Governments get tired, Ministers predictable, and in the absence of great upheavals, the cycle turns and people want a change. So long as the alternative party has personalities and policies of some credibility. That seems to be the case in Australia. Prime Minister John Howard’s Houdini escape acts of finding non-existent children overboard, playing the refugee card, rallying the Australian public with the obvious CRY, “We will decide who comes to Australia and when!”, plus the security card by being in Washington on 9/11, won him an almost record term in government. Cautious, clever Kevin Rudd, Labour’s new leader, is unthreatening and comes across as competent and calm. A bit like the local chemist. In New Zealand, with its election due next year, it’s different, you can never think of New Zealand politics without remembering New Zealand now has proportional representation, MMP.

Unlike many, I have never written Labour off, saying they could form the next Government even if they poll less than the conservative National Party. The Greens, the Maori Party, and a strange populist party, New Zealand First, are more comfortable with Labour than National. Prime Minister Helen Clark has superb skills at balancing and massaging deals born of a lifetime of cutting deals in the most difficult of all coalitions, the NZ Labour Party

Labour’s secret weapon, as always, is the National Party’s arrogance and sense of entitlement. They still think they are born to rule but forget that when the economy was deregulated, so was politics, especially with MMP. They no longer have the traditional levers of power, powerful loyal interests, born of the days of controls and licensing. In the old days, they could count on funding and powerful support from those people who directed the economic traffic because of central control and hand-outs. The media has also been deregulated with new, often overseas, owners who don’t have automatic tribal, conservative party affiliations. State broadcasting and much of the ‘commentariat’, those who write and talk about politics, normally, now have liberal and greenish personal views. This coming election, some have suggested, is National’s to lose, as hard as that may seem, they are capable of doing it. In politics, perception is reality and when National talk of private schools, more privatisations, the attack adverts during the campaign will convince many that means their local schools and roads. National’s latest blunder, that doctors will be able to charge whatever they like, whatever the state subsidy, was bad politics and wrong in substance. If a government pays out an extra $20 for a child’s visit to a doctor, surely it’s not unreasonable to ask that most of that extra payment goes to the patient.

Meanwhile, unnoticed, a very serious and useful report has been published about the status of Maoris living in Australia. The number of Maoris living in Australia has gone up from 27,000 in 1986 to about 120,000 in 2006. Why have they gone? How are they doing? Powerful evidence emerges. Getting away from gangs and violence, negative attitudes towards success by their own families in NZ, prejudice by white New Zealanders, mainstream negativity about Maori issues; Aussies saw them as Kiwis first, Maoris second. Most said they would come home and missed Maori culture and feared their children would lose what was special about being Maori. Surveys of NZ Maoris towards those who have left revealed something else. They were dismissed as ‘Mozzies’, only in it for the money, greedy. Proving the reasons many left. They left for the same reasons 500 Kiwis leave a week, the push of the problems at home, and the pull of a better life in Australia.

A public debate and analysis of this serious government report has been absent. A quick, impulsive backlash by some local Maori commentators suggested that ‘Maori overseas were making excuses for failing in New Zealand!’. Every migrant group throughout history that went anywhere, left home for good reason, generally ambition, and generally succeed. That’s the genetic makeup of those with the character and drive to give life a fresh go. This information is not new. Some years ago an independent TV produced a show entitled ‘Aussie Haka’, revealed a stunning number of New Zealand Maori business success stories in Australia. Why no debate? Where’s the opposition parties? Where’s the media in New Zealand? Silly me, the report’s got 20 chapters and some serious recommendations about what we should do. Curiously, only about what we should do in Australia, mainly more cultural programmes. Not bringing these lessons home to tell us what’s going wrong. A serious opposition party preparing for government would get this report to a select committee and do the hard policy yards, but that seems beyond the New Zealand conservatives.