Kiwiblog

Just watching Trade Minister Tim Groser on Agenda, and it is nice to see someone who is so obviously an expert talk on their portfolio area. This isn’t always possible (or resirable) in every area, but likewise it is nice to have one of NZ’s top lawyers as Attroney-General, rather than a non-lawyer.

Later on Mark Unsworth from Saunders Unsworth talked about the new MPs, and opportunities for promotion. He was pretty complementary of the new MPs from both parties (as I have been also). But what I thought was most interesting was his words on the difference between Ministers in John Key’s Cabinet and Helen Clark’s. Unsworth said it won’t be three strikes and you’re out for Ministers, but more like one strike and you are out. And unlike Clark there won’t be a recycling of Ministers six months later by putting them back in, but once you are out, you stay out.

While I don’t think it will be quite as black and white as that, I do think that life will be very different for Ministers under John Key. Up until her final term, Clark had very few realistic options for promotion, so Ministers were safe. Key has a number of very competent and ambitious MPs in the 2005 intake who will be keen to be Ministers within the next term, and a fair few of the 2008 intake will be aiming to become Ministers in the second term (if there is one) if not before.

Very sad to see Agenda killed off by TVNZ. It has been a very influential show, with comments made by MPs on the show often causing headlines for some days.

Ironically thanks to the change of Government, Agenda may be able to continue on another channel. It depends how quickly the policy changes can be implemented.

John Key, if he wins the election, may be the most economically literate Prime Minister New Zealand has had in recent decades. I think he will have a far greater understanding of business and the economy, than most people realise. Why do I say this?

Clark and Cullen never lose a chance to scoff at his former job, and call him a money trader, a currency dealer etc. And they are right – he was (amongst many other things). In fact he was one of the most successful people in the world at currency markets.

Now think about people who are world experts in a market. Take for example someone who is a world expert on the price of gold – they probably know more about gold than 99.99% of the population. They know all about production, distribution, prices, costs, delays, environmental issues etc so they can correctly predict what will happen to the price of gold.

The same applies to the world experts on futures markets about say bananas. These people will know more about the banana trade than most people would think you can know. They’ll know the diseases they can get, the temperature they grow best in, the cost and time to transport etc etc. For if they didn’t know this they wouldn’t be so successful year after year in making money predicting the price.

Now John Key is not an expert on the price of gold or the price of bananas. He is an expert on the price of a country’s currency, which is heaving influences by a country’s economic performance. This means he knows, and has a 20 year track record of stunning success on what factors push a currency up and down – interest rates, employment, labour productivity, level of taxation, construction activity, exports, imports, balance of payments current account etc etc. You do not make $50 million by accident on predicting what will happen to currencies. You understand the economic drivers of a couple of dozen economies and are better than almost all your peers at understanding them.

Agenda producer Richard Harman blogs:

Sunday did not begin auspiciously. We had agreed to interview Mr Key early. At 8.30 — so he could get a 10.00 a.m. flight to Wellington. Through either our stuff up or in Mr Key’s office, the Opposition leader arrived at 7.30. I got in just before 8 to find him in the Green Room with a press secretary quietly reading the Sunday papers. Shortly afterwards John Roughan and Vernon Small arrived and we were then treated to a fascinating 20 minutes from Mr Key as he explained (almost non stop) his own analysis of the American financial crisis and why it had happened. Along the way we got some revealing insights into the way Wall Street works and the mindsets of the traders in the markets. It was the kind of view only a top insider could give.

Today I have been talking to a former National MP who is close to Mr Key. He argues that the Opposition Leader has one of the sharpest minds he has ever met. That is not a view I have shared up till now. What I have seen of Mr Key has been pretty much what the public has seen; a warm, relaxed, sometimes bumbling person with a mind for numbers. But his talk in the Green Room revealed a different side and which today meant I could understand what the former MP meant.

John is very very sharp. Yes he is new to politics – only six years to Clark’s lifetime. But to say he is a fast learner is to put it mildly.

With the world facing the most difficult economic conditions in 70 years, I have absolutely no doubts about John Key’s ability to understand what is happening and to react to international economic events in a way of maximum benefit to New Zealand – not based on an narrow ideological system of beliefs, but with pragmatic responses based on two deacdes of experience.

