We don’t need to get dirty

Dear John,

Colin Espiner suggests National might have to fight Labour’s fire with some of its own:

Labour is so much better at attack politics than National. Perhaps it’s time Key followed Clark’s advice to her own troops and told them to “put on your hard hats”.

Attack on issues and policy (or lack of it) is one thing. Dishing out the dirt as Labour has been doing is quite another. Please don’t go there.

You should have more than enough facts for which you can hold Labour to account without following their example of dredging the depths of their imaginations for muck to rake.

They think chucking mud will work because they judge people by their own low standards. Please show us you have a much higher regard for the intelligence and perception of voters.

You will need to fight hard but you don’t have to fight dirty.

Mud sticks to the hand that throws it and New Zealand needs a Prime Minister with clean hands.

Yours in hope,

Ele

Going, going, almost gone

Colin Espiner thinks Helen Clark has run out of options.

True to her natural style of caution, Clark has given herself the night to sleep on it. She will take advice tonight on the likely impact on her government of cutting Peters adrift, and take some soundings from NZ First about what may happen to Labour’s relationship after the election if she sacks or suspends him.

It’s understandable that Clark doesn’t want to sack her Foreign Minister. It’s a bad look. It will make him very angry. It may derail the third and final reading of the Emissions Trading Bill. It could end her hopes of a fourth term.

But she simply no longer has any choice. The Prime Minister has given Peters as much rope as she can afford to without being dragged under in the same whirlpool currently sucking the NZ First leader beneath the waves.

What are her options? She could argue that the SFO investigation is only into NZ First, not Peters himself. Except that the SFO specifically mentions the involvement of ”a minister in the government” in its press release. She could argue that the investigation has nothing to do with Peters’ job as Foreign Minister. Except that as Foreign Minister Peters is the representative of New Zealand abroad and it’s difficult to have someone under investigation for fraud in such a role.

She could argue natural justice. That has got her through so far with the privileges committee – just. But the SFO is a whole different kettle of fish. The privileges committee is the proverbial wet bus ticket. The SFO is the big time. Clark cannot have a minister of the Crown signing ministerial warrants while under investigation from the SFO.

The positives for Clark are these: Sacking Peters will make her look decisive. It will end John Key’s short but triumphant occupation of the moral high ground. It will disassociate her and her government (partially) from further fallout, for it looks as though there certainly will be further fallout. It will not bring down the government.

In some ways it’s a sad end for Peters. He has been a reasonably good Foreign Minister. Labour could not have governed without him. But he has brought this entire controversy upon himself. Peters has no-one else to blame. Clark knows she must sack him. And sack him she must.

The alleagions are still just allegations and Peters as an individual is innocent until anything is proved to the contrary. But the role of Foreign Minister is one of the most important in the government and while questions are raised over him personally it reflects on the position he holds.

Clark has to accept that Peters is not just damaging himself, his party, her and her government, he’s risking New Zealand’s reputation in the international community.

Optimistic but not over confident

A party conference on the eve of an election when all the polls point to victory is an exciting one, though the National Party’s is not as Colin Espiner an over confident one.

There has been less triumphalism than I expected. For a party 50 points-plus in the polls, National seems pretty much aware that winning is no foregone conclusion. Perhaps this is because after three defeats in a row, many have forgotten what winning feels like and are dead scared to even contemplate victory, let alone celebrate it early.

No, not forgotten what winning feels like, but grounded enough to know that the only poll which counts is on election day and there is a lot of hard work to be done if we want to be able to celebrate then. We’re cautiously optimistic but taking nothing for granted because complacency isn’t far away from arroagance and neither of those win votes.

Head & heart

Most people accept that National – and other centre right parties – have a head, unfortunately fewer people realise we also have a heart.

Perhaps that’s because it’s difficult to get the message in a sound bite: that we need a sound economy to be able to afford first world health care, education and other social initiatives (and anything else we expect a government to do for that matter).

Yesterday’s family forum at the party conference was an opportunity to show we had a heart. It didn’t impress Colin Espiner who said:

The only bum note, for me, was the “families forum” half way through the day, which seemed more the product of a focus group’s report on what National should cover off at its conference than any serious attempt to address an issue of substance.

It didn’t seem that way from where I was sitting in the audience – although of course I’m a wee bit biased 🙂 The message I got was one which is central to the difference between centre right parties and those on the left – that its people and not the state which makes happy, healthy societies. This was summed up by early childhood spokesperson Paula Bennett who said there are two words which really matter for young children: love and care.

Rodney’s the winner

Colin Espiner reckons the real winner in the Peters/ NZ First donation debacle is Rodney Hide.

There’s one politician who has emerged from the disgraceful episode involving the hypocritical Winston Peters and his wealthy donor mates head and shoulders above the rest…

It’s ACT leader Rodney Hide. The perk-buster from Epsom has recovered his sense of purpose over the donations scandal, and he is the only politician who has been pushing Peters for answers both inside the House and out.

OK, he looks like Ted Bovis from Maplins Holiday Camp in the old BBC telly show Hi-de-Hi!, in his silly yellow jacket that his staff can’t persuade him to remove. But he’s talking a lot more sense.

I had begun to worry that Hide had become so narcissistic over his weight loss and various stage performances that he had disappeared up his own ego. The excruciating appearances on TVNZ’s Good Morning programme, the dancing, the Pollyanna-ish reinvented “let’s not be so beastly to each other” Rodney saw him lose his mana and his political nous along with the kilograms.

