Two months in and the government’s honeymoon is still in full glow, the rosiest for decades. Why?
One reason is that the change of government was not just a switch of parties after nine years of National. It was also a switch of policy tone after 15 years of free-market governments. That has intensified voters’ sense of change.
Here is a tale of the ingenuous and the disingenuous, of a defeated Prime Minister and one in youthful bloom.
Jenny Shipley accused Helen Clark of an ill-considered diplomatic affront to Britain in raising the republic issue on Waitangi weekend.
Excuse me, but there was not a skerrick of ill-consideration, since we became fully independent in 1947 on Britain’s initiative 14 years earlier and in any case it will not be Britain’s monarchy we abolish.
Australian authorities are likely to respond to a decision to cancel the F16 fighter contract with “exact correctness”, Centre for Strategic Studies director David Dickens has found.
This will mask deeper reactions which could affect relations between the two countries on other fronts, especially if it is not accompanied by a commitment to replace the Skyhawks eventually – though if instead New Zealand committed to some new equivalent expenditure, such as attack helicopters, Australia would be “sympathetic”.
This weekend is a reminder of our greatest political challenge: the reconciliation of two dissonant cultures and two ethnically separated peoples.
Beside this, the great political debate of the 1980s and 1990s, over which precise point on the scale from socialism to free-market capitalism we should occupy, pales into a squabble.
Helen Clark is aiming to finesse the tangled arguments over Waitangi Day by dedicating her day to “nation-building”. The logic is that creating a new sense of nationhood might knit together the fragments of a society from which many of the certainties of the 1960s and 1970s have gone.
Not least among those lost certainties is that of European paramountcy. Whether we like it or not – and many do not, hence the appeal of ACT’s treaty stance – we are now a bicultural, not a monocultural, society. This has splintered politics, as it has society, hurling fragments to the periphery.
National’s usual route back to power, 1975 excepted, is to let Labour dig its grave and push it in.
The assumption is that National, as a broader-spectrum party, is closer to ordinary folk and therefore can more often command the centre and so a majority, while Labour in power veers into minority pursuits.
Three years ago senior National ministers were gloating that their alliance with Winston Peters had blocked Labour off from the centre. But actually Mr Peters’ betrayal of his supporters’ expectations – that he would eject National and its economic programme, not prop both up – had opened up space in the centre for Labour.
All new governments look pleased with themselves. This one, reciting a liturgy of fairness, frugality and (intra-coalition) fraternity, is almost incandescent.
It will even relish today’s debate on the tax rise because it is sure it has the moral high ground. As one former minister said this week, there is little point attacking it for the next few months because hardly anyone will hear.
Where is the faultline the 1980s revolution opened up in politics? Between Labour and the Alliance. That is the underlying reason why they agreed midyear the coalition agreement could be about only process, not policy.
Monday’s skimpy “peace in our time” document is as unusual in its lack of even a general programme as was the National-New Zealand First coalition’s doomed attempt to tie everything down.
Helen Clark has a couple of economically comfortable years ahead, forecasters say. That, some Nationalists are pondering ruefully, might usefully fund a Labour-Alliance re-election spendup in 2002.
But what happens in the economy this parliamentary term has been mostly determined by events in the term just ended. Underlying the boomlet ahead are deeper issues. What happens when United States consumers stop spending and we still haven’t got to the haven of the “knowledge economy” – and what is that anyway?