John Key, still new to politics, is keen to show voters he has the breadth, the depth and the management and unifying skills of a Prime Minister. His gravitas-seeking slow conference speech fits that strategy. But he has much to learn.
Example: last week he could have taken the high ground on the trans-Tasman therapeutic products agency, stated he was going to broker a compromise that met his party’s policy objectives and laid some cosmetics over the government’s proposal that looked just that.
Members, money and momentum and a rival obligingly tripping up repeatedly — what more could a party want for its new leader’s first full conference?
David Benson-Pope kindly set the stage by getting himself sacked for once again not telling the whole story.
Down the ladder a departmental chief executive chose the less wrong of two wrong options but mucked it up with another wrong decision which caused his boss to wrongly write in an article that the minister wasn’t involved.*
John Key’s first act in foreign affairs has been to give Australia the fingers.
He has locked National into opposing the legislation implementing the trans-Tasman agency to regulate “therapeutics” — prescription medicines, medical devices, “complementary” medicines, herbal remedies and food supplements.
All health policymakers and administrators roast on this spit: “Free can’t be the best, best can’t be free.” Voters in modern rich societies want the best for free.
They also want it along with tax cuts and despite any self-inflicted damage from eating, drinking and behaving badly.
The Australian Labor party is promising to take an existing regulation off business for every one new one it puts on. The Labour party here has agreed to a select committee hearing for Rodney Hide’s Regulatory Responsibility Bill.
What’s going on? Aren’t Labour parties supposed to be trigger-happy regulators?
When you’re in a tunnel, any glimmer of light is welcome. So it was with the economy last week.
Thursday we learnt that in the 12 months to March the deficit on the balance of payments current account — New Zealand’s account with the rest of the world — had “improved” to 8.5 per cent of total output. We were spending “only” one-twelfth more than we were earning. And now we have a debt to the world equal to 85 per cent of a year’s total output.
Two important rules for ministers are: when in a hole, stop digging; when water comes over the side, start bailing.
Steve Maharey has spent most of this year bailing the “20 hours free” waka and might just keep it afloat and get it into calm waters a safe distance from the election. Damien O’Connor has spent most of this year digging, to the point that he is near out of sight down a hole. Any future shovelling would best be done from top.
One sign of a government on its way out is that its knee-jerks turn into convulsions and folks notice. We have just witnessed such an event.
A personal tragedy became a national crisis — or so the Prime Minister played it. A whole industry was threatened with a new regulation because one firm slipped up, on her reading of the facts. Of course, that it happened in Phillip Field’s electorate and to a Samoan were incidental.
John Key has flipped. John Howard has flipped. Now George Bush has flipped. What does it mean for our brand?
The flip is on climate change. Voters have shifted, business has been shifting and once-scoffing politicians are running to catch up.
Howard’s and Bush’s goal is to keep their countries rich. Howard says no jobs, even coal jobs, are to be jeopardised. Bush’s aim is security of energy supply for Americans, including, if needed, coal-petrol.
Roads are not free. But Aucklanders won’t pay tolls for new roads. Which has given the government a Green headache.
The government’s alternative to tolls is a very blunt, very old-fashioned regional fuel tax, for use in Auckland for passenger rail and new roads and in Wellington for the Transmission Gully inland road north. But the Greens won’t vote for it unless it is blocked from being used for Transmission Gully and earmarked instead for public transport — which Gully champion Peter Dunne says has funding in the existing budget.