But in the past two weeks he has gone a long way to redemption. It was Hide who demanded that the Speaker consider a breach of privilege case against Peters. And Hide who, in a stroke of genius, yesterday complained to the Serious Fraud Office, thereby ensuring the story will live on for a few more days…

Of course it’s easy for ACT to criticise when it does not have its future at stake. But that is the role of the smaller parties, and one that until recently Hide seemed to have forgotten.

There may be another reason why the Yellow Coat of Epsom has a spring back in his step. National is giving Hide plenty of room to play on the centre-Right at the moment. The Working for Families announcement was an absolute gift. Judging by some of the comments on this blog, there will be a few disgusted National voters heading ACT’s way over the decision to continue to deliver welfare to upper-middle-income earners.

It will be very interesting to see whether ACT receives a boost in its polling over this. Hide has been in the news nightly. It’s sometimes difficult to pick up rises in very small sample sizes, of course, but I think ACT is still likely to register an increase…

The ultimate irony for Peters would be if it is his nemesis who ends up around the Cabinet table and not him. At least Hide could say he’d earned it.

The leaders of the wee parties do have more leeway than those of the major ones and Hide has made the most of it. Even without the yellow jacket, no-one would have been in any doubt about where he was standing in the past week.

More bad policy that’s good politics

Colin Espiner sums up why National had to swallow the dead rat of Welfare for Families:

Has Key had an ideological change of heart? Unlikely. I suspect his deputy Bill English and National’s Treasury secondee have been wrestling with the numbers and concluded that it’s just too hard to unpick the scheme and replace it with tax cuts that favour the upper end of the income scale without chucking out the whole model and starting again.

And this wasn’t an option, given the current state of household budgets and rising costs. Going into an election campaign promising to take money off people, even if it was being replaced with a tax cut, was never going to be a good look. Key has decided, once again, that it’s better to swallow the short-term embarrassment of another me-too National policy than suffer a hit in the polls.

Yes, it’s opportunistic, pragmatic, realpolitik. It may make the purer bluebloods within National gnash their teeth and shake their heads. After all, isn’t WFF exactly the kind of anti-aspirational, low productivity handout that the party has always railed against?

Yes, but just like interest free student loans, bad policy is sometimes good politics and too many people are getting money from WFF to risk the electoral backlash from ditching it.

Students to get $350 weekly allowance?

Remember how Labour trumped National on the eve of the last election with its interest-free student loan policy? Colin Espiner wrties in The Press today (not yet on line) that another student election bribe is in the wind.

It is understood Labour is considering a massive boost to the student allowance scheme, including a payment of some $350 a week for study courses of 35 hours a week or more. That would put student allowances far ahead of any other standard benefit payment. It would cost a lot of money, but may not have the same impact as interest-free loans did in 2005.

Students and student politicians might think this is a good thing and they may be able to make a case for a small increase. But a $350 a week allowance, so much higher than any other benefit,  is not the best use of money in the over-stretched education budget.

Students and their representatives put a lot of energy into crying poor, but instead of worrying about loans and allowances they ought to be worrying about the quality of their education.

Every dollar that goes to a student allowance or interest free loan, is a dollar less for teachers and teaching resources. Improving those would be better use of taxpayers dollars than an over-generous student allowance scheme.

Family Friendly But Not For All

Helen Clark had only just scraped the egg off her face for getting her facts wrong in last week’s attack on John Key, when she put her head back in the hen’s nest by criticising him and Bill English for taking a few days off with their families.

Colin Espiner blogs:

“They do tend to work pretty short weeks,” Clark said of the National leadership yesterday. I thought this was pretty unfair. Both have school-age children. It’s the school holidays and recess at Parliament. The election is at least four months away. Why shouldn’t they have a few days off?

There is every reason why they should have a few days off. It would be difficult to find a less family-friendly job than that of an MP. The hours, the travel, the lack of privacy…  It’s a dog’s life which puts immeasurable strain on MPs and their families so snatching a few precious days of family time is both sensible and healthy.

I accept there are MPs – on both sides of the political divide – whose work rate wouldn’t match the prime minister’s, but even the busiest of people need time off. I’ve said before that I simply don’t know how the PM manages to work as hard as she does and I very much doubt we will see a harder worker than her at Premier House for many a year.

Whether that’s a good thing is a moot point. Should political life be “all consuming” as Clark said yesterday? Or should Key and English be allowed a couple of days off with their families to recharge the batteries and see their kids?

How very sad that Clark has allowed political life to be “all consuming”, for her and for us. Having a life in the real world outside politics might enable her to clear the bile from her brain and have a more varied diet than the lemons she appears to be permanently sucking. In so doing she’d become a better person and we’d get a better Prime Minister.

It might also enable her to see the irony in leading the party which continually reminds us about Welfare Working for Families and has only just passed legislation creating family-friendly work places; then attacking two husbands and fathers who very sensibly take one of the few opportunities their demanding jobs afford them to spend some time with their wives and children.

It makes a farce of any claims she might make that she or her party are family friendly. Her words show that family friendly is only vote-catching rhetoric, not a conviction based on a belief in the philosophy which ought to under lie it.

Clark expects others to respect her choice to not have children but her attack on Key and English is devoid of any respect for them, their families and their choices.

On The House Turns 1

Many happies to Colin Espiner and his blog On The House  which turns 1 tomorrow.

Blogs have added an extra, and welcome dimension to the MSM and political ones like this are a bonus for media and political junkies, especially in election year.