At milking time early one morning last week I came across two figures quaffing coffee in an airport lounge, exuding good cheer despite the hour. Wyatt Creech and Nick Smith were hugely pleased with the government.
Why? Because the new tax, ACC and labour laws had reconnected some of National’s core support. Business, they beamed, is shocked. National’s troops have been miraculously energised.
What is the most important thing a government must do in its first 100 days? Change the tone.
Helen Clark and Jim Anderton beamed self-congratulations at journalists and colleagues yesterday over coffee and biscuits. That in itself is a change of tone. Can you imagine Jim Bolger and Winston Peters doing an arm-in-arm act three years ago?
Greg Sheridan, the Australian newspaper’s foreign editor was wrong on at least one count in his miasma of accusations about the new defence policy. The Prime Minister is decidedly not flakey.
Flinty would be nearer the mark. In her first three years as Labour leader Helen Clark weathered a hail of personal abuse and white-anting that would have filleted many a supposedly stronger male politician.
Fresh from her venture to Sydney this week, Helen Clark will journey into the interior next Tuesday. She is on the hunt for local partners to build the economy and rebuild social services.
Keeping yet another pre-election promise, Ms Clark will co-chair the first partnership-seeking central/local government forum with Local Government New Zealand president Louise Rosson.
Very soon after they were elected Prime Ministers within a week of each other in 1972, Norman Kirk and Gough Whitlam made contact. That marked a new era in trans-Tasman relations after decades of distance.
Malcolm Fraser and Sir Robert Muldoon, who followed those Labour giants, disliked each other but practised mutual toleration in the interests of a by-then necessary neighbourliness. The same went for David Lange and Bob Hawke.
Two months in and the government’s honeymoon is still in full glow, the rosiest for decades. Why?
One reason is that the change of government was not just a switch of parties after nine years of National. It was also a switch of policy tone after 15 years of free-market governments. That has intensified voters’ sense of change.
Here is a tale of the ingenuous and the disingenuous, of a defeated Prime Minister and one in youthful bloom.
Jenny Shipley accused Helen Clark of an ill-considered diplomatic affront to Britain in raising the republic issue on Waitangi weekend.
Excuse me, but there was not a skerrick of ill-consideration, since we became fully independent in 1947 on Britain’s initiative 14 years earlier and in any case it will not be Britain’s monarchy we abolish.
Australian authorities are likely to respond to a decision to cancel the F16 fighter contract with “exact correctness”, Centre for Strategic Studies director David Dickens has found.
This will mask deeper reactions which could affect relations between the two countries on other fronts, especially if it is not accompanied by a commitment to replace the Skyhawks eventually – though if instead New Zealand committed to some new equivalent expenditure, such as attack helicopters, Australia would be “sympathetic”.
This weekend is a reminder of our greatest political challenge: the reconciliation of two dissonant cultures and two ethnically separated peoples.
Beside this, the great political debate of the 1980s and 1990s, over which precise point on the scale from socialism to free-market capitalism we should occupy, pales into a squabble.
Helen Clark is aiming to finesse the tangled arguments over Waitangi Day by dedicating her day to “nation-building”. The logic is that creating a new sense of nationhood might knit together the fragments of a society from which many of the certainties of the 1960s and 1970s have gone.
Not least among those lost certainties is that of European paramountcy. Whether we like it or not – and many do not, hence the appeal of ACT’s treaty stance – we are now a bicultural, not a monocultural, society. This has splintered politics, as it has society, hurling fragments to the periphery.