This is John Key’s crunch year. It is also Rodney Hide’s. New love has limits. Hard politics is an arranged marriage.
Hide is a mixture of bounce and bluster. The bounce gets things done. The bluster pumps him up big which might keep the small band of faithful hopeful, but at the risk, if punctured, of leaving him and ACT smaller (as do love trysts at taxpayers’ expense and loose talk about National at dinner).
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.
Colin James at Te Papa Waitangi debates
Claudia Orange has now twice cast me as a riroriro to a totara in this annual Te Papa Waitangi series. Three years ago I followed Sir Edward Durie. This evening I follow Sir Mason Durie. These brother totaras are of great stature. They root deep into the earth. A riroriro is a momentary flutter.
Colin James on John Key for Management magazine for February 2010
John Key, Prime Minister, is work in progress. Can the man who made his pile in the heat of currency trading be a game-changer for a nation that has been sliding down the global rich list? If so, he has to start in 2010.
Key declared himself “ambitious for New Zealand” in the 2008 election. He makes speeches that enthuse audiences — but which in the cold light of next day in executive suites leave doubts he will turn ambition into strategy.