So everytime a Labour MP scoffs at Key as a currency trader, just remember what that actually means – that John Key understands economies, and that MP does not.

Agenda hve the transcript up of their interview with Mairo Party MP Hone Harawira. First the good parts:

HONE Oh sure, I mean they have, to assume that they can simply sit there and pass an Electoral Finance Act when the whole world was saying this sucks and in fact it’s come back to bite them on the bum shows how disconnected they were with reality to try and ram through legislation at this late stage in the game is arrogant, it suggests that they are really only – and then to stack all of these quangos with their cronies suggests that they see themselves going out and they’re really just trying to maintain as much power as possible, that’s arrogant, that’s nothing to do with coalition building, and in fact the Labour Party has yet to come out clearly and say these are the sorts of things we’d like to do with the Maori Party.

Harawira is of course right with his analysis.

GUYON What about National then are you comfortable, could you actually work with National?

HONE Another difficult one there, but no more difficult than working with Labour as far as we’re concerned. People have this big fear of National and Maori in terms of oh they’d get rid of the Maori seats wouldn’t they, but my response constantly is always the greatest land theft of my generation has actually been the Foreshore and Seabed and that wasn’t stolen by National that was stolen by Labour, would you expect us to jump into bed with them happily.

That is a very different tune to a few years ago.

But some idea of the challenges ahead:

GUYON Let’s talk about a couple of the things that you said you want to do if you have influence over a government, you wrote recently in the Northland Age that you want to remove GST from food and abolish tax for people earning $25,000 and under, how much would that cost?

HONE Actually Guyon I couldn’t care less how much that costs, what I do know is this.

Guyon says Treasury worked the cost out for them:

GUYON Well we did something that you should have done, we asked Treasury how much this would cost, they said it would cost two billion to remove GST from food and three billion more to cut taxes for those earning less than $25,000. You want free health care for kaumatua and kuia too, where is the money coming from?

I have a figure of $2.4 billion for removing GST from food. The no tax on those earning less than $25,000 could be even more than $3 billion. That is the cost of zero tax for everyone who earns $25K or less. But if you read it as being zero tax on the first $25,000 of income (which you would need to do otherwise someone at $25k pays $0 and someone on $26K pays pays says $5k) then the fiscal cost is arouynd $11.4 billion (according to NZIER calculator).

HONE Well let’s say the tax off cigarettes for the last we’ll say five years, that’s five billion dollars. This isn’t very hard eh, this isn’t rocket science, the government is taking a billion dollars a year off tobacco tax, they could certainly spend it in this area.

Hone is correct that tobacco excise tax is around $1 billion a year. But that tax is already budgeted for.

Even if Hone was suggesting we double the excise tax on tobacco, that would bring in an additional billion a year at most. Probably quite a bit less as the amount of tobacco purchased would decline. But even if it was $1 billion that is not even close to the $5 billion to $13 billion cost of what he wants to do.

Very amusing to watch the students do fact checking on Agenda. They found:

• Lockwood Smith was only half right in claiming 80,000 Kiwis had left last year, as did not take account of returning Kiwis
• David Parker was only half right in claiming they have doubled the compensation to forestry owners as in fact has only increased by 50% on original offer
• Most amusingly of all they found Nick Smith’s comment that the first policy released by Labour in this campaign was a National policy was 100% correct. They checked both the Beehive website and the Labour Party website and could not find a single 2008 election policy listed.

An interesting discussion on Agenda this morning.

Jeanette Fitzsimons said Peters has shown a contempt for the public and the public’s right to know. It is not just a matter of illegality.

She was asked if she could work with NZ First in a governing arrangement. Fitzsimons said that the party decides that but her personal viwe is you have to be able to trust someone around the cabinet table, you have to be able to trust and take their word and know it is not going to take weeks and weeks before questions are answered and only under coercion. She personally would be uncomfortable in a governing arrangement with NZ First.

Good on Jeanette for saying that. Not as strong as Key, but if the Greens won’t back Labour if they keep clinging to Winston, then he has no power even if makes 5%.

Peter Dunne hedges his bets and says he does not think either major party will want Peters and that NZ First will not be re-elected. However says he will decide on policies only, and not rule Peters out.

