Why is Michael Cullen so uptight that he made himself hostage to TV1’s camera last week? Because he is clamped in a vice.
One jaw of the vice is an unsatiable public hunger for government supplies, services and money. The other jaw of the vice is public hunger for material goods and personal services which needs tax cuts, now the boom and easy debt are fading.
As the general mood becomes less cheery and the government begins a gentle slide down the polls, it is trying harder to look fresh, inventive and solicitous of business needs.
Even tax rate cuts are no longer ruled out, though still heavily qualified. Competition rules are being turned over, the quality of regulations and their implementation is to be scrutinised — and state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are likely to get more latitude.
The last time the Greens changed leaders, in 1995, three options were debated: one leader, two of different genders or 693. The 693 was the total Green membership at the time and many in Green and green politics abhor traditional notions of leadership.
This weekend there are two options: an MP or not an MP to co-lead with Jeanette Fitzsimons. That question will be decided before the vote on who is to be leader and if passed would bar all candidates save Nandor Tanczos, for none of the other three are MPs, though Mike Ward was until last year.
One Budget done and certain to pass. Two to go. That’s how to measure the life of this government: Budget by Budget till the third is passed in August 2008.
But equally important is the one after that. How does Labour get to present the 2009 Budget?
First it has to hold New Zealand First and United Future in until 2008. Then the computations get tricky.
The focus is on 2008. That’s when the tax cuts come, if any. They are left over from Budget 2006 and won’t go away. So what are the odds?
First, there are tax cuts programmed for April 2008: the part-indexation of personal tax thresholds to inflation announced in the 2005 Budget: 2 per cent a year from 2005, the midpoint in the Reserve Bank’s target range, well below the likely actual averages.
Maurice Williamson has a habit of chanting “roads” in rousing speeches to National party faithful and promising all of the petrol taxes to building them. Now Michael Cullen has (sort of) joined him.
A quietly triumphant Cullen declared that over the next five years he will spend $300 million more than the total of fuel taxes — and this coming year even more for a raft of special projects.
The government wants you to think of tomorrow’s Budget as the “investment Budget”. That’s right: spending is investment.
This is not ideology so much as it is language. Labour ministers woke up two years back to the need to sharpen the brand. And language is a big part of brand.
Need an ad break in the long-running Labour show? Some commentary a month ago suggested just that. Then, since modern media attention spans are short, there was the Labour recovery-of-nerve cameo.
Last week it was another episode in the Don-Brash-dead-and-buried series after a badly bungled press conference and photographs of him walking the plank. Brash’s Jim Bolger-brought-up chief of staff, Wayne Eagleson, should have managed better.
It is a sport to snort at Gerry Brownlee. He is a bit Billy Bunterish. He got well snorted at when he called for a constitutional debate a week or so back. Wrongly.
Brownlee went off-key with an injudicious comment that sounded as if National might back off from abolishing the Maori seats. The news media pounced, Don Brash demurred, the policy stayed, the Maori party got angry — and the deeper point got lost in the melee.
Stand by for an overhaul of seriously old property law. The government is at last moving on a 1994 report of the Law Commission — thanks to last year’s hairline election result and the irrepressible Sir Geoffrey Palmer.
Politicians of all stripes have two large pigeonholes — one to stuff with reports they can’t find the time to action and one for hiding reports they are too scared to action.