The Australian Labor party is promising to take an existing regulation off business for every one new one it puts on. The Labour party here has agreed to a select committee hearing for Rodney Hide’s Regulatory Responsibility Bill.
What’s going on? Aren’t Labour parties supposed to be trigger-happy regulators?
When you’re in a tunnel, any glimmer of light is welcome. So it was with the economy last week.
Thursday we learnt that in the 12 months to March the deficit on the balance of payments current account — New Zealand’s account with the rest of the world — had “improved” to 8.5 per cent of total output. We were spending “only” one-twelfth more than we were earning. And now we have a debt to the world equal to 85 per cent of a year’s total output.
John Key will be lionised at the National party conference early next month. Don Brash picked the party off the floor. Key had it bouncing off the ceiling in the autumn.
Not since 1990 has the party felt so good about itself and so sure power is its for the taking. But it has work to do before it is ready to govern — not least in honing management at the top.
Two important rules for ministers are: when in a hole, stop digging; when water comes over the side, start bailing.
Steve Maharey has spent most of this year bailing the “20 hours free” waka and might just keep it afloat and get it into calm waters a safe distance from the election. Damien O’Connor has spent most of this year digging, to the point that he is near out of sight down a hole. Any future shovelling would best be done from top.
One sign of a government on its way out is that its knee-jerks turn into convulsions and folks notice. We have just witnessed such an event.
A personal tragedy became a national crisis — or so the Prime Minister played it. A whole industry was threatened with a new regulation because one firm slipped up, on her reading of the facts. Of course, that it happened in Phillip Field’s electorate and to a Samoan were incidental.
John Key has flipped. John Howard has flipped. Now George Bush has flipped. What does it mean for our brand?
The flip is on climate change. Voters have shifted, business has been shifting and once-scoffing politicians are running to catch up.
Howard’s and Bush’s goal is to keep their countries rich. Howard says no jobs, even coal jobs, are to be jeopardised. Bush’s aim is security of energy supply for Americans, including, if needed, coal-petrol.
After the 2005 election Helen Clark swiftly stitched a deal with Winston Peters, the man who had spurned her in 1996. It kept her in office but it was like swallowing a dead rat, colleagues said privately.
John Key and Bill English have been working out how to swallow dead rats and telling their activists to prepare for it.
Roads are not free. But Aucklanders won’t pay tolls for new roads. Which has given the government a Green headache.
The government’s alternative to tolls is a very blunt, very old-fashioned regional fuel tax, for use in Auckland for passenger rail and new roads and in Wellington for the Transmission Gully inland road north. But the Greens won’t vote for it unless it is blocked from being used for Transmission Gully and earmarked instead for public transport — which Gully champion Peter Dunne says has funding in the existing budget.
Leading up to the 2002 election a small voice inside the Prime Minister’s circle argued in vain for an aspirational pitch. It was deemed unnecessary, inappropriate and out of step with voters’ mood.
The economy was up. Voters approved Helen Clark’s “correction” of 1990s policies. The National party was adrift. Steady-as-she-goes was a serviceable message for a reform-weary electorate. Daring or bold policy was out of fashion.
Michael Cullen’s self-proclaimed “bold” Budget last Thursday struck out an important principle. The question now is whether he will be bold enough to reinstate it next year. His junior partner, United Future, will push him to.
The principle was the one tepidly established in his 2005 Budget: indexation of personal tax thresholds to inflation — the so-called chewing gum tax cut. When — and some ministers insist it is a when not an if — he cuts personal tax next year, will he reinstate the 2005 initiative?