Colin James’s paper at the Victoria University Post-election Conference, 12 December 2008
The 2008 election was the last of the baby-boomers’ (1) elections. Henceforth Parliament and the government will increasingly be in the hands of the post-baby-boomers, the 28s-45s. So 2008 will in retrospect be seen as a pivot.
Colin James’s speech to an Institute of Public Administration seminar, 9 December 2009
Rodney Hide campaigned on “three strikes and you’re in” — prison, that is. The campaign worked, though his maths weren’t strictly accurate. After four strikeouts and 12 years on the Opposition benches, Rodney is at last in the government. But is it the government he wants to be in? And does the government really want him in?
There has so far been a rule under MMP: support parties’ vote shares fall at the next election.
* New Zealand First in coalition with National, 13.3 per cent of the party vote in 1996, 4.3 per cent in 1999; supporting Labour, 5.7 per cent in 2005, 4.1 per cent in 2008;
* Alliance in coalition with Labour, 7.7 per cent in 1999, 1.3 per cent in 2002;
What makes an economy rich? Resources, luck, the population’s mindset and energy, infrastructure (including human capital) and institutional settings. Governments can do little or nothing about the first three. So if John Key is to make good his vaunted “ambition” and enrich us, he must improve infrastructure and hone institutional settings.
Elections might change Parliaments but they don’t dispose of issues. And there are some whoppers.
First, the economy must navigate the flash flood that followed the bursting of the debt dam.
Step one was the immediate assurance of credit and avoidance of a spiral of consumer and business confidence. Step two is to convert stopgap, on-the-hoof decisions during the election campaign into durable policy settings that don’t take us back to the counterproductive interventions of the 1970s and early 1980s.
Free trade is the easy bit for John Key, new ambassador. There has been a strong political majority at home for free trade for two decades. The hard bit in international relations is the environment.
All foreign policy starts at home. Diplomacy in essence is promotion of the national interest, getting your way with other countries to enhance wellbeing at home.
Since 2002 the proportion of MPs who are Maori has clearly exceeded the Maori proportion of the voting-age population. Now there is a Maori party in the governing machine.
In part this has come from the increase in Maori electorates from four to seven, each with fewer electors than in the general electorates.
The election campaign guns having fallen silent, it is fitting to remember this is Armistice Day: 90 years ago, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the tribes of Europe stopped killing each other in the “war to end all wars”.
An idealistic American president tried to make that true but 20 years later the killing resumed, on a wider scale. Only with the making of the European Union did peace break out. Now another American president, elected to global acclaim amidst division at home and dismay abroad at his predecessor, has a resounding mandate to bring peace and unity.
John Key is a phenomenon — six years an MP and now Prime Minister. Helen Clark is phenomenon — 15 years Labour party leader, deputy Prime Minister at 39, nine years Prime Minister. It was quite a contest.
In the event it was a clear contest: National and friends as an alternative government to Labour and friends. And it was a clear result: a majority for that alternative government.
You knew Helen Clark would fight all year all the way to tonight’s election eve sweep down Ponsonby Road when she turned up to her first press conference of the year in open-toed shoes — with her toenails painted. This was a gal who once didn’t wear lipstick.
All year Clark has battled adverse polls reflecting a sagging public mood and a sagging economy, her lapses of political management last year and third-term-it-is. To come from behind, she pushed “trust”: on the one hand a “secret agenda” behind John Key’s bland change-with-no-change; on the other insisting her decades of experience were needed to navigate the wild waters whipped up by the international credit turmoil.