Jim Anderton says issue for Peters is not so much legal but hypocrisy of railing against donations from big business and taking them secretly.

Fitzsimons says she is most concerned about the fihsing issue, and wants it investigated.

Barry Soper has ripped into Anderton for saying the media have tried and convicted Peters in public.  He points out that teh media have been unable to get a single useful explanation from Peters for months on end and it is thanks to the media these issues have come to light. Says Anderton should applaud media if they believe in transparency. Anderton responds weakly.

Anderton now talking about the Brethren. Yawn. Now he is alleging the SFO is compromised as investigating Peters keeps them alive.

Dunne says he has no problem with Key ruling Peters out, and suspects he has wanted to for some time. Says he “fully understands” that John Key needed to put a marker in the sand.

UPDATE: A friend points out to me that Jeanette is a very polite person, and her comments indicating diffculties serving with Winston was Green Speak for “Fuck Off”

I hope so! Removing Winston from power (only the public can remove him from Parliament) is something all parties in Parliament should agree on. It should not be a partisan issue.

Good God. TVNZ have cancelled this week’s Agenda for repeats of the Olympics.

Is this an example of the Charter at work?

I mean it is not as if there isn’t an election about to be held. Oh wait, there is.

I could understand if it was for live Olympics. But 10 am Sunday in NZ is 6am Sunday in Beijing so it is definitely only repeats.

Two months before an election, TVNZ dumps for a week the only in depth political show for sports repeats.

Our tax dollars at work.

Has been a busy few days. In the last week or so I have:

• Spoken to the Kapiti Rotary Club
• Done a TV3 Sunrise interview
• Done an interview for One News
• Also a longer interview for TVNZ7 News at 8
• Been on Agenda
• Spoke to a 20/20 Comms Trust/UNESCO seminar on the impact of Identity and Location Services
• Interviews on Newstalk ZB and Radio Live

Agenda went well I thought. Danyl made an interesting comment:

There was a weird bolsheviks v mensheviks vibe to the Rodney Hide appearance on Agenda this morning. The two ‘commentators’ were National activist David Farrar and media village idiot Deborah Hill-Cone, both of whom are sympathetic to ACT ideology (if not the party itself). They grilled Hide aggressively over his failure to grow the party – much more so than any independent or left-wing analysts would have done.

When I am in roles like this, I think I probably do push harder those I am more naturally in agreement with. I remember also pushing Gerry Brownlee when he appeared quite hard on the Brian Connell issue.

Danyl also notes:

And the fix appears to be in in regards to the Agenda book club, with the book on Jim Bolger being won by former Bolger staffer and Agenda commentator David Farrar! Highly suspicious!

Heh the prize was for knowing the nickname of the Air Force plane Bolger used to fly on – Spud One of course!

The seminar yesterday at Vic (Pipitea) was fascinating – both in terms of content and the technology involved. We were luckly to have the Government’s overall CIO speaking and the proposed online identity verification service sounds just nifty.

The seminar was connected by access grid to four other sites. Vic’s Kelburn campus and also Otago, Canteerbury and Auckland Universities.

This is it in action. The video linkup was excellent and good quality. Sadly the audio failed for us and all the other campuses could hear us (which was okay as the speakers were in Wellington) but we could not hear them. We coped with a mixture of sign language and e-mails.

My contribution was on the benefits, risk and issues around the combining of identity with location (GPS) services. I am hugely keen on the benefits but there are some potentially nasty aspects which will post challenges.

I’ll be one of the two panelists on Agenda on Sunday (10 am TV One). Deborah Hill Cone is the other.

The main guest will be Rodney Hide on the future of ACT. Also Shaun Brown (former TVNZ journalist) on the French Nuclear Testing over Mururoa Atoll that he witnessed and the anti-nuclear protest under Kirk.

There is also a feature on the Dunedin South electorate and Clare Curran and David Benson-Pope.

Agenda was a good watch today. Jim Bolger was in great form as he told off the interview for trying to trick him, and proclaiming he is far too experience to fall into those traps. It brought back fond memories.

But the main guest was Trevor Mallard, and Trevor said some interesting things:

TREVOR Well I’m happy to have floats as long as it’s non core assets.  I mean we’re not gonna float for example the wind farms of Meridian.

