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THE YEAR AHEAD.
The coming year has to be more exciting politically than last year. The Government’s popularity is in part based on its ability not to make headlines, change, or challenge the country.
Prime Minister Key has an attractive non-political style, his ability to turn on a dime seen as good management. He enjoys a golly gosh, good guy image, a sort of James Stewart, Tom Hanks persona. He is not without political skill. The country was divided on the smacking legislation, the insiders and experts versus most of the people.
After an expensive referendum, which is a committee of the whole of New Zealand, the PM decisively set up another committee, people groaned. The committee, after a cooling off period, reported the blindingly obvious, that the legislation was never going to stop the epidemic of child abuse and no parent would go to jail for light, corrective patting. Issue over, the talkback shows silent. Well done, Prime Minister.
Politics is eventually all about economics and choices. The Government has chosen to postpone tax increases to the next generation by stopping investment in the nation’s retirement fund and borrowing over a billion dollars a month to purchase political peace. The Maori Party has levered over two billion dollars out of the taxpayers because of their agreement with National. That’s eight million dollars a week for each of the five seats that National promised to abolish. The insider media even praised this as an example of MMP working! Peter Sharples, with all the good humour of a headmaster on sports day, and Turiana Turia,as a kindly auntie, escape sceptical scrutiny from the media. This should change in the New Year as the cosmetic makeup fades. Act will find it hard to survive, unless National put up another dead man in Epsom as a candidate. Rodney Hyde’s new Auckland city is a Frankenstein which will strangle its creator. His personal extravagances can’t have endeared him to the blue rinse set. His refusal to see the problem and spending so much time in a tanning parlour and getting a good long and painful waxing, which I suspect he enjoys, before apologising, made it worse.
The hyperactive Nick Smith had a good year, sorting out the expensive Resource Management legislation, but his climate change legislation will come back to haunt National.
The feisty battler, Paula Bennett, and is underestimated by Labour; sure she is the Susan Boyle of NZ politics but the song she sings about welfare hits a nerve with struggling Kiwis and hard-working Asian shop keepers who deserted Labour at the last election.
Phil Goff at last found his own voice when he bravely reversed Labours reversal on the sea bed legislation, but then went strangely quiet and didn’t follow up. He would be a good PM. He is focused, disciplined and experienced, perhaps too much so. He tends to treat colleagues like junior officials, and the media complain they have to endure briefings rather than interviews with him. He is surrounded by some angry people who are bitter their supporters don’t share their values and tastes. They insult traditional Labour voters who dare question them by calling them red-necks.
Phil has more than a fifty percent chance of forming the next Government. Note, I don’t say ‘winning’ the next election. In 1978, despite Muldoon creaming Rowling in the election debates and in Parliament, and that Labour then was dispirited and weak; we won more votes than National. The Greens must now want the red meat of Cabinet power. Even they must be tired of condemning earthquakes in distant lands, eating tofu and raffling hemp jumpers. Life style politics is fun, but to save the world they may have to accept the pay rise. They have a strong brand and only need five percent.
Labour overwhelming wins the list vote in Maori seats and the Maori Party will think they have a right to Cabinet seats.
The real game changer is Winston Peters; he has always done exactly the opposite after an election than what he said before an election. He always finds a group, that the minority suspect, to attack. This year it will be the media, privileged Maoris, Aussie banks, capitalists, the Wellington elite, China trade and immigrants again. Remember the accusations about Islamic extremists recruiting nationalistic Maoris in our prisons? And the attacks on migrants in our hospitals for taking beds from Kiwis, when there are many more migrant nurses and doctors than patients. Can we be the only country in the world where there isn’t more than five percent who fall for this? This is a movie you have seen before and it’s coming to your town soon.
