Steve Maharey is hunting “social entrepreneurs”. They’re like other entrepreneurs, only they are in it for social improvement, not the money.
And Maharey aims through them to “invert the state”. This is the modern form of social democracy: not top-down orders and uniform assembly-line services but bottom-up ideas and action.
Why are we so uptight about elites? In the runup to last month’s Knowledge Wave conference both main parties worried that it might be an elite affair. It was.
For the Labour party this was standard fare. “Elitism” and “elite capture” are dirty words because they somehow disparage the modern PC version of the “working man” — though Labour’s own upper reaches are stuffed with members of the elite.
Risk and politics are usually oil and water. But some occasions call for some oil on the water. This, for the Labour party, is one of those times.
The Labour party, its leadership having been brought up to admire the welfare state achievements of Scandinavia, has set itself the objective of bringing our society up to that standard.
A big part of success in government is to be on the right side of history. It’s not easy.
First, history comes in slices and in grades. You can be on the right side of history for a couple of years, only to find you have been in a little eddy current by the bank going in the other direction from the main current.
It is a fact of life that brazenness is an ingredient of durable governments. This one is already showing signs it has got the hang of that.
A year ago Prime Minister Helen Clark seemed to be firmly putting parental leave off the agenda for this parliamentary term.
The Alliance, low in the polls, was pushing parental leave as one of several ploys to get public traction. But business was in a frenzy over taxes, ACC and the Employment Relations Bill and parental leave talk ran counter to Clark’s need to lower the temperature on the business front.
The government has spelt out two big aims. One is to get back into the top half of the OECD income league. The other is to be a “first-world” nation in other respects. The second aim threatens to trip up the first — which in turn would stymie the second.
It’s all to do with triple-bottom-line accounting. This fashionable notion — not just among leftish liberals and greens but also among some conservatives and even some in business — assesses success not just by the financial balance sheet but by social harmony and the health of the physical environment.
At a cabinet committee meeting in February Helen Clark began tapping her fingers on the table, causing Steve Maharey to interrupt his earnest briefing to inquire: “What’s up?”. “Just get on and do it,” said the boss.
That’s the atmosphere in which Maharey is now implementing his Tertiary Education Advisory Commission’s (TEAC) proposals. But has he got the right vehicle? Before Maharey got the cabinet go-ahead, a wary Michael Cullen commissioned a full suite of Treasury reports – rare for him on a social policy issue.
This summer’s news “silly season” produced a series of shock-horror-probe stories about public servants’ bonuses. The Prime Minister, descending from the Andes, declared these an outrage.
To many public servants, who mostly vote Labour or Alliance, Helen Clark’s outrage was itself an outrage. Their pay scales have been frozen for a decade. How, without bonuses, are executives to keep good staff?
Michael Cullen is pathologically clever. He is a wonderfully sarcastic wisecracker. He can perform cartwheels of logic while others are still rubbing the sleep out of their eyes. He scarcely needs fifth gear to speed alongside the best brains in the Treasury.
This makes him a formidably important member of the Clark cabinet. Nowhere has that been better demonstrated than in his superannuation scheme. But has he been too clever? That question will be at the centre of a fierce battle this month [February] and next.
“She’s learning on the job,” says a Helen Clark insider. And she is. Just as she developed greatly in opposition, she is continuing to grow as Prime Minister.
In a sense that is unremarkable, since there is no complete apprenticeship for the job. High-quality stewardship of line portfolios did not give Jenny Shipley the required general management skills. Nor does a period of understudy as leader of the Opposition, though it helps.