My God, imagine if a National MP was saying this. It would be “Privatisation Alert, Privatisation Alert”.

I am glad to see Trevor say it is okay to float non core assets. Could someone ask him for a list.

GUYON What you’re telling me is that you want to sell the subsidiaries but you haven’t been able to.

TREVOR I’m happy for things which are not part of the core to be partially floated, at the moment there’s none of those that are big enough to be interesting, but what I’m not prepared to do is to have the state owned assets either sold and leased back the way John Key has been looking at or prepared for sale the way he indicated that he would use first three  years in government.

Trevor gets marks for always trying to score a point, and invent a policy for National. The important thing to note again is he says it is fine to sell non core assets.

GUYON Okay, can I look at the appointments to SOE boards.  You’ve recently, well not you personally, but Diane Yates has recently been appointed, the former Labour MP to the board of the SOE Learning Media, I mean isn’t this just another example of political cronyism and you’re not getting the best people on these boards you’re getting your old mates appointed to the boards of SOEs.

TREVOR Well I think if you have a really good look and analyse who I have appointed to SOE boards you’ve got one of the classic ones coming on your programme soon, we’ve gone for the talented people, the people who can do the jobs, and if you look very carefully at the chairs of the SOE boards…

This is very interesting. Trevor is ignoring the fact four of his colleagues have gives Yates a Board job, and is just stressing that he personally has not, and he appoints talent only.

This is a very clever way to get across the point he had nothing to do with her appointments and that he does not think she is talented. Otherwise he would have defended her appointments on the basis of the skills she would bring to those boards.

The interview with Winston Peters on Agenda was quite fascinating, and worth going through in detail. He seemed to be at great pains to get across the message that his criticisms of National in no way mean he can’t support them forming a Government after the election.

Of course my view on having a Government reliant on Winston is akin to receiving chemotherapy. It’s damn painful and nasty, but slightly preferable to dying

Now let us look at the interview:

GUYON ESPINER
Well Winston Peters let’s cut to the chase on that question will you be contesting the Tauranga seat?

WINSTON PETERS – Leader, New Zealand First
Look the New Zealand First Party’s about to announce a tranch of candidates right around the country that’s part of our public relations strategy and we’ll have to wait until then.

This makes it quite clear that the decisions have been made, and it is just a matter of PR that it is not yet announced. With this in mind I have now listed Peters as a candidate for Tauranga in my 2008 Candidates list.

GUYON Okay will the public get to know who those charities are?

WINSTON Look I wrote to the Speaker with the full list and the letters of introduction to those charities, if the Speaker wants you to find out that’s fine but I do not think that they should become the victims of snooping prying media interest.

The Speaker has stated she wants Parliament more open and parts of it come under the Official Information Act. So in good faith I expect her to make the list available.

GUYON Are you perhaps hinting that you’ve done your work in that portfolio and maybe want to move on to something else?

WINSTON No I’m merely hinting that I found it an exciting challenge and an enormously difficult complex job both in getting the resources for this country to have for the first time for a long time the capacity to properly image sell itself and help our exporters, has been a great victory and I’m pleased about that, but I wouldn’t want to see it challenged because we’ve barely got back to where we were when Tallboys had the job. What’s sad is what happened in between in terms of lack of resourcing.

The reference to Talboys is interesting. Peters at his heart is a Muldoonist – authoritarian on both economic and social issues. He sees the late 70s as a golden era and rejects most things post-Muldoon such as Asian immigration, asset sales, free trade, monetary policy etc. This is why he attracts older voters – they like him hark back to the 70s. Winston’s aim is to turn the clock back. And like his mentor, Muldoon, he makes expensive promises to retried persons regardless of whether the country can afford them.

GUYON In 2005 it was the same in that you went with the largest party and formed a government which had the fewest number of parties within it, now is that your stance going into this election again?

WINSTON Well I think that the more parties you have the more problems you’re going to have and the real difficulty in New Zealand politics today is that not enough people have learnt that as much as this glamorous romantic talk about doing your own thing and going your own way, the people of this country want a government, they might criticise the government all the time but what distinguishes New Zealand as a first world country is that it has a stability about it, even in this present circumstance and fewer parties makes that easier to happen.

