Helen Clark had H2. John Key has charm and quick uptake. That was not enough to handle Richard Worth.
Heather Simpson, with whom a segment of the international community is now becoming acquainted, was Clark’s chief of staff, go-between, message carrier and enforcer. She was H2.
She could speak for Clark as if she was Clark. She negotiated with small parties. She fixed those who got out of line or favour. She fixed leaks, imagined and real.
Jeanette Fitzsimons put her finger on the Greens’ central political poser in her valedictory speech as co-leader last weekend. She spoke of “putting forward the positive and practical alternatives”.
Too often Greens are finger-waggers. Fitzsimons said: “We’ve always had bundles of ideas on what could be done but we do spend rather a lot of time criticising governments rather than looking like a government in waiting.
The budget is at the core of our constitution. The power to tax is assigned to elected representatives. Bill English needed ACT’s or the Maori party’s votes for the authority to tax and spend last Thursday.
This principle reaches centuries back into British constitutional history. Two centuries ago the United States’ independence was founded on it. Three decades ago here an autocratic Prime Minister’s push to change tax rates by regulation triggered a decisive revolt in his party caucus.
The immediate issue for tax in the May budget was the 2010 and 2011 personal tax cuts promised before — and after — the election. There is bigger work ahead.
Personal tax cuts in part just undo tax rises. During Michael Cullen’s time tax rose as a proportion of income not just because he raised the top rate to 39c but because he did not raise the thresholds at which higher rates cut in.
Colin James on government board appointments for Management, June 2009
Want a government board appointment? Then check out the lie of the land. The geography has changed.
The appointment to the Families Commission of “divisive and controversial” and potentially “very damaging” Christine Rankin (as aggrieved and unconsulted support-partner Peter Dunne, the commission’s architect, described her) signalled two aspects of that change of geography.
There is a hole in the budget and it is an issue for your kids. Will Bill English fix it next year?
English stated on Thursday that the budget had two principal aims: to tide the economy, and the people, through the recession; and to build a more competitive economy for the future.
The first aim can be seen in the choice to maintain social spending and defer the promised 2010 and 2011 tax cuts. Spending for 2009-10 overall is up by $2.9 billion on 2008-09, in part to cope with higher unemployment — and including enough crumbs for the Maori party to say the budget is mana-enhancing.
Every so often there is a shock-horror probe into bear farming in China. And every so often there is a shock-horror probe into New Zealand pig farmers emulating the Chinese bear farmers.
Both are obeying the biblical injunction to humans to exert “dominion” over all the earth and all living things. Some interpret “dominion” as stewardship, which implies respect. Others read it as totalitarian domination: bears in cages in pain and pigs de-pigged in crates.
One clause in Treasury Secretary John Whitehead’s speech last Friday spoke volumes: there have been “structural spending increases rather than temporary fiscal stimulus”.
Thursday’s budget will aim to make a start on fixing that.
A “temporary fiscal stimulus” can be unwound when it has done its work or the money runs out. The government goes back to the way things were. For those in the state’s employ and locked into its activities, life goes on.
The Greens, about to change co-leader at Queen’s Birthday weekend, have a choice. Do they stay a “don’t” party or do they become a “do” party? The time is ripe.
Greens are a mixture of joy and gloom: joy in their own lives, lived according to principle; gloom about the rest of us, slurping up the planet’s goodies.
John Key’s government is six months old this weekend, time enough for some mistakes. What’s the prognosis?
This week’s mistake was the blindsiding of Peter Dunne over Christine Rankin’s appointment to the Families Commission. Not very mana-enhancing, twice-blindsided Pita Sharples might say.