This week Auckland takes the outline of its new plan public. What’s that to Otago? Quite a lot.
Having shoved Auckland together, the government in Wellington now has to work out what to do with it. Auckland’s future is not just Auckland’s. It is New Zealand’s.
That is, Auckland’s future is Otago’s.
It never rains but it pours. Queenslanders would get the point of this tired, hackneyed, overused, wrung-out, saturated cliche. New Zealanders might be starting to get the point of the figure of speech.
Do some simple addition.
Start with two Christchurch earthquakes in an area where there was, Sir Peter Gluckman’s scientists told us last Wednesday, “no evidence for seismicity” (no “foreshocks”). Add the Pike River mine explosion.
This week Rodney Hide is due to table his Regulatory Standards Bill. His deputy, John Boscawen, is nearing the end of a far-reaching review of consumer law. These are important measures and ACT has the portfolios.
Hide’s bill will aim to legislate more rigour in lawmaking. National leans in that direction but does not want to be as prescriptive as ACT wants. The bill will go to a select committee for hearings but will not be passed this year, though there is a good chance a milder version will pass next year.
The aftershocks keep coming. One ran through the Reserve Bank early this month. The epicentre was the Beehive ninth floor.
The original quake hit the Bank the day of Christchurch’s disaster but there was too little data on which to make a sensible official cash rate (OCR) call so it waited until the regular date last Thursday. Meanwhile, Governor Alan Bollard made a reassuring speech, which some took to foreshadow a rate standstill. Others took the opposite view and began to bet on a cut by cutting market rates. Bank economists were vocal on both sides.
A big hole opened up in John Key’s cabinet last week. It is a hole he will not fill readily. The hole will be dug by Simon Power (41, going on 55) when he leaves Parliament at the election after only one term as a minister. Key was “stunned”. Bill English loses a political and personal friend.
Don’t waste a good crisis. Bill English and Rodney Hide agree on that. Canterbury’s woe has a political upside for activists.
Hide has his own crisis: a party short on unity with an election coming. Act’s conference this coming weekend will be an early test.
English has a long-term restructuring aim, which the earthquake might now advance. John Key is nearer that thinking than a year ago.
The only party which argued the property rights line in the foreshore and seabed furore in 2003-04 was ACT. ACT said iwi should be able to pursue due process through the courts. National belatedly rediscovered property rights with new intakes of MPs from 2005.
That rediscovery fuelled National’s agreement with the Maori party to repeal the 2004 act. But its bill in turn has stirred fears, which ACT shares, that backroom cabinet-iwi deals might transfer large sections of the coastline into iwi hands.
The contrast between John Key the yet-to-become-statesman and John Key the one-of-us team-leader is striking. We saw both in two weeks.
Last week I said Key’s jokes and platitudes were inappropriate at the first address to Parliament by an outsider. I said Julia Gillard (she of the grating accent) demonstrated a much better sense of occasion. I said Key could do with a speechwriter and coach.
The earthquake is, first, a Christchurch catastrophe. It is, second, a national calamity. And, third, it has international reach.
The upbeat international dimension is the wide range of countries which, unasked, sent support teams. That attests to a reputation for fair dealing, constructive engagement and independence built up over some decades.
Someone should tell Julia Gillard that the real links between our two countries are not killing and blood on “sacred ground”. Someone should get John Key a speechwriter and a coach in delivery.
Gillard’s otherwise uplifting speech misrepresented history with sentimentality about “young men in trenches”. The shared history actually started with men, women and children in ships pursuing hope in new colonies. And after the trenches of the first world war our two countries drew apart. In the second world war Australia deeply resented that New Zealand left most troops in Europe when the Japanese were in the neighbourhood. The two countries still have divergent perspectives on security and the region.