I have always said this was a major factor for his 1996 decision. He preferred a two party arrangement to a three party arrangement with the Alliance also. On current polls Labour could only possibly form a Government with the Greens, Maori Party and NZ First. That means Winston would be just one of four significant parties in Government.

GUYON I want to get this very clear because there are people, journalists, members of the public, who listen to you in parliament, they listen to you criticise the National Party and think oh he couldn’t work with them, but I just want to get it very clear that your position is based not on personalities but that you again on what you call the constitutional convention with the largest party has the first right to form a government. …

WINSTON Just because you’re reminding people of who did what where and when and making sure the voters don’t forget what might happen in the future because of things in the past doesn’t mean that you are necessarily not going to go into some sort of a governing arrangement with people.

I took that to be unusually clear, and significant.

RAWDON We’re now here with the panel to continue the question line. I just want to start off Minister and ask you that hypothetically come coalition talks what sort of concessions will you be asking for National and will they include the team who’s there, you were just talking about the 90s team?

WINSTON Well look you can’t start telling some other party how to organise its internal operations that’s not what the discussion’s about, in fact it’s an unacceptable way of approaching negotiations, so most certainly I’m not, I’m just making the comment that that is what the difficulty John Key faces as at the moment.

Again, pretty clear. He does not like the MPs from the last Government, but in no way if he saying he won’t work with them.

JOHN ROUGHAN – New Zealand Herald
You were asked I think about whether you would still talk first to the party that wins the most votes at the election.

WINSTON I wasn’t but the answer’s yes I will.

JOHN` You would. Talk first but not necessarily go into coalition with that winning party if you like?

WINSTON Well no party says that or we have said any party that is in our position has – and that goes for the other parties as well – has had more than one proviso.

Now Peters is correct one can not give a guarantee that one will support the largest party, because you then destroy all your negotiating ability. So what does talk to first mean?

The cynical say it means you start negotiations with the largest party 30 minutes before you start negotiations with the second largest. I don’t think that will happen though. People will expect to see a serious attempt at forming a Government with the largest party. But it may of course just not be possible. The economy may be so weak that an incoming Government can’t meet the spending promises that Winston will want.

COLIN ESPINER – Christchurch Press
But they have Mr Peters just listened to you say some fairly negative things about National and it’s well known that you have some problems with people on their front bench. Now let’s look at the polls…

WINSTON No no I don’t have problems with people on their front bench, I have problems with their past record and what they believe, I’ve given you examples.

Again, he goes out of his way to make the difference clear.

JOHN How much change would you make to the Act then, would you completely widen the criteria for the Reserve Bank or would you take the Reserve Bank’s authority away altogether.?

WINSTON I’d change the export, I’d change his criteria to ensure that unlike the policy ties agreement that Dr Cullen and I tried to write for him which in my view ignored, he must have regard to economic growth, he must have regard to exports, he must have regard to employment and the general health of the economy as much as inflation …

That’s also pretty significant. He has just accused Dr Bollard of being in breach of the Policy Target Agreement.

Ironically I think Dr Bollard is in breach also – for not keeping inflation low enough, while Winston thinks he is in breach for not keeping inflation high enough!

RAWDON Do you think an embassy in Stockholm’s a good investment?

WINSTON Of course it’s a great investment it’ll pay off hugely in time, and very quickly, here are from Iceland all the way to Finland five of the world’s most successful economies in one place, why would we not be part of that market when we’ve got so many similar values to them. We have not made the investment in the past, I can remember Tallboys trying to advocate to the National Party way back in 1971 that they must do this, I’ve picked up the message I hope they have.

Note the harking back to the 70s again.

Helen Clark has been defending Mike Williams on the basis he was confused. The Press reports:

Following an all-day Cabinet meeting yesterday, Clark refused to say if Williams had her full confidence.

Asked by a journalist if she still trusted him to tell the truth, she would not answer directly.

“Well, I’ve known him for a long time, but he can be a little loose and confused,” she said.

