Long-run governments embed policies. And the policies that in turn embed long-run governments are those that have wide political-party and public consensus.
Such consensus should not be confused with the default political-party consensus which develops when the lead opposition party thinks better of promising to adjust policies, as with the anti-nuclear stance, the Cullen fund and students’ interest-free loans.
A major party cannot be a simple party. It must pull together different strands in a constructive tension. That is National’s challenge over the next two years.
Delegates to this weekend’s conference who look back over the party’s 70-year history will recall that its heyday was the third quarter of last century.
Climate change is coming, arguably for real, certainly in policy. Businesses that ignore it or fight the government on it might take a lesson from Telecom.
Telecom tried the government’s patience too long and got whacked. Had its internal debate last year gone the other way and voluntary unbundling and wholesale/retail split been started then, Telecom would have won marks with the public and the government.
There are two sorts of beneficiary: the can’t-works and the won’t-works. The point of modern welfare policy is to turn won’t-works into will-works and give can’t-works the chance of some work.
Instead, most of the argument we have heard over the past couple of weeks has been therapeutic hand-wringing, punitive vengeance and superior paternalism.
Friday is the Labour party’s ninetieth birthday. Today is the United States’ 230th. What would the founders think?
Labour was born in a time of darkest war, imperial grandeur gone bad. It was born in part of failure to improve working conditions through direct action and recognition that if improvement was to be won through political action, the movement’s disparate strands had to work as one.
The Clark-Cullen government is not just tweaking the 1990s market-led policies. It is mounting a frontal assault — at least in theory.
In behind its policies is a “new growth theory” which argues that the private sector can’t always pick winners and governments must be involved.
Farmers used to be solid, sensible folk. At least, that is the memory of I have of living among them as a youngster. Now they are common-or-garden protesters.
They drive tractors down main streets and up Parliament’s steps. They dress up in dog’s clothing.
They use the classic protest techniques of students down the ages: overstate and exaggerate and strike poses of moral and civil offence.
When the lights go out next winter, so will the light go out on Labour’s hope of a fourth term. And that comes down to the national interest.
Next winter inflation will be in its second year above 3 per cent. That is the Reserve Bank’s projection. It will change the way we think about prices after 15 years of low inflation.
Michael Cullen funds the great bulk of his capital spending out of cash. Don Brash goes for tax cuts and funding capital projects with debt. Or so it seems.
Cullen gets Tina to push his line: There is no other way. Tax cuts will have to be paid for with cuts in social spending, he says, schoolmasterly.
With little debate, this country has de facto taken on a “responsibility to protect” citizens in failed and fragile states in our region. There is a cost.
The “responsibility to protect” doctrine was developed by a Canadian-led United Nations commission in 2000-01 in the wake of the ghastly slaughter in Rwanda which the international community could have mitigated but chose not, despite this country’s prodding in the Security Council.