ACT MPs have a message for their annual conference this weekend: ACT is making a difference in the government. But how much of a difference?
ACT isn’t the big-money, big-crowd party of the mid-1990s. It fits in a school hall. It depends on Rodney Hide to win Epsom with National party votes and needs all of Hide’s oomph to stay in business.
John Key’s government is experimenting with changes to the way some policy is made. They might just point to a different sort of politics.
Top of the economic policy news last week was Simon Power’s response to the Capital Markets Development Taskforce’s 60 recommendations and high on his list was rejection for now of minority selldowns of state-owned enterprises to citizens to broaden and deepen the too-thin stock exchange — though Key is set to seek endorsement in the 2011 election.
Don’t get excited. Simon Power is a measured man. If you want a change from MMP voting, you can’t till 2017. And then it might not be a big change.
The principled reason for a referendum on MMP is that it makes democratic sense to affirm or not the decision made in anger (against radical Labour and radical National) in 1992-93. You have had five elections to try it out and test its governments.
Mostly the law gets done to people — by politicians, judges, lawyers and police. Is there room for citizens?
Citizens can take the law into their hands in three main ways (aside from vigilantism and shooting intruders, which are outside the law). They can be part of a movement or a party. They can be part of a pressure group. They can get angry and protest.
Between Bill English’s budget last May and John Key’s opening statement to Parliament on Tuesday the government lighted upon some rocket science: that innovation is critical to economic growth.
It’s not rocket science, of course. It’s commonsense. And it is a long way from the 2009 budget’s cut in research, science and technology (RS&T) funding. That was a puzzle, given that Key had contemplated taking the RS&T portfolio.
Grow the revenue. That will be a core message in John Key’s speech tomorrow opening Parliament for 2010.
That is not a tax story, growing government revenue. It is an economy story, growing the country’s revenue. Workers don’t get rich by being fired to make a company lean and mean. They get rich by being hired by companies which make more for each employee than they were getting before.
Today is a day drenched in symbols — for those who go looking for them. For most it is just Saturday. We don’t think enough of our “national” day to make it a weekday holiday.
Contrast that with our most respectful Monday-holiday commemoration of the Queen. Holiday-wise, she gets bigger billing than the nation. That is an intriguing symbol.
In December Pita Sharples characterised negotiations between John Key and the iwi leadership group as the marrying of two worldviews and two political systems, the Maori political system and the general political system. Ponder that this coming Waitangi Day.
Sharples was combining the Treaty of Waitangi’s two modern messages: one of unity and the other of separateness. As the Treaty’s truth and reconciliation phase begins to wind down with the settling of historical grievances, those two messages will need rebalancing if the Treaty is henceforth to be a nation-defining force.
Phil Goff cooks sausages to a turn on the barbecue. But can he cook up a strategic future for Labour?
Here’s Labour’s record for the five decades years since the end of 1959: in government 19 years, out of government 31 years. Its best five decades were 1929-79, when it had 20 years in government, its worst just 12 in 1949-99. Of the 60 years since 1949 it has held office for 21 — one in three.
Two days before Christmas Treasury Secretary John Whitehead announced a cleanout of his top ranks. This day of the long knives was a step in the Treasury’s bid to regain premier status under a government which wants a “step-change” in economic performance.
Whitehead replaced all four deputy secretaries with two new deputy chief executives, one from the Prime Minister’s Department and one from Britain, and two new deputy secretaries. He appointed a chief economist, also British. Crown business and “state sector performance” monitoring got a new boss. There is a new chief accountant.