Who does the cabinet think is the most important visitor this week? Indonesian President Wahid, who is on the skids? Or Sir Tony Atkinson?
Sir Tony Who? What’s he got that warranted a meeting with the full cabinet on Monday afternoon, dinner with selected senior ministers on Monday night, a meeting with the Labour caucus yesterday morning — and star turn at a day-long seminar on Friday, at which Helen Clark will deliver “a vision for social democracy in New Zealand”?
What’s going on? The government should be losing ground in the polls but over the past month it has gained.
The health sector is in uproar and the government’s response is to gag (it is a gag, whatever weasel words Annette King envelopes it in) the hospital chief executives who can’t make ends meet because costs, in-part government-imposed, exceed government-supplied revenue.
A year ago a disastrous series of misapprehensions was in train which eventually scythed the top off Local Government New Zealand (LGNZ), the local bodies’ umbrella organisation.
It was all about how the Prime Minister came to be double-booked for the local government conference in July and for one of her sacred holiday breaks. Innocent and guilty alike sizzled in the conflagration.
A day with the Greens is bracing, lashings of icy air, apocalypse and utopia.
The Greens, like many small parties before them — for example, the Social Crediters, now submerged in the Alliance — have the luxury of certainty of their analysis and prescription.
Unlike the Social Crediters, however, they can draw comfort and reinforcement from recent history’s march, now quickening with global warming, towards their thinking.
Bill English is not a great self-trumpeter. He’s more believable in a low key. Trumpets make noisy politics. His strength is in the subtleties of strategic policy.
Largely unnoticed amid the big brass Budget fanfares, English has been tinkling out a melody of National economic policy renewal.
On Budget night leader Jenny Shipley banged on about the low-paid. That’s defensible — just — as an attempt to wedge the government away from its core vote and English dutifully hums along.
Last year’s Budget was the one to win the 1999 election. This year’s bypasses the 2002 election in the cause of long-range “economic transformation”. But it is trying to do it on the cheap and without using all the available tools.
Michael Cullen wants a high economic ranking — the top half of the OECE in per capita GDP — so the country can return to a high social justice ranking.
Tomorrow’s Budget comes almost exactly at the midpoint in this government’s (first?) term. And, just as last year’s, it comes in a bad patch for the government.
The roll call is lengthening: the community card mistake, declining economic confidence, the secret deal with John Yelash, a poll majority against dumping air combat capability and, in a reprise of May 2000, a standoff over parental leave between Helen Clark and the Alliance�s Laila Harr�.
Now you know the cost of Helen Clark’s occasional penchant for playing the person instead of the ball. You pay $55,000 for her calling John Yelash a “convicted murderer” when he was convicted only of manslaughter.
I say “occasional penchant” because it has not yet become a trademark as it did for Sir Robert Muldoon, the last Prime Minister to use personal attack as a weapon with the steeliness Clark wields it.
“I’m only a little bit pregnant,” Michael Cullen protested (in effect) last Thursday. It’s an age-old cry and we can all titter about it. But it is not a laughing matter.
I refer to his breach of his self-imposed limit on new spending in the three fiscal years to 2002-03 from $5.9 billion to $6.17 billion.
What do Sir John Marshall, Sir Robert Muldoon and David Lange have in common as Prime Ministers? Answer: their administrations neglected their core vote.
Sir John was Prime Minister for 10 months at the end of the 1960-72 National government. A quintessential believer in the maxim, “politics is the art of the possible” (which then meant “what the centre will buy”), Sir John used to tell Nationalists agitating for policies more closely attuned to the party’s stated right-of-centre principles that voters wanting such policies had nowhere else to go but National.