If you really, really want a change in NZ this year, a change that give a clear mandate for sweeping changes in Parliament you need a very large seat majority to National, maybe with an Act supporting bloc.

Labours election campaign will be divide and conquer – they’ll be wanting Act and National and the religious right to be an amorphous blob. Strange but true.

So Key is being plain stupid in ruling Roger Douglas out

I don’t think so. For starters, Key wants to get National as much of the vote as possible, and if he sees ACT compromising that, he needs to do something. Roger Douglas may actually be a draw card away from National to ACT, and that hurts National’s power. If he can convince people that a vote for ACT is wasted, then it’s more votes for National.

And nothing is lost by doing it. If people go to ACT anyway, and they do end up holding the balance of power, few people will blame Key for choosing ACT as a coalition partner. Sure it’s a flipflop, but that’s coalition politics.

You have form on the Douglas reforms issue.

Most of the Left say the never support Muldoonism (what they really didn’t like was his style). Yet Muldoonism was leftwing in nature (centralised economic planning). Muldoonism was the culmination of a previous trend (irrespective of party) to increase the role and the cost of the State.

Jafa then concedes that he likes the outcome of Douglas’s economic reforms, it’s just there were other ways to achieve it (without all the pain) and the benefits didn’t flow fast enough. This is typical dishonesty from the left: they are like sellers of the weightloss miracle pill.

If one thinks about it – if it where easy it would be done instead of waiting for a crisis. You see a bit of this ‘too hardism’ from Mr Farrar. Again take up the health analogy: “look if I had the ideal body weight I would eat healthily, but since I am fat to eat healthily is too hard and the results of that will take too long so there is no point in eating healthily”

Both Labour and National appear to have signed up to the existing social policy programmes in health and education. The are both conservative parties now. All the evidence is that despite unprecedented levels of expenditure in both, the education system is failing almost half the children and our health system is going third world. Defending the status quo in these arrangements is simply not going to be enough.

The problem is Jafa that most other successful nations make micro adjustments in policy over time that reduce the size, role and therefore cost of the State and increase individual choice and personal responsibility. In New Zealand no one is pushing an examination of the slowing failing status quo in say health and education except ACT. Labour has stoutly defended the status quo and National appears to be going to do the same. In the meantime a ‘social democratic’ state like Sweden introduces school choice and its now a political consensus.

We need to arrest the slide — and set the goal of beating Australia. We get upset coming second in sport. Why should we accept coming well down the ranks economically and socially? We shouldn’t. Just like in sport, we should strive to be the best.

We will never beat Australia economically. That is a pipe dream. They have all the advantages. Population, mineral resources, infrastructure, proximity to the rest of the world, and a huge head start. Unless they screw up.

Oh, and they thraaash us in sport, too.

Perhaps a more realistic goal? Like “we will get 3% growth pa when the international recession is over”?

ACT is not too far to the right and I challenge you to suggest how that is so.

Polling seems to indicate….

Centre right voters have two choices this election – to change the government but keep the same direction (and really what is the point?), or to change the government and change the direction of New Zealand onto a path of prosperity.

For the first option – it’s simple, vote National and you’ll get more of the same except John Key answering questions at question time. For the second, vote ACT and not only will you change the government, but you will assist in changing the direction of this country into something better (in conjuction with National). Dare to believe!

ACT is not too far to the right and I challenge you to suggest how that is so. It does however have a vision and goal to make New Zealand prosperous and somewhere we choose to live.

Oh and as far as I know John Ansell worked for National last election because of Don Brash not because the party “wasn’t Labour”.

To most in the centre they are scary, with the jumps too big and too far to the right to be given serious consideration.

I appreciate ACT needs to have a point of difference from National, but Labour will be laughing all the way, as it may play directly into their vote-bag.

As for John Ansell, I consider your change of party support disappointing. You have gone down in my estimation a great deal.

The discussion is more one of prevailing cultural/ tacitly held beliefs about how a nation can best work. Between WW2 and 1984 the buy-in was that economic protection from the outside world and from each other was the best form of social/ employment protection. Also that a state franchise on education, health, accident protection, retirement income and social support would offer the best certainty and quality of delivery outcomes to the recipients, the people, especially the vulnerable.

The economic protectionism argument is over bar a few romanticists hanging on to a mythical past.

The means of delivery of social outcomes is where the argument is still in mid-course. The sacred cows of state control and delivery of social policy are indeed very sacred, especially when they continue to be deified to the public by politicians across the spectrum.

But like the old economic protection approach, the chronic inability of these fat cows to deliver quality outcomes is becoming rather embarrassing and their days of sacred untouchability are starting to fade.

If anyone was going to be able to make state controlled delivery work well it was going to be super-intelligent political scientist Clark and her smart govt crew! Certainly there can be no complaint about the money available – the private economy of the people has delivered bumper outcomes for their decade in office. And National seems happy to preside over much of the policy directions and settings current Labour put in.

Roger Douglas represents a lineage out of the ancient Pragmatists school – bugger the ideology and the sacred cows, what’s moral is what works. If its not working its immoral.

As Rodney Hide predicted at the start of the current regime, Clark/Cullen’s approach has made the govt rich, the peoples wealth continues its decline relative to our neighbours and the chronic failure of state services to deliver, especially to the most vulnerable, is becoming acute. Like Ansell said above, nothing like an idea whose time has come.

Sadly, we can’t run a counterfactual case to show what the outcomes would have been had we implemented structural reform from 1984 in such a way as to minimise the impact on the most vulnerable — with, say, enhanced retraining. (Note, no sane person would argue that some structural reform wasn’t very necessary after so many years of National government).

And, as I conceded on an earlier thread, much of the pain in the early 1990s was down to the vicious policies of Ruth and co — not Roger — including introducing the Employment Contracts Act, stand downs, benefit cuts and so on at a time of very high unemployemnt.

And that some of those policy settings caused unnecessary hardship is manifest in the decision of the current National Party not to re-introduce things like the ECA.

As for the suggestion that the current 3.7% unemployment rate has much at all to do with the reforms in the mid-1980s — as though other policy pathways wouldn’t have resulted in the same outcomes or better — that’s just wishful thinking, to put it politely.

1. We want to restructure who provides. The govt will fund health insurance for anybody who wants it.

2. We want to make this more efficient. Why does the govt take your money, keep a bit, then give it back to you to buy health insurance. For those people who choose to have health insurance, and pay enough tax for the rebate to work, we’ll just give you a tax rebate instead. Anybody who doesn’t want to do this doesn’t have to.

See, much less threatening, no element of compulsion, and achieves the important parts of the programme.

No, you just need to become better informed, or start using words like “soon” and “immediate” in a less Rovian fashion — I suspect the former.

To begin with, I don’t know anyone who would say that 5 years I gave you figures for (to 1989) is the “immediate” period following the initiation of the reforms. Be honest, now; it’s not.

But, the picture is even worse than that. Employment in NZ over the period didn’t hit bottom until the September 1992 Q (at 1.181m)(HLFQ.SLA.3HA, Statistics New Zealand (Persons Employed by Sex by Employment Status; Total Both Sexes; Wage or Salary Earners).

(Note: the Household Labour Force Survey (HLFS) started in October 1985.)

On the other hand, if you’re suggesting that we’re still no better off after the Douglas reforms, then I think even Clark and Cullen would agree that your term ‘errant nutcase’ should be applied closer to home.