Here’s a challenge for policymakers of the 2010s: to not just balance economic growth and environmental maintenance but make them a single, unified ambition.
Against that, Winston Peters is a transitory excitement. His distinction is to have been twice ejected from a ministry and once suspended. That is not the record of a selfless hero. That is the record of a self-regarding misfit.
Democracy is an inefficient business. Yet efficiency is at the core of many of its arguments.
If only the private sector was more efficient, productivity would be higher and we would be a richer nation.
If only public services were more efficient, we could have more and pay less tax for them.
If only our houses, vehicles and lifestyles were more energy-efficient, that would make it easier to meet climate change targets.
Colin James on the election for Management September 2008
The first rule about elections is that they must be managed. They cannot be left to voters.
Even the date must be managed. Prime Ministers cling to the vestige of monarchical power which they have misappropriated, the power to determine when your election is held.
The short-term economic message is that the economy has begun to point less steeply down. The long-term message is: water.
The slowing of the economic decline presages recovery next year, provided the international economy doesn’t tank. That should somewhat lighten households’ gloom about their financial prospects.
Here’s a democratic promise John Key could make: that if Prime Minister he will promote a fixed term for Parliament. Republican Helen Clark has clung to the vestige of monarchical power that allows her in effect to set the election date.
This is your election she has been playing with. It doesn’t improve her democratic record that, as Gerry Brownlee pointed out, in July she appointed swags of Labour lags to state-owned enterprise, Crown entity and other boards while she still could.
John Key did broach the “p” (for privatisation) idea at the National party’s conference. Twice in fact. And there was no uproar.
On one count people of Key’s 47 years (as of last Saturday) and younger might sensibly have got into far more of a lather than did Labour politicians and, eventually, National politicians over what senior MPs were scurrilously recorded to have said over drinks — a lather that said more about National’s devotion to marketing dictates than about its “secret” agenda.
Here’s an idea from Winston Peters: when you are in a hole dig faster and heave dirt around.
The idea is to cover so much outside the hole with dirt that the casual observer might lose sight of the hole. You might then be able at some future point to climb out unnoticed.
So Peters has attacked the bearers of inconvenient news. He has offered no explanations for the apparent inconsistencies in his various statements and actions over the years and between his and others’ statements on big-business contributions to various trusts with leads back to him or his party.
For nearly two years the government has tried to make “sustainability” a core issue and a distinguishing point in the coming election. It hoped climate change would be the vehicle.
But as a slogan “sustainability” is passive and abstract, inviting acquiescence rather than action. Worse, few can agree what it means. And, compounding that, climate change is confusing.
To watch John Key right now is to watch the bland leading the bland. No horses are to be frightened before the election. Is this the man to take us boldly to a brave new world?
Marketing political leaders is routine. Remember the astonishing makeover of Helen Clark in 1996, the hairdo, the lipstick, the designer clothes. Remember the goofy Don Brash in 2005 concocted by marketers trying to make a populist of a serious man of ideas.
Colin James speech to Manukau City Council Midwinter Function 25 July 2008
South Auckland is a sort of shorthand. John Key says “South Auckland” when he means “underclass”. He doesn’t bother to qualify it with the word “problem”. It is an instantly recognisable symbol for a social and economic negative.