But does this sound like a confused man. From Agenda:

MIKE  There was a seminar between 8.30 and 9.30 in the morning which I conducted.  The hall was set up so I was right at the back of the stage on a lecturn almost behind the proscenial arch in the Wellington Town Hall, I’ve got 400 witnesses who’d tell you the first thing I said when I took the lecturn was that I could neither see nor hear them, the acoustics were terrible and the lighting was such I couldn’t even see the audience, okay.  I gave my address, it lasted about 50 minutes.  There was then discussion.  Now what I heard the delegate say and I wasn’t hearing him clearly was that if somebody asks you for a Kiwisaver brochure the IRD’s got good ones.  Now according to people there I did not respond that is a good idea, I simply moved on to the next question which was the last one.  So the whole thing is an incredible media beat up, it arguably never happened.

Funny that for someone who could not see or hear the audience, he referred to the delegate (and fellow NZ Council member) by name. Anyway he labels the whole thing an incredible media beat up and denies outright that he praised the suggestion as a damn good idea.

GUYON  So why did Helen Clark accuse you of poor judgement then?

MIKE  Well she hadn’t spoken to me.

Now this part is crucial. This is where Williams is not just “confused” about what happened, but starts to directly lie about his conversations with Clark. He has just asserted he did not respond “That’s a damn good idea”, and the only reason Clark said he exercised poor judgement was that she had not yet spoken to him.

GUYON  So does the Prime Minister accept your…?

MIKE  Absolutely, I’ve spoken to her after the event, she did the right thing.  Now look make it clear it was my session and I take absolute responsibility to anything that was said there, but I do not believe anything like that was said and I certainly did not hear anything like that said and neither did I endorse it.

While Guyon did not finish his sentence, it is clear he is referring to Williams version of events, and Williams very clearly implies on nationwide TV that the PM has accepted he did not endorse the idea of handing out Government pamphlets while campaigning.

But what does Helen say. The Dom Post reports:

But Miss Clark said yesterday that Mr Williams had informed her last week that was what he said.

“The first thing he told me was the right one. That was, he’d reacted along the lines of `what a good idea’ and he should have continued to repeat that. For whatever reason, he didn’t.

Now if one was very gullible or generous one could almost believe Williams was confused about what was said and what he said at the conference. But are we really meant to believe that he was also confused about his conversation with the Prime Minister?

I mean Clark is quite clear about what he said to her.  The Herald reports:

She said she was baffled at Mr Williams’ denial on Agenda, because he had confirmed it to her when she first spoke to him after the Herald revealed it last week.

This is not confusion. How can you be confused about what you told the PM? Having worked with a PM or two, you tend to remember in great detail your conversations with them – especially those only a few days old.

And do you know what is the weird thing. There was no need for Williams to lie. He wasn’t some cornered rat like Benson-Pope desperately lying because the truth would force him out of office. The truth had already come out, and Williams had been gently reprimanded by the PM. There was no suggestion his job was at risk up until the Agenda interview. By trying to rewrite history, he resurrected what had been an almost dead issue. One can only assume he made a calculated decision that no-one could contradict him if he started to spin what happened. But he went well well beyond spinning. He lied nine times in one interview.  He was in no way confused when he says the whole thing is a media beatup and never happened.

The scandal over Williams lies re the Labour Party Congress have been the main focus of the last 24 hours. But there are plenty of other statements which are worth looking at. From the transcript:

GUYON  Your own poll Mike Williams UMR, I saw it this week, 51-36, 15 points behind, how do you pull that back?

MIKE  Well again I think UMR is the subject of this problem that – let me tell you virtually all polls are conducted by landlines I don’t know one that isn’t.  Now I was the first person in New Zealand ever to put the electronic white pages together with the electoral roll.  Okay that was in 1986 I think, and I got an 82% match in the general seats.  Right, what we got in January of this year was a 50% match.  What this means Guyon is that half the population is statistically invisible.  Now what I trust is our canvassing data and our canvassing data shows the Labour vote about where it was last time, about 40%.  Now at that point it’s winnable.

I find it amusing that Williams works so hard to discredit polls, when his party spends so much money on them! And I have never known someone to claim canvassing data on behalf of a party is more representative than a random scientific poll.

Now look I am the last person to deny there are some challenges for the polling industry, but people over state the problem of landlines. Labour’s Coromandel candidate Hugh Kininmonth for example claimed yesterday:

I’ve never been a fan of the polls. They’re incredibly irrelevant and unrepresentative. For one they seldom report the number of respondents who are ‘undecided’. Around 37% of electors don’t have a landline – they are therefore exempt from participating in the polls.

