Phase one of the reconstruction and recovery is over. Now for phase two. The John Key National party will have more of the characteristics that made it the dominant party in decades past.
Don Brash will go down in the party’s folklore as having brought it back from the brink — members, money and, for a time, momentum. He re-aggregated the right’s vote and laid the platform for the 2008 drive for power.
Helen Clark and Don Brash have been abroad, Clark plying her foreign affairs trade, Brash the apprentice. Is he learning quickly and deeply enough?
Last year Brash personally inserted into National’s policy a line that the anti-nuclear law would not be changed without consulting the public. Labour was easily able to twist that into code for his wanting a change and subservience to the United States — and thereby got back in the election race.
Can Auckland be made into a “world city”? Would a stadium flip that switch? On the track record, “no” and “no”.
The track record tells us there is no “Auckland” — just a scattering of feuding villages, occasionally corralled but not durably one entity as multi-borough New York is nevertheless singular New York.
The easy joke about Helen Clark’s government is that it has promised us global warming for seven years and hasn’t delivered. The hard judgment is that it hasn’t delivered policy either.
Why? Labour has been convinced by the science since way back in the 1990s when Simon Upton signed the country up to it. Why suddenly go “aspirational” now?
The government has no vision, business CEOs commonly complain. Nor does the National party, they often add. Politicians shrug their shoulders. What can be done?
There are lashings of government “strategies”, laced with multi-syllabic abstract nouns and fine adjectives. But few CEOs see “vision” in them. They are either unaware of these documents or are unimpressed or bamboozled by the language or think the strategies don’t in any case amount to vision or amount to the wrong vision.
Why do state and federal governments in Australia keep getting re-elected? Because it is hard to beat a government when the economy is going well.
The economy isn’t everything. Labour nearly lost in 2005 here amidst a rip-roaring boom at household level. Its drift from the centre on Maori and moral policy got National into the race. Then National offered a very big tax bribe as an additional dividend for households from the economic boom.
Two balloons have popped on the right side of American politics: neoconservatism and religious superconservativism. Core conservatism can breathe again.
The United States media are full of Republican candidates in next week’s election struggling for a saleable position on the Iraq war or just plain calling for an end.
The Labour party bothers about its brand. So what brand does it want you to see at its ninetieth anniversary conference this coming weekend?
Claire Robinson, an academic specialist in political marketing, highlights two elements in a successful brand: consistency plus refreshment.
Consistency builds familiarity. People more easily trust a leaning they have toward a party (or leader — or soft drink or car) if they feel they know the party (leader, soft drink, car). Refreshment adds allure, enhances the brand.
Alan Bollard is a pingpong ball on an ocean of money. No matter how hard he tries to sink, forces beyond his control keep popping him back up top again. Inflation is now stuck over his 3 per cent limit.
Michael Cullen has a similar problem. Budget surpluses have ballooned up year after year. Even now, when he is trying to spend and spend, not least by shovelling money through Working for Families tax credits, he has another big number to live down.
The constitution matters. That is the big lesson in behind the parliamentary funds disgrace. If politicians bend the constitution, we are all at risk.
The constitution says who is to have power and how it is to be used and not used. For the constitution to work well, politicians must play by its rules and be seen to.