telegraphed a message of resistance to foreign influence over the economy and the reshaping of society by importing people of different cultures.
Why did so many people back Muldoon-era minister Tony Friedlander’s striking truck drivers even though it is better for them that truck companies pay a bigger share of the cost of roads? Because the truckers were giving the fingers to the government.
Large numbers of people are now doing the same or would like to. They automatically blame the government, regardless of whether the object of their grump is the government’s fault. How else could National get away with its gross exaggeration of the increase in education administrators and obtuseness over regulation of hairdressers?
The first need for any community is to keep its members safe from hunger, privation and violence. Without safety, coherence and prosperity are at risk.
Hence the stuttering debate about families who do not nurture their children. The children lose opportunity, the community loses a contribution and, worse, may take on heavy costs later if the child turns destructive adult.