The 2006 census found only 8% of households said they had no landline, with only 2% having no telecommunication services at all.  I have no idea where 37% comes from.

Williams stuff on matching the electoral roll to the white pages is also somewhat of a red herring. That affects the party’s abilities to match voters to phone numbers, but does not affect polling for media organisations as they do not use the electoral roll, but just call random numbers from the ranges Telecom have advised are available for allocation.

GUYON  Alright, some people say that Andrew Little is lining himself up for the job of Labour Party President.

MIKE  I’d welcome that in the fullness of time yes I would.

GUYON  Is that going to happen?

MIKE  I wouldn’t be surprised, I think he’d have good support

Now Andrew would be a very capable Labour Party President, and on present form he may get a promotion sooner than he wants!

I note on that issue the Herald states:

Mr Little said he would be able to keep his role with the EPMU if he gained the Labour Party presidency.

Now imagine if Little ascends to the presidency before the election. He would be running the Labour Party campaign, and at the same time also running the independent third party EPMU campaign, which will in no way of course be aligned to help Labour’s campaign. That will be a serious case of hat shuffling.

MIKE  There was general agreement I mean it passed with a majority in the parliament and I do think it needs to shake down.  What I’d say to you Fran is that this is what it’s about, it’s about the influence of big money in election campaigns and I think in New Zealand we do not want the kind of American politics transplanted here.  I mean this book (The Hollow Men) really shows an outrage, it’s a conspiracy to overspend and that’s what the Electoral Finance Act’s all about.

Mike’s idea of general agreement is a fascinating one. He means Labour, NZ First and the Greens.

But the prize for hypocrisy is for the line “it’s a conspiracy to overspend”. Mike Williams’ own party overspent by $400,000 to $800,000. They lied to the Chief Electoral Officer about it. They stated they woudl include the pledge card as an expense at a time when they knew that was impossible to do and stay within the limit. They lied merely to keep the issue out of the media until after the election. So for Williams to go on about conspiracies to overspend is just laughable.

MIKE  Well that’s like we had in the past I mean if you’ve got a long memory you’ll realise Muldoon called an election under a National passed law that said you couldn’t enrol after the writs were down, in other words enrolments in that election that Muldoon actually lost cut off in 48 hours and we had to run round, parties change laws, that’s the prerogative of government is it not?

Williams is citing Muldoon as constitutional precedent! God help us.

MIKE  The sort of feedback we get is that yes people are definitely and something has to be done about that, and I think that will be at least partly addressed in the budget, but I do think there’s an understanding that the government cannot legislate for food prices, cannot legislate for petrol prices, there are some things that governments cannot do.

Well if you are going to cite Muldoon as a precedent for constitutional law, why not also follow him as a model for the economy and do a price freeze like he did.  After all his economic management was on a par with his constitutional law probity.

BERNARD  And we don’t have a government list if you like of what are other strategic assets, so we have to wait and hope or guess at what the government’s view on this is, this is the danger of politically driven decisions on foreign investment isn’t it?

MIKE  I’d agree with you, I think we probably do need a list and I think that’s an oversight, but Helen said you know we’re not perfect and these things don’t arise very often, I mean we haven’t had major strategic assets that I’m aware of the people trying to take them over before.

Here I agree with Mr Williams. We do need a list of what assets the Government now deems strategic. Even the Labour Party President says we need a list. So hopefully someone will ask Dr Cullen when he will be producing one.

MIKE  Well I think this government has been very constrained in its use of government advertising I mean if you go to New South Wales in advance of an election you’ll see wall to wall government advertising you know we’ve got advertised for nurses doctors and that sort of thing, I can’t anticipate that but obviously you’ve gotta tell people about what’s going on.

Cough, splutter. Constrained? Well constrained when the Auditor-General knocks some of the more outraegous plans back, but $100 million of government advertising spend is not constrained.

Helen Clark has distanced herself from Mike Williams and basically called him a liar for his performance on Agenda, yet says he will remain President as the Party conference elects him and has confidence in him.

