Phillip Field might yet get his come-uppance — from Parliament, the institution which stands to lose most by what he did with migrant hopefuls, if National can produce an inventive resolution to skirt Standing Orders.
Should we cheer? Of course, if justice is done — and the Ingram report suggests there is justice to be done. But can we be sure Parliament will do justice?
This time next year we may well be getting used to power cuts. That could be critical to Labour’s 2008 election chances.
The politics of electricity are the politics of rights. People have long since assumed a right to electricity on the basis of need akin to the claim to food.
So governments get no kudos if the lights, heaters and hot water stay on. But they get the blame for interruptions.
When you have untangled the tax package, turn your mind to a small bill in Parliament. It points to profitability.
The bill is Sue Kedgley’s version of two-year-old British legislation that establishes an employee’s right to ask for flexible work hours and conditions and requires an employer to give reasons if denying the request.
Long-run governments embed policies. And the policies that in turn embed long-run governments are those that have wide political-party and public consensus.
Such consensus should not be confused with the default political-party consensus which develops when the lead opposition party thinks better of promising to adjust policies, as with the anti-nuclear stance, the Cullen fund and students’ interest-free loans.
A major party cannot be a simple party. It must pull together different strands in a constructive tension. That is National’s challenge over the next two years.
Delegates to this weekend’s conference who look back over the party’s 70-year history will recall that its heyday was the third quarter of last century.
Climate change is coming, arguably for real, certainly in policy. Businesses that ignore it or fight the government on it might take a lesson from Telecom.
Telecom tried the government’s patience too long and got whacked. Had its internal debate last year gone the other way and voluntary unbundling and wholesale/retail split been started then, Telecom would have won marks with the public and the government.
There are two sorts of beneficiary: the can’t-works and the won’t-works. The point of modern welfare policy is to turn won’t-works into will-works and give can’t-works the chance of some work.
Instead, most of the argument we have heard over the past couple of weeks has been therapeutic hand-wringing, punitive vengeance and superior paternalism.
Friday is the Labour party’s ninetieth birthday. Today is the United States’ 230th. What would the founders think?
Labour was born in a time of darkest war, imperial grandeur gone bad. It was born in part of failure to improve working conditions through direct action and recognition that if improvement was to be won through political action, the movement’s disparate strands had to work as one.
If you are National and not impatient, things have been going nicely for your party as you go to the seventieth anniversary conference this month. Your party is on track to government in 2008.
Of course, nothing in politics is automatic. Labour has plenty of fight left in it and is resourceful. So don’t yet rule out a fourth term for Helen Clark. But the signs have been accumulating this year that this is a farewell term.
The Clark-Cullen government is not just tweaking the 1990s market-led policies. It is mounting a frontal assault — at least in theory.
In behind its policies is a “new growth theory” which argues that the private sector can’t always pick winners and governments must be involved.