John Key, annoyed by Hone Harawira, has bid us focus on “real” issues. Either he hasn’t figured there is a real issue in the Harawira fracas or he is being disingenuous.
The real issue is not that Harawira skived off to Paris on a taxpayer-paid trip to Europe. We benefit if he comes back richer in his European heritage.
It’s been a month for H’s in hot water. First Rodney Hide for perk-bingeing actions not fitting perk-busting principles. Then the man with two H’s, Hone Harawira.
Harawira got into hot water, initially, for making cultural use of a trip to Europe: a day in Paris connecting with his heritage.
Most of the argument about climate change, apart from whether it is really happening or whether humans are causing it, is about how to stop or slow it. But there is another costly game in the interminable global negotiations: who pays the bill for adapting to the changes we are told are coming.
If the United Nations scientists are right, the world will have no choice but to adapt to different and variable weather, sea level rises and other impacts.
Rodney Hide has stumbled into the H world: say one thing, do another, about perks. Then in Christchurch on Wednesday there was H for hubris as he disparaged “do-nothing” John Key. In Hide’s actual work as a minister, however, the H stands for high-aiming.
His aim: to revolutionise the way law is made. His mechanism: a new law, plus new procedures, to parallel the transparency Ruth Richardson’s Fiscal Responsibility Act injected into government budgeting.
John Key’s government will be one next weekend. What will it be like at four or nine?
Will it get to four? Most likely. Key is popular, his opposition will take time to regroup fully, the economy looks likely to muddle through and, barring egregious errors, the cabinet is not likely to have made too many enemies.
Running the government is not for amateurs. Correction: running the government is for amateurs. They are called ministers. They need help.
A new cabinet arrives with ideas, some well-formed, some half-baked, all, they believe, “mandated” by their election. They suspect public servants are infected with the ousted government’s way of thinking.
A year ago Helen Clark’s government was in its death throes, a week away from election defeat. John Key was on a roll. He still is.
Key is set to roll over the top of Phil Goff in 2011. Indeed, the spectre for Labour is National’s fall in 2002 after losing power in 1999.
It is not beyond imagining that Labour could come in below its 2008 vote and the Greens not get 5 per cent, in which case National then cruises with an easy majority through a second term. A complicating factor in that event could be a despairing vote by some to lift New Zealand First back over 5 per cent to provide the sort of antidote United Future provided to Labour in 2002 when National was down and out.
John Key thinks MMP is working well. So why is he going to put you to the expense of two referendums to decide whether to have a different voting system?
Once a Prime Minister had only his party’s caucus to whip into line. Patronage and party discipline usually sufficed, though there were occasional rebellions. One over proposed potato regulations in 1979 was the first shot in what exploded into the 1980s economic deregulation revolution.
Tariana Turia is fixing a personal health matter and will continue as Maori party co-leader after the 2011 election. The party needs that.
The party was born in anger and has been sustained in aspiration. Now it needs to drill foundations into the substrate of politics. That means members, money and organisation — and a message embedded in a long-term strategy.
From Michele Hewitson’s interview with Mike Moore, NZ Herald, 17 October 2009
Now, look, why does he [Mike Moore] always do this? He comes across as having a chip on his shoulder and he said, twice, that he did, a “working-class chip”.
I read a quote, from a Colin James review of one of his books, which noted this: “… the chip on the shoulder at not being taken seriously here at home by fellow-politicians, journalists and intellectuals …”