Last week’s bagging of the Greens by business overlooks two facts: the Greens are not the government nor even a major influence on it and even Labour will not have a firm majority for its agenda.
Most discussion since the election has been on the makeup of the government’s support on crunch confidence-and-supply votes. But that says little about day-to-day support on policy and bills.
This is a tale of two conservatives, a jailbird and a radical — and a challenge for Don Brash’s white, male, provincialised National party.
First up is the late Bruce Jesson, who for decades, as a journalist and political activist, eloquently made the case for marxist socialism. A book of his writings is launched today.
Winston Peters has not had a good election. Had he known the date of the election well in advance, he might have had a better one.
In June, after a flurry of well-aimed attacks on the government in May, New Zealand First was averaging 10 per cent in opinion polls. Peters was promoting himself as an alternative national leader to Helen Clark and Don Brash and his party as well clear of the other minors.
When Don Brash and John Key have got over their loss, if that is what it turns out to be, they might thank their lucky stars. If they were strategising for their party’s long-term health, this may turn out to be the election to lose.
Brash and Key are both men in a hurry, Brash because of his age and Key because that is the way he tackles life.
The issue for the next government is unification. There is a lot of healing to do. This is a divided nation.
The provinces went a different way from the main cities in the election, piling up huge rises in National’s share of the vote and stripping a swag of electorates from Labour. The cities were much more sedate in their swing from the government — in many electorates Labour’s vote share went up.
Did Helen Clark “win”? Yes and no. Even assuming she forms a government, she has some serious rethinking ahead.
She “won” by coming first in the vote on election night by a big enough margin to be sure (failing some new astonishment in the numbers) to have more votes than National in the final count.
After the binge election comes the economic slowdown. That will test the government’s mettle — and its fiscal solidity.
Whether it is eventually Helen Clark or Don Brash who forms a government — and the odds are it will be Clark — the easy life of high consumer spending, high profits and high tax revenue is over for now. It is time for discpline.
The star of the campaign has been John Key. The flop has been Winston Peters. The winner has been the election itself — interest high as it has not been in a long time.
And it has been the battle of the big fellas, evenly matched and both strong as we haven’t seen since 1981. The small parties are there and relevant to coalition-building but not the force of previous MMP elections.
The Economist magazine, shrine of deregulation and low, preferably flat, taxes is not usually Michael Cullen’s bible. But last week he grasped at its endorsement of his KiwiSaver to score a point off John Key.
Key, usually on the Economist’s side of the argument, promises to scrap KiwiSaver, Cullen’s tax-based toe-in-the-water attempt to lift individual saving in this grasshopper society. He has not yet offered an alternative.
The choice is simple: tax cuts or not; Treaty of Waitangi rollback or not; a fresh but unprepared face or not.
The “not” is a third term for Helen Clark. The alternatives are the Don Brash experience.
There are other dimensions. If you are especially bothered about energy over-use, bottom trawling, the biosphere, clean rivers, climate change, international capitalism, fat and sugar in food and the poor, your choice is automatic. So, too, if you are Maori and proud of it and angry about the foreshore — though every party vote you give that party is a vote denied to Labour in its battle with Brash.