Did you notice the recession? Did it savage your household or neighbourhood? Have you noticed that things are looking up now and it’s (nearly) fine, sort of?
Or did you only know there was a recession because economists and politicians kept banging out numbers of gloom? Is it the same with the sort-of lift?
This week the government will invite us to think in two different ways about investment. One invitation is implicit and the other explicit.
The implicit one will come late in the week from Simon Power and other social services ministers on the “drivers of crime”.
Power’s main focus has been to be tough on crime, increase police powers and take victims’ side. While American states have been trying to cut prison numbers to save cash, John Key’s cabinet has been determined to put more in prisons.
If you can’t get through the door, you are not likely to be much help to families in trouble and need — nor, more important, to their children. The Maori Women’s Welfare League, which can open doors, can tell you that.
So can Shine, an Auckland NGO (non-government organisation) which has begun a three-month pilot of a Paula Bennett initiative to get more effective “low-key” intervention to head off domestic violence and protect under-2s.
John Key turns out to be a slow follower: a ticket to Copenhagen, long after dozens of other heads of government have bought theirs.
He gets to have dinner with the Queen — Denmark’s, not his — then a day of schmoozing, all to limited avail except that not to be there sends a message of insincerity.
What will Don Brash’s 2025 taskforce say next year and the year after and the year after and the year after?
Most likely it will say that, short-term fluctuations aside, the wage gap between New Zealand and Australia is not getting smaller and that the government is dragging its feet on the taskforce’s recommended reforms.
Almost exactly 20 years ago Ruth Richardson won a narrow vote in the National party caucus in favour of the Reserve Bank Bill. That sealed a broad National-Labour pro-market consensus based on “neoliberal” precepts and embedded the new political language.
This year Rodney Hide, talking Richardson’s language, has been notching up de-regulatory wins in the National-led government which will intensify strains in the pro-market consensus.
One thing is uncertain in life: taxes. You can never be sure what the government will do to you next year.
Where the cabinet goes on tax will say a lot: how strategic it is, how adventurous, how well it can pick its way through intellectual complexity, how prepared it is to face down vested interests and how good it is at selling reform.
It’s useful to know who your friends are. Rodney Hide is a devoted friend of this “very, very good government”. He called Nick Smith’s emissions trading bill “atrocious policy” resulting from “atrocious process”.
Then a luminary John Key counted as a friend on education policy joined three others to question his (actually Bill English’s) cornerstone education policy — standards.
Labour and National agree on free trade. But they don’t agree on emissions trading. Now Labour has called an end to a 20-year agreement on inflation targeting. What does that mean?
Nothing immediately — and nothing for at least two years, more likely five and possibly eight while Labour enjoys opposition.
Once upon a time farmers had great leverage within and over the National party. This past week or two the iwi leadership group has had more. Its lever is the Maori party’s votes Nick Smith needs for his revised emissions trading scheme (ETS).
Farmers got intensity-based status in the ETS with no cap. But they have not got out of the ETS, as farmers in Australia have from that country’s, through the Liberal-National opposition.