Editorial: Care bears in Beehive pass round the honey

There is a new broom in the Beehive. Photo / Mark Mitchell

When Parliament rose for the year this week, the new Government could look back on 2018 with a great deal of satisfaction. It has generated a sense of change in the country. There is a softer ethos prevailing in the way people are expected to deal with each other, stricter rules about what constitutes bullying and sexual harassment, kinder, gentler standards of behaviour in workplaces. Even Parliament is undergoing a review of how people who work in its precincts are treated.

It has been a year of reviews being set up into seemingly everything the Government would like to do. This is not a government in a hurry. It is not making drastic reform of the economy, which continues its steady growth. Business confidence which fell after the election last year and declined in the first half of this year has recovered, a response no doubt to compromises on intended changes to employment law and the healthy Budget surpluses Finance Minister Grant Robertson is running.

Next year he plans to produce a different sort of Budget with broader measures of "wellbeing" covering child poverty reduction, income equality, environmental improvements and the like. So long as the economy continues to record GDP growth there will be funds for these purposes and it may be possible even on Budget day to widen the public focus beyond the Government's financial management.

The new climate of care and co-operation comes from the coalition Government itself which finishes its first year looking more cohesive than possibly even its leaders expected. It has suffered no obvious tensions this year despite Winston Peters carving out unusual room for a smaller coalition partner to manoeuvre in regional development and defence, and clearly forcing Labour to compromise on 90-day trials and other employment law proposals.

The Greens also have their own space, not formally in the coalition but inside the Cabinet with climate change and associated environmental roles. They have made more progress against plastic bags than global warming this year but they have managed to redirect some roading funds to railways and cycleways and enticed KiwiRail to resume plans to replace diesel with electric locomotives.

The two big changes the three parties were agreed on when they came to power last year were in housing and immigration. A year on, neither looms quite so large. House prices have been stable for a second year, as are mortgage interest rates. Labour's "KiwiBuild" house construction programme is not attracting the expected demand in all centres. The party's tougher tenancy laws may be its most effective depressant for house prices, more than a capital gains tax that might be recommended by Sir Michael Cullen's working group in the new year.

Immigration, meanwhile, has fallen slightly from the record levels of the previous three years. Its minister, Iain Lees-Galloway, who gave the Government its worst moment on a deportation issue this year, seems sensitive to the needs of regional and seasonal employers for migrant workers.

But the Government's main mission, besides boosting home ownership, is to raise incomes at the lower end of the scale. This week's announcement of another increase in the statutory minimum wage from April will have brought Christmas cheer to many.

There is a new broom in the Beehive and it is making a difference.