Who gets hurt when the economy slips? How can that hurt be eased? This is where the economic debate is turning. And there is more to it than tax.
A slowdown hurts the poor first. No one much notices, except food banks, which for some time have been reporting rising demand, and budget advice services, helping people trapped in loan-shark debt and/or skewered by rising prices for essentials.
We are used to globalisation now. We surrender assets to foreigners. China makes more and more “New Zealand” goods. We bought our houses on Japanese housewives’ money. We get music off the internet. On balance we are richer for it.
There is another globalisation: of people — fleeing poverty and catastrophe, hunting riches. Are we, will we be, the richer for that?
The same but different: that’s what voters want. But what they want to stay the same and what they want to be different varies from voter to voter — and from generation to generation.
These contradictory wants don’t bother small parties. A small party’s aim is to make a difference: a particular difference or differences. It is in Parliament not to manage the state but to prod policy down a liberty (ACT) or family (United Future) or oldies (New Zealand First) or green (Greens) or brown (Maori party) track.
What has Helen Clark got that John Key hasn’t? Deep experience in management of policy, foreign affairs and government.
What did Clark have that Don Brash didn’t? Competence at political management — managing the politics.
What did she fall down on last year? Political management. Why is the Owen Glenn affair a bother now? Because of past and continuing failures of political management.
When it comes time to memorialise Labour’s fifth spell in office, it may be remembered most lastingly for early childhood education.
Note: education, not care. Childcare is the minding of children while parents are at work. Early childhood education prepares children to learn.
Of course, educating 3-5s also involves care. And if the state pays, it helps working parents by cutting the cost of that care. But it reaches well beyond care.
Here’s an idea for Helen Clark, under suspicion for her Electoral Finance Act: name the election date today in her annual opening address to Parliament, then propose future election dates be fixed and regular.
Playing the time-dishonoured cat-and-mouse game with the election date this year might risk compounding the impression many voters have that Clark somehow set out to undermine democracy with her election finance law.
Each Waitangi Day we edge a little farther from memories of empire, as Sir Edmund Hillary’s non-Royal funeral reminded us. Each Waitangi Day these past few years we have come a little closer to embracing it as our national day.
For a quarter-century it was a day of disruption, protest and (literally in 2004) mudslinging. Helen Clark stopped speaking at Te Tii marae in protest at the protests.
The Electoral Finance Act passed amid controversy late last year will not be the law for the 2011 election if National leads the next government. It is likely to need amendment whoever is the government.
So will all that damage the Labour-led government did to itself, leaving a public impression it was attacking free speech, have been for one election?
Sir Robert Muldoon had to wait 15 years after coming into Parliament to make Prime Minister. Jim Bolger took 18 years. So did Helen Clark. Can John Key do it in a bit over six and set a record?
First, Key has to see off Clark.
Clark has already shown her fighting spirit: impeccably groomed and magisterial centre-stage at the Hillary funeral, thereby stating her identification with “the nation”; her decision, after years of rejecting advisers’ urgings, to do an “Orewa” scene-setting speech this year, a day after Key’s own “Orewa”.
Tomorrow the cabinet meets for the first time this election year, fresh not from its holidaying but from a swag of own goals in 2007. Two weeks hence the Labour caucus will mull over a strategy to win a fourth term. The contrast with the opening month of the three most recent election years is stark.