What has Helen Clark got that John Key hasn’t? Deep experience in management of policy, foreign affairs and government.
What did Clark have that Don Brash didn’t? Competence at political management — managing the politics.
What did she fall down on last year? Political management. Why is the Owen Glenn affair a bother now? Because of past and continuing failures of political management.
When it comes time to memorialise Labour’s fifth spell in office, it may be remembered most lastingly for early childhood education.
Note: education, not care. Childcare is the minding of children while parents are at work. Early childhood education prepares children to learn.
Of course, educating 3-5s also involves care. And if the state pays, it helps working parents by cutting the cost of that care. But it reaches well beyond care.
Here’s an idea for Helen Clark, under suspicion for her Electoral Finance Act: name the election date today in her annual opening address to Parliament, then propose future election dates be fixed and regular.
Playing the time-dishonoured cat-and-mouse game with the election date this year might risk compounding the impression many voters have that Clark somehow set out to undermine democracy with her election finance law.
Each Waitangi Day we edge a little farther from memories of empire, as Sir Edmund Hillary’s non-Royal funeral reminded us. Each Waitangi Day these past few years we have come a little closer to embracing it as our national day.
For a quarter-century it was a day of disruption, protest and (literally in 2004) mudslinging. Helen Clark stopped speaking at Te Tii marae in protest at the protests.
Sir Robert Muldoon had to wait 15 years after coming into Parliament to make Prime Minister. Jim Bolger took 18 years. So did Helen Clark. Can John Key do it in a bit over six and set a record?
First, Key has to see off Clark.
Clark has already shown her fighting spirit: impeccably groomed and magisterial centre-stage at the Hillary funeral, thereby stating her identification with “the nation”; her decision, after years of rejecting advisers’ urgings, to do an “Orewa” scene-setting speech this year, a day after Key’s own “Orewa”.
Tomorrow the cabinet meets for the first time this election year, fresh not from its holidaying but from a swag of own goals in 2007. Two weeks hence the Labour caucus will mull over a strategy to win a fourth term. The contrast with the opening month of the three most recent election years is stark.
The chiefs of the British, Australian and New Zealand Treasuries meet here next week. They will have much to discuss. The world economy is not as rosy as a year ago.
For this country, in debt up to the eyeballs to foreigners, that is a worry. For households, also in debt up to their eyeballs buying overpriced houses or using houses they already own to raise cash to splurge, the squeeze is already on.
This month’s scare is oil, a resource. The long-range scare is climate change, an environmental issue. But bigger than oil and more proximate than climate change is water.
Water is a resource issue and an environmental issue — and potentially a cause of conflict.
In our pluvial country water is not top-of-mind. There are occasional droughts and less water is expected in the east this century. Some catchments are overallocated or badly managed. But, with political will (so far lacking), we can easily manage.
The point of a group is to be more than the sum of its parts. That goes for a family, a sports team, a company — and a nation.
Otherwise, there are just individuals. Cause for thought as a new year begins and we resolve to do better.
The point of leadership is create, cajole, coax or corral that surplus from a group: points on the board, profits and prospects, a strong economy and clear sense of ourselves.
The Parole Board delivered the National party this year a New Year present: murderer Graeme Burton. At year’s end it has sent a Christmas present: pack rapist Peter McNamara.
In between the justice system showered gifts on National’s Simon Power. And the police gave radicals a free hit by mis-hitting “terrorists”.