Some quotes from Clark on Breakfast on TV One:

Clark: “I certainly can’t understand why he made the comment on Agenda yesterday Paul. I watched it with some disbelief because of course after I spoke to you last Monday I did when I got to Wellington speak to Mr Williams and established the facts of the matter both from him and in the course of the day and that led me to go to my press conference and say there had clearly been a misjudgement. That was only compounded by what was said yesterday.”

Henry: Did he tell you the truth, because it appears he has not been telling us the truth.

Clark: He told me the truth, and that’s why when the tape was run on TV last night I knew that was what I had been told six and a half days before. Really what possessed him on Agenda I do not know, I can only put it down to confusion.

Clark has all but called Williams a liar with her comments that she has no idea what possessed him to deny what happened on Agenda, and watched it with disbelief.

Clark generously puts it down to confusion but she knows he was not confused on Agenda. He didn’t like the fact he had been reprimanded and tried to rewrite history on the basis no-one could prove otherwise. He claimed it was all a media beat-up and grossly misrepresented what the delegate said, and what he said.

National’s policy on state owned assets for the 2005 election was very mild.  It was for no full sales, and maybe one or two minor part-sales. Something that even Labour has done in Government – sell some minor state assets.

Labour of course would have you believe National plans to sell the roads, the seas, the air and the water, rather than have a rational debate over whether or not the NZ Government needs to own a chain of garages (Vehicle Testing NZ).

And having semi-sucessfully managed a fear campaign in 2005, they were all poised to do so again. For months on end they tried to talk up Auckland Airport as some sort of state asset sale they were stopping when the reality was it has been a privately owned company since Winston sold it in 1998.

So at the Labour Party Congress this weekend, they were all set to start their campaign of fear and loathing on asset sales. Yet quietly on Sunday morning on Agenda, John Key took their toys away:

GUYON Alright you rightly point out it was sold by the National government in 1998 now that brings us to this position.  What is your position now as a National Party on state asset sales?

JOHN Well National’s had some time to reflect on that and the position that we’ve decided to have is the following one.  That in the first term of the National government there will be no state assets that will be sold either partially or fully.

GUYON So no state assets, you’re completely firm on that?

JOHN That’s right.

Colin Espiner caught on to the wonderful timing:

COLIN ESPINER – Christchurch Press
Mr Key the Prime Minister addressed the Labour Party’s annual congress, the election congress yesterday and one of the things she said was that asset sales were a defining issue for Labour, and a defining issue for the election, you’ve just essentially inoculated that, was that your intention?

and again:

COLIN  Sure, but you’re also avoiding skirting around the issue of asset sales where you’re gonna get clobbered by Labour, and they were warming up, they’ve been warming up on this one for weeks and you’ve essentially ripped the rug from under them haven’t you?

Yes he has.

John Armstrong I think is 100% wrong on this being a fumble, because Key only ruled them out for the first term of office. Far from being a fumble, it was a move of brilliant timing and within a few weeks, the issue will have little resonance with anyone but those who are in no way swinging voters. No party ever gives a guarantee beyond one election, and no-one outside Helen Clark and a few commentators really get excited about what may or many not happen in two elections time.

Now my personal view on asset sales I blogged back in July 2005, and listed 13 SOEs I would happily sell.  But even National under Don Brash was talking at most a partial float of Solid Energy and maybe a few farms.

If you are not going to have a bold asset sale programme (such as I would do), then it is politically stupid to have a 5% programme where you attract all the scaremongering over asset sales, just to allow say a 20% share holding in some coal mines.

So despite personally favouring a bold programme of asset sales, I am delighted that National has shut down Labour’s ability to effectively scare-monger on this issue, because frankly you should either do a bold programme, or do no programme at all. The 2005 Brash policy was so modest, it wasn’t worth the hassle and distraction it would be.

So overall I thought Key did very well on Agenda – a very in depth and extended interview. And I say that having been pretty critical of how Key handled the Peters issue the week before.

While I am very relaxed about going from a 5% asset sale policy to a 0% asset sale policy, I am somewhat concerned over the dropping of bulk funding. Sure, I understand the politics around not provoking the PPTA and NZEI into a full-scale jihad, but if we are serious about lifting our economic game, we need to lift our educational game, and the current way we fund and staff our schools will not achieve that.  Having said no to bulk funding, the onus is on National to come up with some other ways to improve management and funding of our schools.