This week another Resource Management bill is due to reach the House, promoting renewable energy and energy efficiency. But yet another is in the mill — aimed at taking a tinge off business’s sourness about the act.
This third bill will underline the growing concern in the cabinet that some of its policy settings may be discouraging business investment, particularly by large foreign companies which can, and do, put their money elsewhere.
Traditional Labour, within the constraints of prudent budgeting and with genuflections to a high-skill economy: that’s Michael Cullen’s fourth Budget.
And, in case you haven’t got the message by now he made two strong points at his press conference:
* On present projections he will have an additional $500 million or so to spend next year and that is earmarked for tax credits for low-income families and assisting beneficiaries into work.
The government sails into its Budget on Thursday with a near-sublime confidence.
That is about to fade. The astonishing congruence of rain, prices and a low dollar has reversed and SARS, an electricity shortage and persistent sogginess in the world economy have darkened the future.
So Michael Cullen has told ministers to hold tight for another year. He and the Prime Minister (both fiscal dries) want to be sure the surpluses are sustainable before spending them.
Incrementalism rules, OK. That is Thursday’s Budget. Health gobbles up its large annual dollop but otherwise it is a little bit here and a little bit there, with an accent on “innovation” and research. Very Michael Cullen. Very Helen Clark.
A “stable and certain fiscal policy”, as Cullen put it to Labour party faithful early this month, is one of his “three key principles” and central to this government’s pitch for credibility with investors.
The once potent National party has fallen to this: cowering behind a curtain to talk policy. This month it has banned the media from such discussions at its regional conferences.
Such tremulousness in a party which pretends to run the country after September 2005! Even during the awful Muldoon years a quarter-century ago, when much of the party was in rebellion, it did not close its debates — and righteously scorned Labour’s periodic proclivity for privacy.
No sooner will the government get its highly controversial changes to the Resource Management Act (RMA) through than it will back on the job — this time to add energy efficiency as a national priority. As we head towards our cold showers, this may prompt a wry comment or two.
This change, which Energy Minister Pete Hodgson foreshadowed in February, is linked to an other change designed to discourage local authority politicians from blocking windpower and other renewable energy schemes for aesthetic and other reasons. Hodgson wants windfarms and is doling out Kyoto “promissory notes” to get them.
Three canyons cut through the political landscape between National and Labour.
One is in the workplace. Labour sees wages and conditions (including safety) as the sustenance of workers and their families. National sees them as a cost to business.
The second is in foreign policy. For 65 years Labour has leaned more to multilateral processes and resorted to alliances as temporary second bests. National has always put more faith in alliances and has at times been deeply sceptical of the United Nations. Iraq sharply delineated that ideological ravine.
Electricity was the first need in Iraq after the bombing. Why? To get water to people. Water was the bigger and more basic need. As we are about to find out.
The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) warned earlier this month [April] that the next 50 years will be drier than the past — just as competition for available water is heating up. NIWA predicts conflict over water in the future.
The Prime Minister is in Europe this week. What’s the point?
Sure, she’s chairing an OECD meeting in Paris which will discuss sharing economic gains with developing countries, she’s catching up with Tony Blair and she’s visiting her great-uncle’s war grave — all reasonable reasons to drop by.
The government’s gradual reorganisation of the state sector is back into action with four recent developments.
* Justice Secretary Belinda Clark was last month made chief executive of the Courts Department, foreshadowing the eventual merger or at least alignment of those two departments.
* Some small ministries, starting with women’s affairs and youth affairs, are to clustered with larger departments to reduce the cost to small ministries of some administrative functions.